A letter from Fred C. Alexander of Yosemite Postmaster dated June 29, 1926 was intended to straighten the record regarding the shipment of £50 Frankfurter from San Francisco.
The sausages were delivered to their beloved Yosemite Valley restaurateurs after passing through the newly built Yosemite National Park Post Office. Alas, the hot dogs didn’t do very well.
Alexander wrote to an official with the US Postal Service in San Francisco that a US Postal Service truck was sliding down the embankment 50 feet down the embankment, with “there are empty boxes containing the Frankfurters.”
“We tried to save them all and gathered them to the fullest extent of our abilities,” the letter continued.
Delivery to the remote Yosemite National Park Post Office was never easy, as evident from what current Yosemite Postmaster Ellen Damien calls it the “major Frankforter catastrophe.” But for the 1,800 or so residents of Yosemite Valley, “it’s a connection to the outside world,” Damien said.
He retired outside the Yosemite Post Office, where he retired from John Reynolds and his wife, Christine, with undated photos.
(John Reynolds)
This month’s post office celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Yosemite Village building. The two-storey facility, completed in 1925, features timber paneling at the top and stone paneling at the bottom, and was designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who later designed the famous Arwanee hotel on the streets.
For many years, postal services have considered closing or consolidating expensive local post offices to run by financially bound institutions. But far away places like Yosemite have uneven internet and cell services, with instant Amazon delivery and fewer brick and mortgage stores and pharmacies – is a lifeline.
“We know how important this post office is to everyday life, especially in the Yosemite Valley,” Damien told the crowd this month at the 100th anniversary celebration.
She added: “The mail will receive many everyday supplies for those who live here. Climbers camping on the side of Elpitan, hikers on the Pacific Crest and John Muir Trail, are important for them to continue their journey.”
Centennial in Yosemite was a bright spot during difficult times for both the USPS and the National Park Service. Over the past few months, President Trump has meditated on the privatization of postal services, losing $9.5 billion in 2024 and cutting thousands of jobs.
On March 13, former US Post Officer Louis DeJoy wrote a letter to several members of Congress. The Postal Service wrote that it would eliminate 10,000 positions within 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program.
John Reynolds sat on the stairs at Yosemite Post Office in 1961. He later served as the postmaster.
(John Reynolds)
Dejoy resigned on March 24th.
This month, the Post Office’s Governor’s Committee announced that David Steiner’s choice will become the next postmaster. Steiner is directly on the board of directors of USPS competitor FedEx. Critics including the national assn. Of the letter carriers, a union representing around 295,000 postmasters, he said his choice would speed up the privatization of independent institutions.
And this year, thousands of annual and seasonal national park workers, including rangers, wildlife researchers and maintenance staff, have been fired and rehired as part of Doge’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government. Hundreds of employees shop for the year.
In February, a group of Yosemite National Park staff hanged a huge, upside-down American flag (symbol of pain) protesting the cuts from the side of El Pitan, a 3,000-foot granite monolith.
In a Centennial speech on May 14th, Damien promised that under the USPS (a 10-year modernization and cost reduction initiative deployed in 2021), “I commit to making sure that our services are timely, reliable and ingrained in honor of the people we serve.”
The email service to Yosemite began long before the current building was built. It began in August 1869, 20 years before Yosemite National Park was founded.
The first post office was called Yo Semite. Two words.
Delivering mail from the East Coast to the new California state in the mid- to late 1800s required weeks of hard journeys, said Steve Cochersperger, official USPS historian.
It was overland from St. Louis and Memphis, Tennessee to San Francisco, and it took about 22 days of travel by horse-drawn carriage. And then there was the sea route. The steamship loaded with mail sailed from the East Coast to Panama. There, mail was removed from the ship, transported to canoes and packed animals, and handed over to another steamship waiting for the Pacific side of the isthmus. The ship then sails towards San Francisco.
David’s people write to his future wife, Lucy, in undated photographs. Their courtship took place through letters, said their daughter, Eren Damien, the postmaster of Yosemite.
(Ellen Damien)
From San Francisco, Cochelsparger said it was a long, difficult postal route to Yosemite before the rail service arrived at the park. On the boat that traveled by the river from the Bay Area to Sacramento, the package was handed over to a train tied up for Merced. From there it was carried by a stage horse to the town of Coulterville in Sierra Nevada Foothills. There, the horse rider grabbed it for the last 55 miles of the journey.
“If you become a part of the country, you have to connect,” Cochelsperger said of mail delivery to California, which became a state in 1850. “The only connection was through email. There were no calls.
“No matter where everyone in the country lives, it’s important to postal services because it’s our mission to make sure they receive the same level of service as everyone else. It doesn’t matter how far your home is.”
In 1959, John Reynolds was born at what was called Lewis Memorial Hospital, about 200 yards from Yosemite Post Office. He joked, “I didn’t go that far into my growth and my career.”
Reynolds retired in 2023 as postmaster at Yosemite Post Office after a 44-year USPS career within and near the national park. Without that place he would not be alive, he said.
It is where his parents, Anna and Albert met. And that is where his mother spent his own overlapping four-year USPS career.
[In194518-year-oldAnnaReynoldsofNeeAuricktookaridewithherauntandunclewholivedwithherauntandunclefromaruralKentuckyfamilyhomeAyearlateratthesuggestionofhergirlfriendshestrippedoffthesemesterfromschoolandheadedtoYosemiteneverturningback[1945年、18歳のニー・アウリックのアンナ・レイノルズは、ケンタッキー州の田舎の家族の家から叔母と叔父と一緒に叔母と叔父と一緒に住んでいた叔母と叔父と一緒に乗車しました。1年後、ガールフレンドの提案で、彼女は学校から学期を脱いで、ヨセミテに向かい、決して振り返ることはありませんでした。She was soon hired by fellow Kentucky state and postmaster Fred C. Alexander. Anna Aurick worked as a scribe in the late 1950s when she met Albert Reynolds, a standard petroleum concessionaire in Montreal. They hit it.
“Ah, that post office romance – I know! That’s so amazing,” said 65-year-old John Reynolds with a laugh.
He began working at the post office as a part-time summer secretary in 1978, overcoming the ranks. He said, “We are proud to deliver emails in all conditions: snow, floods, rock slides, and more.
John Reynolds said several times he drove his truck to the edge of the rock slide, walked over and grabbed mail coming in from a USPS truck waiting for the other side.
“It was like a bucket brigade, one truck, the other truck,” he said. “And we will walk towards some degree of danger and a growing awareness of rocks coming down, mailing them across the rocks.”
During the Centennial celebration, John Reynolds cited his mother.
When he was a child he said, “Can you imagine these walls could speak? … If you think about it, all people in every corner of that earth have come to this post office.”
Damien, who became the postmaster after John Reynolds’ retirement, said, “I wouldn’t be here without Yosemite or the Post Office.” In June 1957, the mother Lucy, along with several college girlfriends, went camping in the park. They found a group of cute guys selling tents nearby.
“My mother called out to Dib,” said Damien, 54, with a laugh. “She called my dad for Dib. All the girls chose it from the campsite. They went and met. My mother and dad, they got stuck.
Yosemite Post Officer Ellen Damien and her mother Lucy Parsons were outside the Yosemite Post Office in May 2025.
(Ellen Damien)
Lucy and her catch, David’s people returned to school. She went to All Girls Catholic College in Oakland, where he went to school in Reno and then to morgue training in San Francisco.
Their whole courtship was through letters.
Damien comes from a long line of USPS employees. Her grandfather was a postmaster of Lake Nevagamon, Wisconsin in the 1930s. And her grandmother, father and uncle worked as store clerks. She worked for USPS for 24 years and started as an alternative rural airline in Stanislaus County. When she won a job in Yosemite, she said she couldn’t believe in her luck.
“It’s so much fun here, and of course beautiful,” she said. “This place is magic.”
Post office staff have been shrinking over the years, ranging from five to six store clerks to just two living in apartments above the lobby.
But the place is still busy. And she said, she hopes it will be there for more than a century more.
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