Saturday was a routine day at Moon Post Office in Mathews County—unlike the scene at Moon 50 years earlier, July 20, 1969, when Americans landed on the Moon.
Then, nearly 1,000 letters poured into the post office, located at the time in a former country store. Postmaster Shirley Snow hand-stamped letters with the Moon cancellation, and then cancelled more, then more.
On the 50th anniversary of the landing, postal clerk Robert Epps raised the flag outside the post office, now in a newer building, and said it was “another day as usual” with no huge volume of mail and no special events planned.
Vernelle Robinson, postmaster at Mathews and six other county post offices (Hudgins, Moon, Onemo, Port Haywood, Susan and New Point), said Monday that no special event was organized, but that the United States Postal Service had issued a 50th anniversary Moon landing stamp on July 19 and that people wanting special Moon cancellations can mail moon-landing-stamped envelopes to this address: Moon Post Office, Moon, Va. 23119.
The 25th anniversary of the Moon landing, in 1994, brought a special cancellation and work by Shirley Snow, still postmaster then, to fill customers’ requests. In October 1998, Moon post office got a bit more extra work for special cancellation of a new 32-cent stamp “Space Exploration Station.”
Recalling the excitement 50 years ago, Snow said that while hundreds of letters came in on Moon landing day, they continued for 30 days for a special cancellation authorized by post office authorities. She said the total must have been nearly 1,000.
“People would send a whole box” of letters to cancel, she said. “I don’t think I counted. They came from all over the world, a lot from Europe, and most from the United States … It was a fun time.”
How Moon got its name
The origin of the post office name for this tiny community is a bit of a mystery.
It was established in 1902 by William Jefferson Callis, the first postmaster. Oral histories passed down are that he proposed both “William” and “Jefferson” as the office’s name. These were rejected, the legends said, and so then he either wrote down “Noon,” the hour when mail usually arrived, which was misinterpreted as Moon and approved as such, or “Moon” because of a beautiful full moon that rose as he pondered his application.
After the Gazette-Journal reprinted part of this legend last week, a reader alerted us to an entry in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This entry reads, “Moon is an unincorporated community in Mathews County, Virginia, United States. Moon is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) east-northeast of Mathews. Moon has a post office with ZIP Code 23119.
“The origin of the name ‘Moon’ is obscure, though the community may take its name from early settler Abraham Moon who patented 500 acres of land in the area on June 6, 1650. By 1657, Abraham Moon’s land had passed to George Billups, whose descendants still lived on some of the land as recently as 2009.”
Whatever the origin of its name, Moon has seen its day in the sun.