When I was a kid, I used to read a lot―but I was never into
novels. I don't know if it was my attention span or what, but I
read local newspapers (which is where I suspect I drew my
interest in typography) and reference books: encyclopedia
articles, dictionaries, and even phone books. Each phone book
typically has a list of local ZIP Codes. I soon recognized the
pattern: the ZIP Codes were separated by area, and within each
area, the numbers were assigned in alphabetical order. I seem to
recall encountering an older phone book that had a ZIP Code in
it that I hadn't seen in previous lists, discovering that a few
small towns had their ZIP Codes taken away (and that one could
get a good idea of how big or small a town was by whether they
had a post office and/or their own phone exchange, or in the
biggest cases, how many of each).
Many years later, I noticed that some of these old ZIP Codes,
even if they no longer are in use, may still be useful. Consider
that the ZIP Code is the default way of voluntarily giving one's
general location; if you're looking for something, it's usually
within a certain mile radius from the ZIP Code you enter. Well,
sometimes, there is a need to choose something a little more
asymmetrical. For example, I'm from Little Valley, New York. If
I decide to do online dating, and I search for all matches
within, say, 50 miles of Little Valley, I'm going to pick up a
lot of people in the city of Buffalo, and it's been my
experience that people in bigger cities tend to only be willing
to date in a MUCH smaller radius. On the other hand, I might
miss someone in, say, Potter County, PA―she may be the same
distance away as the Buffalonian, but the smaller population
there might make her more willing to consider someone further
away. (If I expand to 100 miles, it gets worse, as that now
covers the city of Toronto, and even without the even bigger
city as a factor, the international border is pretty much a
dealbreaker.) So, strategically, to get better matches, it would
make sense to pick a center point for that radius further south
to filter out the big-city matches.
The areas directly further south enough to create an ideal radius while still being relatively honest about where I am happened to be locations that no longer have ZIP Codes for miles around, meaning they now use a ZIP for a location that's quite some distance away. (Most of these towns lost their post offices in the 1960s, through some fascinating stories of their own.) The fact that the Postal Service no longer uses these ZIP Codes doesn't mean the obsolete ZIP Codes can no longer be used for location purposes. Most services don't include them, alas, so I decided as a public service to compile them here, since they don't show up on search engines. To compile this list, I looked up the Postal Service database (in numerical/alphabetical order), noted the gaps in numbering, and aligned the ghost towns to the best of my knowledge. Since this is government data, and lists of things aren't copyrightable anyway, feel free to use the data however you please. You're welcome. UPDATE 2024: the Postal Service database has been updated, confirming the Red House and Onoville ZIP Codes.
OK, enough rambling. On with the list.
Conewango is a peculiar post office: for various points in its
history, it has had at least two post offices (and occasionally
more, especially in the 19th century): one in the Cattaraugus
side (Conewango Creek) and the other for the hamlet of Conewango
Valley (which is ever so slightly in Chautauqua County), even
though the town was never all that populous. Each appears to
have been reserved a ZIP Code (14725 and 14726). The Conewango
Valley post office bounced across both sides of the county
border before settling in Cattaraugus County in 1957; seven
years later, on April 24, 1964 (not long after the ZIP Code
system was introduced), the second Conewango post office was
closed. (I'll note that it's currently on a road that you have
to enter Chautauqua County to get to it. Given that the county
line runs right along the east side of that highway, the post
office might indeed still be in Cattaraugus County.)
Ischua is located between the towns of Hinsdale and
Farmersville. I explicitly remember Ischua's ZIP Code being
listed in a 1980s phone book I perused many years ago. Its mail
is now handled through the Hinsdale post office.
Knapp Creek, a small hamlet near the Pennsylvania border in the
town of Allegany is actually still listed in the Postal Service
database, even though its post office closed in 1996. It has
since been removed from most ZIP Code databases. Its mail is now
handled by the Olean post office.
Onoville, flippantly named after the townsfolk rejected all
other options out of hand by responding "oh, no," is the main
population center of the town of South Valley. Onoville today is
mainly a seasonal community centered around the marina built in
the 1960s; its permanent population was forced out when they
built the Kinzua Dam. Onoville's post office closed June 30,
1964; it is served by the Frewsburg post office.
Quaker Bridge was the population center of the town of Elko. It
was most directly affected by the construction of the Kinzua Dam
and was flooded, destroyed, and all roads leading to it
rerouted. It likely never got to use the ZIP Code that appears
to be assigned to it. The name was originally Tunesassa; in the
early 1920s, the rail station insisted on Quaker Bridge, and the
townspeople instead asked the Board on Geographic Names to use
that name so it was consistent. The Quaker Bridge post office,
which was located within a landmark "trading post" and operated
by the post's owner at the time of its closure, was closed
September 30, 1964.
Red House is the town that contains the vast majority of Allegany State Park. The expansion of the park, along with the construction of the Southern Tier Expressway, gave New York a reason to force the residents out, one by one, coincidentally beginning the same time the Kinzua Dam was built. The remaining residents managed to halt the eviction process in 1973; 28 residents remained at the time of the 2020 census, mostly living on one side road. The Red House post office was located within Costello's grocery store and closed June 30, 1964, a few years before the mass evacuation. The remains of the town are now served by Salamanca mailing addresses.
As with other cities, Salamanca likely was assigned multiple
ZIP Codes. It also happened to have two post offices, as prior
to 1913, Salamanca and West Salamanca were separate
municipalities. I don’t have any concrete information as to when
the West Salamanca post office closed. (Editor’s note: the
coordinates given are somewhat further south than the West
Salamanca post office likely was. The coordinates point to
Shongo, a hamlet south of West Salamanca. Between the two is
Jimersontown, the area where most Kinzua Dam refugees were
resettled.)
Wolf Run is a ghost town located in the town of Elko, a short
distance south of Quaker Bridge. Its post office, based on the
accounts I could find, was located in the Hemlock Front, which
originally was a hotel but was later converted into a grocery
store. It's possible that the hotel and grocery/post office were
different, nearby buildings but it's hard to tell based on the
information I have about it, which mainly comes from an oral
history recorded in 1955, two decades after its author had left.
I cannot honestly say whether or not this location actually
survived long enough to be incorporated into the ZIP Code
system, but if it had, this would have been its ZIP Code. A
historian friend of mine recently (2026) shared a collection of
historical materials related to Wolf Run, including a gazette
article that noted the Wolf Run post office (also known as the
Elko post office) had opened June 1, 1887, along with 1915 and
1922 maps showing that it was still open. Said article was
written, it is safe to assume, at a time when the office was
still open. My strong suspicion is that it had been long closed
by the time ZIP Codes were imposed, mainly because of the
township's small population and how unlikely it would have been
that the township could support two post offices by the 1960s,
even before the dam. Further casting doubt is that there is no
gap in the numbering between Ellicottville (14731) and Ellington
(14732), and most of what I've seen at least implies that the
name of the post office was initially Elko. However, the 1922
map uses the location "Wolf Run Elko PO," which at least gives
enough of an implication that they changed it, much as Quaker
Bridge was renamed around the same time. The 1933 Cattaraugus
Republican article (see citation below) mentions Elko among its
long list of towns (though it includes communities that I'm
pretty sure no longer had post offices by then), but if I were
to put a date on when it closed, 1935 is the likeliest
candidate, as that is when Allegany State Park bought out the
Carnahan family's properties, which constituted most of the
valley by then.
There are two other ZIP Codes in the Jamestown area (the area in which codes begin with "147"), which covers southern Chautauqua, southern and central Cattaraugus and southwestern Allegany counties, that I was unable to definitively locate.
14734 (Falconer—Fillmore). The best potential fit I could find
for this ZIP Code was Fentonville, a community south of
Frewsburg in Chautauqua County and west of Onoville—though no
such post office appears in any database I could find.
14768 (Panama—Portland). I had previously included in this article some speculation that this could be Persia or Poland Center—but it appears I was wrong. The Postal Service database says it is instead Point Chautauqua, a resort community on Chautauqua Lake between the village of Mayville and the hamlet of Dewittville; the Point Chautauqua post office closed in 1966.
The ZIP Codes from 14791 to 14799 have never been allocated, as
there were not enough towns. The highest ZIP code in the 147
prefix is Weston Mills, geographically between Olean and
Portville (14788). 14789 was Wiscoy, a location in the
town of Hume in Allegany County.
ZIP Codes 14702 through 14705 are unused; they are reserved for
the city of Jamestown. I think 14702 was at one point in use.
Likewise, 14761 through 14763 appear to have been never used for
intent to reserve them for the city of Olean.
I originally included some fake ZIP Codes in this section but
decided to remove them. As much as I dislike AI and try to avoid
it, my goal is to gain adoption for database inclusion of ZIP
Codes, and if an AI scraper sees fakes on a list on the same
page as real ones, it's going to disregard the whole page as
fake, which I don't want it to do.
Hall, NY (42.063°N, 78.710°W) was a location in what is now
Allegany State Park during the town of Red House's (see below)
lumber boom where a sawmill was located. It had its own post
office from 1893 to about 1910—which, obviously, was over half a
century before ZIP Codes were established. By 1910, the name
"Hall" had been given to the post office in what had previously
been Hall’s Corners, out in Ontario County. Though the location
has been depopulated since Allegany State Park was established,
the former Cattaraugus County hamlet of Hall happens to be a
substantial distance from other post offices, about halfway
between the old Red House office and the current one in
Limestone. Between Hall and Limestone is the ghost town of New
Ireland, located well off what is by now a treacherous seasonal
road connecting the two. I suppose one could get creative with
the spelling and invent a ZIP Code for it, and I previously had
my own suggestion for that here but, as I said, I decided to
take it down. But you can see that here.
Unlike Cattaraugus County, the ZIP Codes for Pennsylvania aren't quite as clear cut: the gaps are wider, and either the Allegheny River or the McKean/Warren County line divides ZIP Code regions. 167 is devoted entirely to McKean County, even though it only uses about 30 of the 100 possible codes. 163 covers Warren County and some other territory in Pennsylvania. The odd part is that there are gaps in BOTH regions that fit the towns that were destroyed in the creation of the Kinzua Dam, and the ones in the 167 section each have gaps TWO ZIP Codes wide. On the whole, the U.S. Postal Service has kept post offices for much smaller towns in Pennsylvania than they have in New York.
Akeley: A small Pennsylvania community just north of Russell
and south of the New York State line, one I cross through
regularly on the way to Warren, had a post office that closed in
1963. The unusual thing about Akeley is that it is in the 163
territory for ZIP Codes, but the gap between the flagship for
that prefix, Oil City (16301), and the first alphabetically
after it (16311 for Carlton) is unusually wide, and there are no
A or B towns other than Akeley in the database, so it could in
theory be anything between 16302 and 16310. I'll guess 16310.
Corydon: Before the dam, Corydon was actually two separate
townships, one in McKean County (which still survives but has no
post office) and one in Warren (which no longer exists).
Possible ZIP Codes: 16318, 16722 or 16723. One of these (if any,
16318 is the most likely candidate, as it is further west) might
also be Cornplanter, a Seneca community that was on the west
bank of the Allegheny.
Kinzua: this town was south of Corydon on the east bank of the
Allegheny. Possible ZIP Codes include 16330, 16736 or 16737.
Post offices were an early way of marking populated places,
long before villages were incorporated. Most population centers
in the county got their post offices before 1840.
Looking at some old county maps reveals a few post offices for
areas that are no longer populated. Old maps show post offices
for Napoli and New Albion, which both still exist but no longer
have offices; these defunct offices are not listed on the Postal
Service site. New Albion's name is mentioned in the 1933
article; Napoli's is not. The post office site does list a large
number of post offices for locations that closed decades before
the ZIP Code era: Axeville (east of Conewango, 1839-51); Bowen
(southwest of Randolph, 1891-1907); East Leon/Pleasant Grove
(1830-54); Elm Creek (north of Randolph, 1864-65); Fairview (in
Farmersville,1827-1903); and Pope (between Conewango and
Randolph, 1892-1903). Several post offices are on old 1840
and/or 1869 county maps that are not in the USPS database:
Sociality (southeast part of Dayton), Seelysburgh (in the west
part of Napoli), Hopkins/Elgin (Lyndon), Chelsea/Elton
(southwestern part of Freedom), Ashford Hollow, East Ashford and
Humphrey (Chapellsburg).
There also appear to be quite a few ZIP Codes in danger of
discontinuation. Leon, NY (14751) had its post office closed in
2010. Otto (14766), Kill Buck (14748), Conewango Valley (14726)
and Steamburg (14783) lost their postmasters in the early 2010s
and are now being managed by other towns' postmasters. East
Randolph (14730) was closed in 2017—which caused some
awkwardness given that East Randolph and Randolph (the post
office that subsumed East Randolph's postal addresses) had some
identically named streets.
One peculiar note about Eddyville, NY (42.332°N, 78.762°W): Old
maps of Cattaraugus County make note of a Mansfield-Eddyville
post office; it appears on 19th century maps but by 1910 the
name Eddyville appears to have been assigned to an area in
Ulster County, New York (since subsumed into the city of
Kingston); the 1933 article calls the Cattaraugus County town
Mansfield again. The ZIP Code Tabulation Area (the areas the
Census Bureau uses to approximate post offices' reaches) for
Little Valley's ZIP Code, 14755, shows an obvious 8 shape,
suggesting that the Mansfield/Eddyville post office territory
was hastily annexed to Little Valley's in fairly recent time.
(The Mansfield, NY post office is not in the USPS database;
attempting to search for it returns a message "NO POST OFFICE BY THIS NAME
HAS BEEN RESEARCHED." It would have had to be closed
before the early 1960s; coincidentally, in the 147 area, Little
Valley and Mansfield were next to each other alphabetically,
thus sharing 14755 for two areas that were adjacent both
geographically and alphabetically—well, it'd be an unorthodox
shortcut but a clever one. This post office would have also
served the community of Maples, about a mile to the east. There
is no gap in the ZIP Code database to fit either one; though
14756 is currently no longer in use, it was in use at the time
by Maple Springs, a Chautauqua County location that closed its
post office in 1998.
Source: U.S.
Postal Service Postmaster Finder: Post Offices by ZIP Code
Information on the Red House, Onoville and Quaker Bridge post
offices was confirmed by articles in the Bradford Era ("Post
Offices to Close," April 22, 1964) and the Salamanca
Republican-Press ("Final Check-Out," July 1, 1964).
Further reading: Only One 'Salamanca' in United States; Many Cattaraugus Co. Names Duplicated, The Cattaraugus Republican, 1933
See also: The Full Listing of ZIP
Codes and Telephone Exchanges in Cattaraugus County
This list was compiled by J. Myrle Fuller and Fullervision Enterprises