Baldwin Post Office
|  Video
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| Cliff Naylor |
| 5/22/2009 |
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| Multi-purpose facilities are not new to architecture, in fact 100-years ago many public buildings were used for a variety of events.The Baldwin Post Office is literally "old school" when it comes to being a versatile building. Built in the early 1900`s, it`s first mission was to bring education to the children of rural Burleigh County as a "rolling" school. "It was on timbers and as they needed it from one township to the other they would pull it for five to six weeks and have school in it," says Gail Gorden, the postmaster at Baldwin. Teams of horses would move the mobile classroom around and it served as a school from 1909 until 1915, then the structure was permanently moved to town and found religion. "I went to church in here and I also went to Sunday School and Bible School in here," Gorden says. These pictures shows the congregation of Saint John`s Lutheran Church on a Sunday morning in the 1930`s. The sermon for that service was given from a pulpit that is still in the building. "This is the original pulpit that was in the church, we`ve always left it in here, it was never moved and we`ve never done a thing to it and now I use it to just put my supplies on it for the post office," says Gorden. The church was converted to a federal building in 1960 and became Baldwin`s Post Office. Gorden was a clerk with the postal service back then and today is the postmaster. Her father was the postmaster before her and prior to that, a great uncle and then a cousin sorted the mail for residents of this small town. Today, her 41 customers still get letters delivered to post office boxes that are old school. "Everybody has their own combination, every time one is closed and we reissue a box then we have to change the combination on them," she says. Gorden has seen this building go through lots of changes, but structurally it still the same as when it was a mobile classroom and it continues to serve this rural community well. Baldwin has a population of 52 and is located 17 miles north of Bismarck. |
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