Two charming Wyoming post offices up for sale

Delivering the Mail by Allen Abel

A pair of United States post offices — or at least the handsome and historic buildings in which they are located — are up for sale in a less-traveled corner of the nation.

The post offices in question are in the southeastern Wyoming towns of LaGrange and Lingle. The hamlets lie about 40 miles from each other in rectangular Goshen County, an hour or so northeast of Cheyenne, just west of the Nebraska border, and far from the urban cacophony of the nation’s coasts.

There was a time when the only sounds that broke the high prairie silence were the cries of Lakota warriors, the rumble of wagon wheels on the Oregon Trail, and the hoof beats of the Pony Express.

Now you have the heavy metal thunder of freight trains hauling coal out of the Cowboy State; the grumbles of the ranchers at the B & V Coffee Cafe in LaGrange; and the spiel of a listing agent named Bob Van Newkirk from Premier Properties Inc., in Torrington, Wyo., who is trying to bag a buyer for the two lots as eagerly as local hunters bag coyote and antelope.

“It’s a government property that’s got a pretty secure lease, about as secure as a rental can be,” Van Newkirk told Linn’s Stamp News by telephone from Torrington, the seat of Goshen County.

(Van Newkirk is about as Dutch as a surname can be, although Goshen County, Wyo., is a fair distance from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. “If you ain’t Dutch,” Van Newkirk merrily said, “you ain’t much.”)

The U.S. Postal Service’s lease on the 60-year-old tan brick building in Lingle, which is listed at $82,500, will expire in the fall of 2025. But the LaGrange building — a steal at only $65,000 for a 1922 white stucco edifice with a high boomtown-like front — is booked for postal purposes until the end of June 2029.

More USPS retail outlets are leased from private investors than are owned outright. According to the USPS, it leases more than 25,300 spaces and owns more than 8,500.

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