One of Arizona's Oldest Post Offices

The little post office in Chloride is among the oldest in Arizona, by local account. Mail service here reaches back to the early boom years, when the post office began serving miners and their families and kept the letters and parcels moving. Think about what a post office meant to a remote silver camp like this one.

It was the thread that tied Chloride to the wider world, the way a miner sent wages home to family in the East, the way a mail order rifle or bolt of cloth arrived, the way news of prices and politics reached a town at the end of a long desert road. Through boom and bust, through the closing of the mines and the near death of the town, the post office kept its doors open. When Chloride's population fell to barely over a hundred people in the middle of the twentieth century, this small building was one of the institutions that refused to quit, and it still cancels stamps today.

Chloride began as a silver camp in Mohave County, on the southwest flank of the Cerbat Mountains, and it is considered the oldest continuously inhabited mining town in Arizona. The town was founded around eighteen sixty-three, but mining did not become widespread until the eighteen seventies, after a treaty with the Hualapai. At its peak Chloride held about five thousand people and was once the county seat.