Wittman community staple under construction

WITTMAN — The town of Wittman has been without a post office since late May due to a car accident that left the building out of commission.

Ted Marshall, owner of the post office building, said a vehicle hit the porch on May 28. Though the post office itself was not damaged, the porch was moved approximately a foot and a half, and the incident dislodged the porch, including the braces.

Marshall said the post office is vital to his family and its legacy. His mother, Betty Marshall, was the postmistress of the establishment, and Marshall said he also spent time working there.

The building was passed down to him after his father died, and he eagerly wants to keep it going.

“My mother and my father always wanted to keep that post office open for the community,” Marshall said. “It meant a lot to the community. It was not only a place of business, it was a meeting place, and we wanted to keep it going, and we want to keep it going further.”

In 2019 the post office celebrated its 150th anniversary. Since the closing of the Asbury Methodist Church, the Wittman Post Office has been the unofficial gathering spot for the area’s communities.

Marshall said the post office not only provided mail to Wittman but also to local towns such as McDaniel and Sherwood.

Since the incident, mail that would have normally gone to the Wittman Post Office has been transferred to the St. Michaels Post Office.

Wittman has a large elderly population, which makes it difficult for many people without licenses or vehicles to make the over-10-minute commute to St. Michaels for their mail.

According to Marshall, even if people can commute to St. Michaels, the summer traffic from tourism creates an additional barrier.

But Wittman lost more than convenient mail access, residents of the town say. Pat Ellison, a Wittman resident, said the post office encompasses a large part of the Wittman community.

“The post office here is more than just a post office. It’s a community,” Ellison said. “It’s a place where people get together and see each other … It’s not just the post office. That’s one of the reasons losing it hurts so much.”

Ellison said people would go to the post office to leave extra produce from their gardens or books that they would want to have a good home to be picked up by other members of the community. It was a center for residents to connect with one another.

Though the post office’s closing has caused stress to residents of Wittman, Ellison said she is impressed by the amount of effort the community has made to help Marshall and the efforts by retired postmistress, Chris Henckel, when the accident happened.

That evening after the crash, Henckel, with the help of her mother, went into the post office and hauled out all the mail and packages into big plastic bags to take to St. Michaels.

“I know it all had to be sorted, and they had to find a place for it,” Ellison said. “So it must have been a really, really tremendous job.”

Marshall said he admires the work that the St. Michaels Post Office has done to accommodate the extra work. He said he has been putting in effort to get the porch rebuilt as soon as possible, but due to the porch’s age, more needs to be done to ensure it is up to code.

“There’s a good reason for it,” Marshall said. “Inspections and all this it’s for the safety of the people. Just like bringing back the porch is for the safety of the people, probably a lot better and safer than the one we had since the post office is (over) 150 years old.”

This report has been updated to correct Henckel's title and name spelling.