History: Sherry Post Office Photos
Contact: Chris Barney
Email: cnbar51@wi.rr.com

Additional Information & Photo Album

---Source: Badger Postal History

Official Publication of the Wisconsin Postal History Society Organized 1942 Volume 41; Number 1; August 2001

Preserving Our Postal Past

by Chris Barney

In March, 1998, my wife Pam and I visited the small, unincorporated village of Sherry, Wisconsin in northern Wood County, about five miles north of the farm where Pam was raised. Sherry was a booming lumber mill town in the 1880s and 1890s, but the boom passed and the village’s population, which had peaked at about one thousand around 1890, eventually dwindled to about 150.

The village’s fourth-class post office, established in 1884 with Charles S. Briggs as first postmaster, hung on until 1968, when the little office was closed following the retirement of postmistress Lorraine LeRoux, and the Post Office Department’s decision that there was not enough revenue to justify a full-time postal employee.  

By the time of our 1998 visit, all that remained of Sherry was a cheese factory, church, tavern, trucking company, and the Sherry Volunteer Fire Department. Not a grocery store or gas station survived. What did remain, however, was the old storefront building that had housed the Sherry Post Office for most of its eighty-four years.