The Most Beautiful Post Office in Texas

Yes, indeed, this was once the federal building and post office in Jefferson, Texas, a picturesque small town just 80 miles north of where I live.  At one time Jefferson was one of the largest and busiest cities in Texas.  It is said that shortly after the Civil War it had a population of as many as 30,000 people.  It was actually a river port where tons of cotton were hauled just a few miles into Western Louisiana where it was loaded on barges and floated down the Red River which eventually merged with the Mississippi and then on south to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.  All that was made possible by an earthquake which occurred in 1811, one of the strongest quakes to hit the central part of the United States (it was centered in Missouri).  As a result, many trees fell down, especially here in the pine forests of East Texas.  Beavers later built a huge dam which created a logjam on the Red River and Caddo Lake was formed which afforded Jefferson the opportunity to become a port city.  Everything was thriving until for some unknown reason the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1870s dynamited the logjam which caused the lake to practically go dry and the port on the Red River was no longer viable.  Today Jefferson is a small city of 2,000 people which relies upon the tourist industry for its existence.  The city is full of historic buildings and interesting boutique shops.  The post office was built in 1888 and was closed in 1964, at which time it was purchased by the Jefferson Historical Society and operates today as a museum.

My blogging was interrupted for a few days while I laid my trusty computer to rest.  I was able to revive it for a couple of hours, long enough to transfer my photos to some flash drives but by the time I got up the next morning it took its final breath within a few minutes.  I lost all the recipes I have collected over a lifetime and a few other things.  During the five years I cared for my mother I occasionally made it through a trying day by writing humorous stories about things she would say and do and I thought I had lost all those also but I actually found where I had printed them off a few months ago so that was a happy moment.  So for now I'm working on a laptop that I bought a couple of years ago and I finally got my current photos loaded on yesterday.  I would have been devastated to have lost my courthouse series as I've traveled thousands of miles throughout Texas in search of the state's historic courthouses  Thank you all for being such wonderful blogging buddies!