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HAULIN THE MAIL



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"Haulin' the Mail"
A Slice of Nostalgia
in Mendon, New York

A Non-Fiction work by: Paul S. Worboys

         It's the dawn of the 1950's in a tiny corner of rural America, the sleepy hamlet of Mendon, New York. Two sets of heavy steel rails traverse the scene, arriving from the northeast along Mill Street, slicing the Pittsford road and curving smartly across the direct road to Rush. Shiny from frequent use, the iron trail portends that quietude is anything but when the Lehigh Valley Railroad drags a string of passenger or freight revenue through town.


     Day and night since its arrival in September of 1892, up to a dozen passenger trains and a goodly number of freights rattled the bejeebers out of the little place - Sunday church sermons and the family china were forever at risk. But the compliant populace appreciated a little excitement now and then and soon took to setting up railhead businesses, commuting to schools, jobs and shopping, visiting friends and relatives, not to mention having their best penmanship of the King's English hauled away on the mail cars.
     By 1950, the Lehigh had emerged from World War II tattered from its patriotic effort and hardly the romantic image of steam engines ferrying passengers from every backwater station it served. Mendon, like so many lesser burgs, had been deleted from Lehigh passenger timetables and rarely occasioned a freight assignment. However, the tracks stayed burnished from long-distance diesel-powered engines tugging lengthy east or westbound consists. Regardless of the hour - high noon or well past midnight - the trains kept a steady procession.

On weekday mornings, Train #11, "The Star," traversed Mendon doing at least seventy, sweeping westward past the recently abandoned depot, hauling people, express and mail from New York City's Penn Station to the LV's colonnaded Buffalo terminal. Later, as the noon hour approached, the venerable "Black Diamond Express," the famous passenger varnish celebrated since the 1890's, turned the becalmed hamlet into a flash of Cornell Red.


     A shrieking chime horn and heavy rumble shook every material thing nearby, as it sped hurriedly down the eastbound track toward Victor, Geneva and, eventually, New York City. As the buzz dissipated from the Star whistling by heading toward Rush, Batavia and Buffalo, a diminutive lady and two little boys were revealed on the station platform. At the instant of the train's passing, a gray canvas bag, hanging tautly from a trackside post, disappeared as the car immediately behind the locomotive whooshed past.
Cautiously taking a bee-line over the rails toward the rear of the Presbyterian Church, the adult portion gathered in a similar gray sack from the weeds and returned to the platform. With her young consorts firmly in control of the bag, the woman loaded the boys onto a shiny red Radio Flyer cart and hauled her burden toward Howard's Ice Cream Store near the Four Corners.
     Hard by the Irondequoit Creek bridge on the Victor highway, Grace Habecker held sway at Howard's in more ways than one, for it was often her job to fill her husband's soda jerk shoes. But she had U.S. Government tasks to perform as well, since those cubby hole box affairs in the rear of the store comprised the Mendon Post Office and Grace was its erstwhile postmistress.


     With the arrival of the trio and their cargo, another exchange of U.S. Mail with the Lehigh Valley Railroad had been completed. Mrs. Albert Alexander, her boys Joe and Butch, and their little red wagon had just traded mailbags with hundreds of tons of screaming railroad train doing 70 miles-per-hour. It was a now-extinct slice of Americana, performed thousands of times a day without fanfare, in fair weather and foul, in mid-20th Century America.

     Marguerite Alexander, a young mother with two (subsequently three) children in tow, spent nearly four years (1950-53) transferring mail between Mendon's post office and its railroad depot. Together with her husband, who helped with evening parcel post and 1st Class mail deliveries to and from nearby Rochester Junction, the Alexanders, at $50 monthly, experienced a microcosm of the intricate and historical web with the U.S. Mail system.

     Born out of the colonial days of horseback mail delivery were two fascinating institutions: "Rural Free Delivery" (R.F.D.), which reached the far-flung rural folk of the hinterlands not served by a community postal facility and the "Railway Post Office" (R.P.O.), when most of the activities within a community post office were carried out on specially outfitted cars of the "Railway Mail Service," moving along America's vast railroad network.

     While the R.F.D. system came late to the scene (a carrier out of nearby Elba, N.Y. traversed the first route in the nation in 1896), railroads were designed into mail delivery schemes way back in the 1830's. A fledgling means of transportation in those days, it was not until the Civil War that mail was sorted onboard trains. Though slow to catch the fancy of railroaders, public imagination was immediately captured via songs, plays and even a railway clerk correspondence school.

     The first fast mail train in the U.S. was a 26-hour run from Grand Central Station to Chicago over the New York Central Railroad in 1875. It included 100 "scoops" of mail from depots along the way, a loading of New England mail during a quick stop at Albany and thirty-three tons that originated in New York City - all sorted and bagged enroute for further distribution out of Chicago. While the "Fast Mail" was the glamour, railroads furnished hundreds of workhorse R.P.O. cars that plied the branches connecting small-town America with the major urban centers.

     By 1888, at salaries of $900 to $1,300 a year, postal clerks ranged over 26,000 miles of track, logging 122,000,000 railroad miles yearly. Long hours, fatigue and front office whims were the benefits, with a bonus that, with mail cars at the headend of trains, Railway Mail Service rosters suffered terrible casualties in accidents.

     It was high drama, as Marguerite would attest, when a speeding train's "catching post" snatched a mailbag from a depot stanchion, whereupon postal clerks within the R.P.O. car stamped and sorted flats at lightning speed while rocking to the clickity-clack song of the rails.

     Strictly from Marguerite Alexander's trackside viewpoint, Mendon could hardly be considered a major player in the Lehigh Valley's scheme of things. That is not to say, however, that periodic train racket was the only excitement that visited the little depot or the highway crossings that framed it at each end.

     To be sure, every rail line had a sordid history of tragedy and the mainline hamlet of Mendon was no exception. Numerous fatalities occurred at its twin grade crossings, when locomotives indiscriminately victimized riders of wagons, buggies, cars and trucks, as well as pedestrians.

     Specifically, the very routine of hauling the mail to or from a main train rendezvous was broken at least twice at Mendon; in 1921, when the LV's crack fast mail train plastered a car at the unguarded crossing east of the station, resulting in one death, and, in 1938, when a Mendon woman, performing the exact task of transferring the mails as Marguerite has done so many times, misread the approach of the Black Diamond and died - along with the stationmaster's little boy, who had accompanied her.

     The latter event was most shocking to the close-knit community. Just before noon on a cheerfully bright Wednesday in June, 75-year-old Mary Schlaefer was at the station to retrieve the mailbag tossed from the Diamond on its eastward roll toward New York City. She was substituting for her daughter, Lillian, having done so on numerous occasions.

     The elderly woman had lately been joined by 18-month-old Robert Slaght on her rounds between the station and the Schlaefer home/post office just east of the Grange Hall. Leland Slaght, recent successor to the veteran Mendon agent, Darwin Turner, never doubted for little Robert's safety when, in the lady's arms, the two began crossing the tracks to await the onrushing train.

     Coasting on the downhill grade over the Rush-Mendon Road, the steam-powered Black Diamond fooled Mrs. Schlaefer as it swiftly rode the gentle curve toward the station. The alert engineer spotted her dilemma and clanged the warning bell - its peal of emergency bringing all residents within earshot sprinting toward the tracks.

     In horror, both Agent Slaght and his wife realized Mary's blunder too late and their cries were drowned out by the shrieking whistle and wheels of the train. Gate-tender Addison Hodge heard the bell and spotted the danger from his shanty at the Pittsford Road crossing one hundred yards up the line, but there was nothing he could do.

Confused by the set of tracks the monster was on, then nearly paralyzed by fear, Mrs. Schlaefer stepped towards the Presbyterian Church - and directly in front of the thundering locomotive. Doomed, the woman mustered the only strength her fear had not stolen, hurling little Robert to the side of the track as the Grim Reaper struck. She died instantly and the toddler expired soon after of a broken neck, sustained not from the train, rather from the tumble.
     Services for Mary Schlaefer were conducted from her home where, a decade later, Marguerite and Albert Alexander came to reside. The victims rest in the peaceful community cemetery, overseeing the place where their mortal stay came to a sudden, heartrending end. Crestfallen by the tragedy, Mendon began healing and Lehigh trains continued rolling through town.
     A few months later, residents went to war over the Lehigh Valley's proposed radical change in the railway-highway configuration of the crossroads hamlet. The plan would relocate the depot and turn the two dangerous grade crossings into dead-ends. A highway overpass would then obliterate the historic Mendon Hotel and the Four Corners. Regardless of the merit and, with a statewide vendetta against grade crossings that had already produced bridges over the LVRR at nearby Clover Street and West Henrietta Road, local opposition ripped the idea from the drawing board and into the "circular file."
     Through the war years, nothing much changed in Mendon after the Schlaefer tragedy, except the location of the post office: from Schlaefer's, to Broomfield's Hardware Store, to Hazel Stanley's place, to Myrtle McEneany's, and, in 1947, to Habecker's combined residence/ice cream parlor.

     That year the Schlaefer residence was sold to the Alexanders. The young couple had just started a family, so naturally on the lookout for any opportunity for the Mrs. to supplement the Mr.'s paycheck, Marguerite quite willingly grabbed the unique courier route when it came available.

     Being of a simple routine, Mrs. Alexander was a quick study. After breakfast, she carried the outgoing mailbag from the post office at Habecker's store to the train station and hung it on a special stand for the westbound Star's R.P.O. to snare on the fly... at 60, 70, even 80 miles-per-hour, depending whether it was trying to keep to the scheduled arrival in Buffalo.

     Simultaneously, a clerk within the car flung the day's Mendon satchel to the opposite side of the tracks which Marguerite dutifully retrieved and delivered to Grace Habecker in the post office. Around lunch time, she returned to watch the eastbound Black Diamond roar through, depositing a bag in the vicinity of the earlier drop, to await removal to Habecker's.

     Of course, the scene was not quite so simple as that, since the term "day care provider" was yet to be coined. To perform the duties required by Uncle Sam's U.S. Mail, Mrs. A. had young'uns virtually in tow, Butch and Joe in their Radio Flyer.

     In practically all the conditions a weatherman's vocabulary could offer, Marguerite and her boys met the trains twice a day, six days a week, for the duration of a Presidential term. Drifting snow, spring freshets, bees and bugs and slithery things all had to be dealt with in due course, as mail clerks inadvertently hurled bags over a wide trackside swath.

     Marguerite's job description failed to note that, two years into this part-time employment, one of her job sites lost out to a bulldozer. Having utilized the Lehigh's derelict depot, which the railroad quit in 1950, but left to her disposal when the elements forced her and the children to seek shelter, Mrs. A. one morning found a concrete "thing" in its place.

     Hexagonally shaped, yet barely large enough for a pirouette, a tiny pot-bellied stove was all that stood between the Alexanders and frostbite. Once common throughout railroadland, this homely shelter was essentially a telephone booth for trainmen to reach out and touch their dispatcher in some cozy tower off near Buffalo. Advancing technology negated these structures, leaving the LV to recycle them into what Marguerite adopted at Mendon. (The LV station on Lehigh Street, Honeoye Falls, presently called "Bloomfield Gardens" store, has one standing out front.)

     Not to be outdone, Al Alexander returned home from his daily toil in Rochester, wolfed down Marguerite's fine home cooking and trundled the family off toward Plains Road for an evening rendezvous with the westbound Black Diamond at Rochester Junction.  Here at the Junction's darkly whimsical depot nestled in the middle of nowhere, save the long-ago Iroquois village of Totiakton, is where the Lehigh main bisected the north-south branch connecting the pristine waters of Hemlock Lake with the Court Street shadow of Rochester's Rundel Public Library.  The fanciful 1905 LV station there is today's popular bikers-to-briefcases rib joint, the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

      Being that the Diamond always stopped at this country place for passengers and to service carriers of express, 1st Class mail and parcel post, the Alexander's jeep wagon was spotted every weeknight rolling through Mendon Center toward the junction. Neither-rain-nor-heat-nor-gloom-of-night-kept-them-from-their-appointed-rounds, even when child #3, Martha, came along in 1953.

     It was a benign routine, drudgery at times, but the memories of the Alexander family easily rewind to those days. They recall local farmers gathered at Mendon Post Office to await their consignment of Spring chicks or when grizzled railroaders, in transit between the big towns, tossed treats to the Alexander children as their trains hurtled past.

     With the Springtime call of "peepers" came delivery of "cheepers," when the majestic Black Diamond, dressed in Cornell Red finery, ground to a stop at Rochester Junction. Arriving via parcel post, boxes of baby chicks were loaded into the Alexander jeep and returned posthaste to Mendon.

     Brawny farmers, gathered about Habecker's in the evening chill, gently cradled the little yellow fuzzballs and hustled them off to uncertain, yet useful futures. Such a ritual could never wait until morning, since the chicks would tend to huddle together for warmth, severely reducing their population through suffocation.

     And, trackside for mail call, the Alexander kids quickly learned the value of a pleasant wave to the choo-choo boys on the long freight trains. Candy and fruit often burst forth from the rugged engine or, failing that, a patient wait for the red caboose trailing 100 cars along, frequently saved the day. In April, there were Easter baskets (sans live chicks) and, when little Martha grew big enough to be spotted above the weeds, out flew a gift dress, securely packaged, of course.

     Yes it was hard to duplicate this fellowship, carried out along the steel corridor of grit and noise, adventure and heartache.
Mendon Today

Site of Rochester
Junction Depot		 The incessant winds of change blew on and, more than fifty years after the Alexanders' mail days, Mendon is a much different place. The railroad is gone, pulled up in 1976, yet replaced in spirit by the untiring efforts of the Mendon Foundation's "Rails-to-Trails" program, which connects Victor with the Genesee Valley Greenway Trail 15 miles down the old LV mainline.
Rochester Junction is a lucid memory to those who touched its history. The careworn station was razed by fire on Easter Sunday, 1972, and the last remnants of the Junction's heyday were removed a dozen years later. And the U.S. Post Office, having quit the Habecker building a few years ago, is harbored in a brick plaza overlooking the suburbanized Mendon hamlet - its former home serving pizza and wings amidst the spiritual tappings of parcels and baby chicks.

Mendon Four Corners
Habecker's Store/Post
Office (Bg) Cottage Hotel (Fg)
Site of Mendon Depot
(Looking west down
Lehigh Valley Trail)
Site of Mendon Depot
(Looking east down
Lehigh Valley Trail)

     Marguerite Alexander still resides in the handsome turn-of-the-century home built by the Schlaefers. The welcoming porch, once periodically adorned in all manner of sign salutes to people and events dear to Albert's mischievous heart, is now tastefully decorated with a lady's touch - for Albert passed away in 2005. Though native to other small Western New York towns, Marguerite Alexander keeps alive the memories of the lost days in their adopted little farming community, before the zephyrs of change blew cold.

Paul S. Worboys - October, 2006

       Please know that Honeoye Falls is my native home, branch trains passed by my window and pilgrimages to Rochester Junction have been ongoing for over sixty-five years. Contact me via snail mail at 108 Quail Run Circle, Leitchfield, KY. 42754; email at  psworboys@gmail.com;  or leave a message at (585) 697-4683. Thanks!

[Original version printed October 12, 2000 by
the Mendon-Honeoye Falls-Lima Sentinel]



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