One Township's Yesterdays Chapter XLVIII  

AN EARLY POST OFFICE MAXINKUCKEE POST OFFICE

At the village of Maxinkuckee, on the east side of Maxinkuckee Lake, the first post office was established about the year 1858. At that time, WILLIAM C. EDWARDS was postmaster of Plymouth. The Maxinkuckee office was discontinued February 1, 1902, being merged into the Culver post office. Most of the former patrons of the Maxinkuckee post office were thereafter served by rural free delivery from the Culver office.

The postmasters at Maxinkuckee were:

ELI PARKER JAMES M. DALE HARVEY ATKINSON JOHN F. WISE ADIN STEVENS

D. C. PARKER GEORGE W. KLINE GEORGE M. SPANGLER FRANK SMYTHE

In the early days, the mail was carried on horseback over the route leading through the Maxinkuckee settlement. Mail coaches were used on the long overland routes and on the more traveled and perhaps slightly better surfaced roads, of which only a few then existed in this part of Indiana. The stagecoach, as well as the mail coach, did not penetrate far enough into the wilderness to reach the obscurity of Maxinkuckee.

When the mails later became more bulky and heavier, the carriers ceased to come to Maxinkuckee on horseback; they came, instead in wagons, horse-drawn over rough, bumpy roads that were scarcely more than trails. These mail wagons were long affairs, covered with a sort of canopy, and were something like the "sample wagons," so familiar to folks of the 90's and early 1900's.

The Maxinkuckee post office was in the old general store, in the settlement on the hill. The store was kept by Parker & Wise, and stood on the north side of the road, opposite the present general store. One corner of the store was reserved for the post office business, GEORGE SPANGLER recalls, and when the mail came, it was put in a wooden bucket. The store, at mail time, would be well filled with people from 'round about, and the postmaster, as he shouted out the names in a voice that could be heard from one end of the building to the other, would throw, hurl or fire the mail matter at the addressees. His aim was true; he seldom pitched a bad one, and could qualify for 'most any baseball team. At the receiving end, the catchers were nearly all adepts, too.