In his book about post offices and ghost towns in Goodhue County, Roy Meyer observes that “to people living in the late nineteenth century, the rural post offices must have seemed as permanent an institution as marriage. It has always existed and it will always exist.” Post offices were a staple of rural pioneer life, connecting rural populations with each other.

Post offices were not necessarily the establishments that they are today. All one needed to make a post office was a designated location and someone to serve as postmaster. Qualifications were not highly (or perhaps at all) scrutinized. Often it was the general store, with the owner being the postmaster.

Innovations like the Rural Free Delivery, which delivered mail directly to farm families instead of having them get their mail at post offices, changed the nature of mail delivery. As that changed, so did the numbers of post offices. All of the post offices in the Sogn quadrangle dissolved by the early 20th century. The trend was apparent throughout Goodhue county, with 20 of 34 post offices closing from 1900 to 1905.

Click on the various post office sites to see when they were active.

Most of these post offices had been dissolved long before the RFD came along. Others, like Sogn, might have been affected. Today, there are no post offices in the Sogn Quadrangle. All of its residents are covered by post offices like the one in Red Wing and mail delivery to their door. The post offices of the Sogn Quadrangle are just a small piece of the nature of communication networks and questions regarding coverage.