FAQ’s

USPS Mailing Addresses in Dutchess do not by definition, contain your town (municipality). The “town” portion of your mailing address is the hamlet or village containing the post office responsible for delivering your mail. This post office may not even be the closest, nor even located in your town.

For example, someone in the town of Clinton, only a few miles from the hamlet of Clinton Corners and its namesake post office, receives their mail delivery from the Staatsburg post office 10 miles away. (Staatsburg is a hamlet less than 1.5 square miles, outlined in yellow, located on the Hudson River in the northwest corner of the town of Hyde Park.) But that Clinton resident’s mailing address (and now GPS location, too) is:

66 Schultzville Rd
Staatsburg NY 12580

Why? Well, history. The following slide progression shows Dutchess County:

1. Late 16-1700’s – Dutchess is farmlands with only county-level governance. Towns don’t exist yet. A select few hamlets and villages scattered throughout the county got U.S. Post Offices. (They appear in small type.) Residents’ mail was addressed to the post office of their choice, then they traveled to retrieve it.
2. Late 17-1800’s – Cities and towns are formed, their boundaries outlined in white. (Their names in large type, were often that of their largest hamlet or village.) Some villages within towns also incorporated for an additional layer of governance (e.g. Fishkill, Millbrook, Millerton, Pawling, Red Hook, Rhinebeck, Tivoli)
3. 1905 onward – U.S. Post Office Department begins Rural Free Delivery (RFD), and postal inspectors define delivery routes based on existing roads and other practicalities. The varied color blocks identify the delivery area for each contained post office. Rather than one’s own town, the hamlet location of one’s delivery post office determined the “town” portion of their Mailing Address. (And now 100+ years later, to compound the confusion, that same mailing address is used as the standard addressing for GPS.