St. Vincent Railway Post Offices

The railway mail service was...

The state’s first international RPO, the St. Vincent & Winnipeg, initiated service from that Kittson County town to Canada in August 1881.

My great uncle, Charlie Fitzpatrick, and later his brother, Dick Fitzpatrick, both worked at the St. Vincent depot, and one of their daily responsibilities would be to switch out the mailbags, both incoming and outgoing.  Some of the sorting for the various towns on the particular RPO was done on the trains, separating for each town they were responsible for.  Once delivered to St. Vincent, for example, then the town's postmaster would do the final sort for each postal customer.

In Pembina, History is the Attraction

A historic postcard touts Pembina's attractions. 

[Photo Credit: State Historical Society of North Dakota/Digital Horizons]

Pembina, N.D., has accumulated a cast of characters and logged a number of firsts that belie its current existence as a town of 600 people.

By: Mike Jacobs (Grand Forks Herald Publisher Emeritus) | July 21, 2019

PEMBINA, N.D. – History is the attraction in Pembina and there is a lot of it – more than 200 years of it.

A look at the map of North America shows why this is so.

Pembina is close to the center of the continent, and a direct line drawn from northeast to southwest would pass between two of the continent’s great watersheds, one feeding Hudson’s Bay and the other the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. Plus, it’s near the source of the continent’s greatest river, the Mississippi, flowing southward to the Gulf of Mexico.

Draw an international boundary across this expanse and history – dramatic, sweeping history – becomes inevitable in Pembina.