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Reflections
158 years later, tiny Bristol Post Office still survives : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, Illinois158 years later, tiny Bristol Post Office still survives
| by Roger Matile
| 12/6/2012
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If you've been keeping up with what's happening locally, as reported here in the newspaper, you will have noted that the unincorporated village of Bristol's post office will not be closed as part of the Republican Party's war on the postal service. Instead, its hours will be cut, but residents will still enjoy postal service. At least for now.
The little Bristol post office has a somewhat complicated history, due to how the area was settled and also due to the area's transportation history, which also had a direct impact on how and where post offices were established.
The story begins when Lyman and Burr Bristol arrived along the banks of the Fox River in 1833, and began acquiring land by buying claims from the earliest pioneers. Not only did they buy out the claim of Earl Adams on the north side of the Fox River, but also the mill and claim of John Schneider at the mouth of Blackberry Creek on the Fox. By the time they were done buying, they had accumulated the land for, as the Rev. E.W. Hicks put it, "several good farms."
The Bristols were pioneers in every sense of the word, and helped establish the village that bore their family name. Lyman Bristol donated land for a public square park that is still used for that purpose in modern Yorkville. Lyman Bristol, like so many Kendall County residents, was lured west during the California Gold Rush. He died in a wagon accident in California on June 13, 1864.
The original village of Bristol was soon joined by the hamlet of Yorkville on the south side of the Fox River. The old Village of Bristol was granted a post office on July 1, 1839, one of the earliest in the county. The community got the post office because it was on the Fox River Trail mail route, which ran north from Ottawa up the Fox River through Bristol to Oswego and Aurora all the way to Geneva. Mail was delivered three times weekly by post stagecoaches running up the trail.
In 1850, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation allowing counties to establish the township form of government, compared to the old three-man commission form of government. Most of the counties in northern Illinois immediately adopted the township government form. And when it came time to name the township in which the Village of Bristol was situated, voters decided to call it Bristol as well. Oswego and Lisbon voters followed suit, naming their townships after the townships' principal villages.
In the early 1850s, rail lines were pushed west of Chicago to Aurora, across the Fox River, and west through northern Kendall County. The rail line bypassed both Oswego and Bristol, running roughly two miles west of the Oswego and two and a half miles west of Bristol. As a way to offer rail service, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q) Railroad established stations along the rail line, named for both communities. A village did not grow up around Oswego Station, but one did grow up around Bristol Station. And on Dec. 22, 1854 Bristol Station was granted its own post office.
During the next several years, the question of the location of the Kendall County seat began to be debated. The county seat had originally been located in the hamlet of Yorkville when the county was established in February 1841. But in 1845, voters decided to move it to Oswego, then as now, the county's most populous township. Oswego, located in the county's northeast corner, was a far piece to travel in the days of horse and wagon. So in 1859, another vote was held and this time voters decided to move the post office back to centrally-located Yorkville. Due to the Civil War, however, it took a few years to get things settled.
By June 1864, the new courthouse in Yorkville was completed and the records were moved from Oswego. Because postal regulations required that every county seat have a post office, Yorkville was granted its post office on April 18, 1864, just two months before county records arrived.
So the neighboring villages of Yorkville and Bristol, separated only by the Fox River, found themselves each with a post office. Mail was delivered to the Bristol Post Office by stage from the Bristol Station Post Office and then distributed across the river to the Yorkville office.
Then in 1870, the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road was completed from Ottawa through Yorkville, Oswego and Montgomery to Aurora. The Yorkville Post Office was changed to the distributing office, with the Bristol office getting its mail from Yorkville. Bristol Station continued to receive its mail from trains on the CB&Q main line.
The Post Office Department put up with this situation until December 1881, when they announced plans to close the Bristol village post office. As might be expected, Bristol residents were not pleased. Writing in the Jan. 5, 1882 Kendall County Record, Bristol resident J.M. Gale fumed that his fellow townsfolk were "greatly incensed at the unwanton outrage of the taking away of their post-office."
In June of 1882, the old Bristol Post Office was finally closed. From then on, residents of Bristol had to cross the river and get their mail at the Yorkville Post Office.
There was still room for confusion, however, given that the villages of Bristol and Bristol Station were two completely different towns, separated by more than two miles. As a result, the post office department decreed that the post office at Bristol Station would be officially named Bristol, with no "Station" attached to it, although the village retained its name of Bristol Station to differentiate it from the old Village of Bristol adjacent to Yorkville.
In 1957, residents of the villages of Yorkville and Bristol voted to merge, naming the new municipality the United City of Yorkville and Bristol. The old, original village of Bristol thus disappeared. And it wasn't long before the "Station" was removed from Bristol Station's name, resulting in the post office and village finally enjoying the same name for the first time since 1882.
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