'We love our post office': Cordesville residents don't want rural outpost to close

CORDESVILLE -- Keep driving north of bustling Mount Pleasant on S.C. 41, past all those fancy new houses in Dunes West, and you find yourself in Berkeley County, surrounded on both sides by trees of the Francis Marion National Forest.

This is what families with roots going back generations call home, and where retirees move to get away from the noise.

Keep going through Huger, cross two sets of railroad tracks, and you're in Cordesville. A little cinderblock post office sits among the trees off the right side of the road, an American flag flying out front. It could be a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting.

The U.S. Postal Service is considering closing it to save money, along with the one in Russellville near St. Stephen and Grover near St. George. It's not a sure thing, and Cordesville residents hope it doesn't happen.

"If you close this down, there are lot of people who are going to cry," Helen Poston of nearby Macedonia said as she leaned on the pickup truck she uses in her lawn-care business. "This would hurt a lot of people. There are people in here all the time. There are always people in and out."

She was one of about half a dozen residents who stopped by in a half hour Tuesday morning. The nearest alternative is Moncks Corner, which the Postal Service says is 7.6 miles away.

"Don't close our post office," said Betty Jean Richmond, who lives about two miles away on Old Church Road, sporting a Ten Commandments T-shirt. "We just love our post office. I know they're doing a lot of cutting back. We're praying for our post office not to be closed."

Bernard Lastinger, a retired Air Force civil service employee, bought some land near the forest and moved from the Summerville area about a year and a half ago.

"We wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle," he said as he came of the building. "We use the post office a lot. I'd like to see it stay here. I know they're trying to cut back. I'd hate to see it close. It's going to inconvenience a lot of people."

It's more than a matter of convenience. Losing the post office here would come at a time when residents are working to make Cordesville more visible.

The focal point of that effort is a small grocery store.

The Village Grocery is four miles north on S.C. 402. A picnic table and rocking chairs invite lounging on the covered front porch.

Just inside the front door, a community bulletin board advertises a backhoe for sale, vacation Bible school at Cordesville Pentecostal Holiness Church, horse and hog feed and chicken scratch, an electric wheelchair, crickets and worms.

There's chirping in the air. A green wooden bin of live crickets sits by the door under the bulletin board.

Across the room on the counter, there's a glass jar meant to collect money. A paper taped to it says "Cordesville Community Citizens." They're collecting for a road sign that tells people they're coming into Cordesville, according to the clerk, Donna Courtright.

The president of the citizens group happens to be in the store. She's Frances Wright, who grew up nearby and sells and inspects fire extinguishers.

The road sign would go by the Wadboo Creek Bridge about a mile north of the store. People coming from Moncks Corner looking for Dr. Evans Road to Mepkin Abbey would see it, she said. She also hopes to see a sign near the railroad tracks on the southern end of Cordesville.

The citizens group was formed about two years ago to bring the community together, she said. They held their first Christmas parade in December and plan to make it an annual event.

Residents started a successful neighborhood watch program after a series of break-ins last year, she said. It's not quite as peaceful out here as it used to be.

"Our neighbor's keeper is what we were," Wright said.

The post office here might be replaced with a village post office in a store or other community center, according to the postal service. The Village Grocery would be a logical spot, but nobody here seemed to be in favor of that idea. An actual post office gives a community a sense of identity.

"It carries the name of Cordesville with it," Wright said.

Cordesville is a diverse community of about 2,700 people in 750 households, Fire Chief Patsy Van Allen said. She helped start the fire department 25 years ago and has been chief almost 16 years.

The fire district roughly corresponds to the residents' notion of Cordesville. The district goes from the Wadboo Creek Bridge on the north, the railroad tracks south of the post office, past Dr. Evans Road near Mepkin Abbey on the west and the U.S. Forestry Service's ranger station on Witherbee Road on the east.

"I think we're a pretty tight-knit community," Van Allen said.

The community takes its name from Alan Cordes, a physician and rice planter who lived on Dr. Evans Road, according to local historian Cecy Guerry of Moncks Corner. The old village was centered around what's now S.C. 402 and Hard Pinch Road, not far from where The Village Grocery is now, she said.

She figures the modern post office was built sometime around the 1950s.

Reach Dave Munday at 937-5553.