The Village Post Office

The Village Post Office This usual and indispensable adjunct to village life has enjoyed continued and happy existence, having been established for nearly half a century and free from the official and other annoyances peculiar to public service. Its history is brief, and can be told without exhaustive verbiage. The office was established in 1837, half way between the Head of the Hollow and Van Buren, where it remained nine months, under the administration of Peter Coyle. At the expiration of that period, Celestine Kaltenbach was appointed and removed the office to Van Buren. He has now been in service for 43 years, and has followed the drifting changes of the tide from Van Buren to LaFayette to Potosi with his charge, and is at present located in one of the brick buildings erected on Main Street in 1843, where he will remain until his terms of office are finished and his record is certified to the Great Master.

Postmaster

In the fall of 1835, C. Kaltenbach, who has been Postmaster at Potosi continuously for forty-four years, came to the village with his wife and settled permanently on the site of Hail's Brewery. In the following winter or early the succeeding spring occurred the first death, that of a miner, whose name is forgotten, but who was buried at the mouth of the hollow. That spring, the vicinity of Potosi for miles around was peopled with miners. Life was, at best, in those days, nothing if not rapid, eccentric, strange, of a capacity for unlimited results, if unlimited opportunities could be afforded. Men and women and youths came in, wrestled for a brief season and were heard of no more, or went back to the Lares and Penates of their lives, armored and cuirassed for struggles with poverty and oppression.

First Birth

On December 20, 1835, Mary, a daughter, was born to C. and Louise Kaltenbach--the first birth in the future village. She grew to young ladyhood, when she became Mrs. Hyman Block, and going with her husband to St. Louis, still is a prosperous resident of that city.