COUNTRY MAIL BOXES

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 5

COUNTRY MAIL BOXES

[By

W. L. STEWART]

Country mail boxes along the rural delivery routes make quite an interesting study when you are out on that week-end run in the car. Quite often they are just the regulation rounded-top metal box but every now and again you come across sortie that are different and occasionally one or two with real character.

There are plain boxes adapted to hold mail, the bread and the odd parcel but we have seen one that was undoubtedly a retired dog kennel with a fragment of chain still hanging to it. Five-gallon oil drums continue useful service on post tops but they are not so interesting as the old wooden butter churn, the medium sized tin trunk, the small wooden barrel, the box sitting on a massive tractor crankshaft or the box on top of a snakey length of “frozen” chain, all of which we have seen on recent Canterbury trips. Three of more than ordinary interest are the ancient single-furrow plough on the West Coast road near West Melton, the house on the Loburn-Ashley road just past the Loburn school and the cluster on the left about halfway through the Weka Pass. INN SIGNS In England one of the features of the countryside that always appeals to New Zealanders is the old inn signs. The White Horse, the Sun, the Admiral, the Pig and Whistle, the Red Lion—often painted by reputable artists, are both distinctive and attractive. It seems to us that this idea could be applied to country mail boxes and that the three mentioned earlier are a step in the right direction. You can imagine, for in-

stance, the dairy farmer with an old five-gallon milk can with a letter slot and a parcel door contrived one wet day in the workshop, the whole set up vertically on a disused separator stand. Perhaps the keen deerstalker farmer could have a nice set of antlers on his box. And those stud farm signs—

Silverlea Jerseys, we will say —would sit nicely on an old butter churn at the farm gate. Another wet afternoon, some thin sheet metal, a good pair of snips and a pot of paint could produce a very lifelike pig, curly tail and all, for that mailbox at Jim Smith’s stud pig outfit on R.D.3.