Many apartment listings describe small spaces as "cozy." Ochopee, Florida, wishes it had a word for it. According to the USPS's Postal Facts page, it is the smallest post office in the country. It spans a mere 61.3 square feet and began life as a storage building for the irrigation pipes of a neighboring tomato farm. They didn't plan for it to be this way. The USPS's Postal Facts page says the shed became a post office in 1953, after a fire destroyed the previous post office and general store. More than seven decades later, it's still USPS's smallest, and it still sits in Collier County, on the northwestern edge of the Everglades along the Tamiami Trail.
A night fire and a very practical decision
A marker next to the office, put up by the Collier County Board of County Commissioners and reproduced on that same Postal Facts page, relates that postmaster Sidney Brown hurried the old pipe shed into service after a night fire in 1953 burned down Ochopee's general store and post office. According to the same marker, the building has been in "continuous use" since and still serves residents in a three-county area, including delivery to the Seminole and Miccosukee people in the region. Neither the marker nor USPS names the other two counties, but Collier County's own boundaries make the likely reach fairly easy to trace: it borders Miami-Dade County to the southeast and Monroe County, home to the rest of the Everglades and the Keys, to the south, both sparsely populated near Ochopee and plausible candidates for the routes this office covers. It adds that residents and stamp collectors around the globe frequently request the Ochopee postmark. Read between the lines, and it wasn't a grand plan. It was a quick fix. Someone needed somewhere for the mail to go, and a shed happened to come in handy.
