Why I Lived at the PO

[This is an excerpt from a transcript of interviews between Emmilou Collins Edmonds Adams and her father, Carlos C. Collins, recorded February 14, 1982. Passages in italics are his actual words, although portions may have been omitted for brevity. Portions in brackets [] were added for clarification.]

Carlos Collins --

After we had been in Fisher County three or four years, Dad bought an adjoining farm. The owner of the farm was the postmaster at that time, so we took over the new farmhouse and the post office and a little store.
 
And mother [Amanda Jane Perryman Collins ] officially became the postmistress of the city of Fisher, Fisher County, Texas, population 3. No, 3 boys and mother and father. [Population 5]
 
It was quite interesting to note that the mail came from Roby on north through Fisher – that was the name of the post office – then Dowell, then Dars [I can’t find a record of Dars, Texas] then Dowell, and I believe there was another one called Double Mountain.
 
The mail man was in what they called a mail hack. He brought the mail – the Fisher mail up to the end of the line. It was in kind of a hack they called it drawn by horses. He would make the round trip in one day and would pick up the mail as he came back. So that was probably interesting to people of the present day.
 
But there’s another thing – we had a telephone at this post office. Really, it was in our house and it was the only telephone in the whole community around there. And we had a special ring for our number – I forget the number but that’s immaterial – I mean the number of rings it would make. But they had ones at Fisher, Dars, Dowell, and Double Mountain. Well, they all had different signals, but it was interesting to note that some other telephone other than ours was called – you’d get kind of interested to know what was going on. So you could lift up the receiver and hear what the news was, if there was any. And you could also hear the different receivers being taken off the hook all the way along the line.
 
Some of these telephone lines they used the wire fences, where they had a wire fence of considerable length. Otherwise they would string them up on mesquite poles along the line.
 
Another thing being the only telephone in the community, there’d be an emergency call they’d want somebody that lived around in that community on an emergency. So we would saddle a horse and ride over and have them come answer the telephone. Sometimes we would get a nickel or dime for this kind of work. Most of the time, we didn’t get anything for doing that.