SALEM TOWNSHIP - Trimmed in country blue, spartan but orderly, it might measure just about 500 square feet at the business end. But Salem Township's Post Office - ZIP code 48175 - can't be defined by walls, a floor and a numbered yardstick.
It's convenient. It's history. It's the heartbeat of a community and a clearing house for local news.
And it's the business of township Treasurer Linda Hamilton, who about 18 months ago - when the previous operator was leaving - contracted with the U.S. Postal Service to provide Salem residents with a place to mail packages, buy stamps, drop off their missives and pick up their bills. Located in the historic 100-year-old Rider House just behind the township hall off Six Mile Road, the green shuttered building with an inviting front porch also houses the township Zoning Department.
Throughout the day, folks stroll in on township business and stick their head in the door, or come in to pick up their mail from one of the 200 post office boxes in the front hall. They buy stamps, mail packages and chew the fat.
"You want me to work today?" Hamilton cracks, rising to weigh a brown paper-covered package on its way to Arkansas. "How do you want that to go? Slow boat?"
"Aw, you know me; I'm cheap," quips the customer, settling on parcel post for $6.43.
Mondays are always busy, and each day slows down after 11 a.m. But always there's something going somewhere to somebody, stamps to be bought, mail to be picked up.
"The big post offices sort mail by address. Here, we sort it by name - because we know everybody," Hamilton said. Local folks would have to drive to Plymouth, South Lyon or Northville to mail a package if the post office were not here, Hamilton said.
It's not unusual for the U.S. Postal Service to contract its services; similar operations are located in grocery stores and strip malls. But Hamilton said she knows of no other operation that's run like hers in Washtenaw County, with a small-town feel and that old-fashioned service.
"People keep up on the news here," she said. "Tonight, there's a Sewer Committee meeting for the hamlet. People will be in tomorrow to find out what went on."
The post office provides added income to supplement the family business, her husband Mark's family farm, a 500-acre, 250-head dairy farm on Five Mile Road and an institution since 1837.
"On a rainy day we have a lot of visitors; people stay and talk," Hamilton said of the post office. "Sometimes they pull up a chair, and we'll have two or three people sitting back here behind the counter talking. You won't find that in a government-run post office, people behind the counter. They come in here to shoot the breeze."
Fittingly, the Rider House was built in 1900 by Fred Rider, the grandson of Capt. Ira Rider who settled Salem in 1831 and served as the community's first postmaster.
A few years ago, a grass-roots group of residents and officials worked to save the Rider House from destruction, and rallied to preserve it.
Hamilton said it's the people who make her job fun.
"It's the interaction with the people, the stories you hear. I don't think people realize it, but everyone has a story that interests someone else. If you go to (post offices) in Ann Arbor or Northville, they have great people, too - but everyone's so busy and there are so many lines that you don't have the leisure time to just talk like we do out here."