This is a page in the postal cash book used at Blackdom, New Mexico.
Post Office Department Form N was issued to postmasters with the instruction that: “This Cash Book is for use at an Office Transacting Money Order Business on Domestic Basis Only.” This copy was used at the Blackdom Post Office in New Mexico. There are approximately 20 pages with entries beginning on April 1, 1913 and continuing to 1919. The account book was signed by the three consecutive postmasters: James A. Eubank, Thomas L. Leathers, and Bessie E. Malone.
This account book is from a post office in an all African-American community. The town of Blackdom, New Mexico was developed in response to the laws in many southern states that restricted land ownership for African Americans after the Civil War. Work to create an incorporated Blackdom began around 1903 with homesteaders setting up farms a few years later. The first official listing for the post office in Blackdom appeared in the 1912 Postal Guide. It last appeared in the 1919 Postal Guide. In that time, the post office had three postmasters: James A. Eubank, appointed on April 10, 1912; Thomas L. Leathers, appointed on March 9, 1915; and Bessie E. Malone, appointed on February 23, 1916.
Mrs. Bessie Malone (1872-1920) had moved to New Mexico with her husband attorney George Malone, one of the founders of the community. Malone was the last and the only female postmaster of the town (Although the title postmistress was also sometimes used in news articles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in reference to women who held this job, that was not the official Post Office Department title.). She served as postmaster until the post office was discontinued on July 31, 1919, at which time this ledger and all postal accountable property were to have been turned over to the nearest post office, which was six miles northeast in Dexter, New Mexico.
Estimates about the community show that it peaked at about 20 families with a total population of approximately 300. Limited water resources and droughts increasingly lead residents abandon the area; Blackdom was a ghost town by the late 1920s (33° 9' 49" N, 104° 30' 30" W).
The account book gives an view into the economy of the community with its bottom-line tallies of the money order business. The money orders would have linked this new community to families back in the settlers’ home states or paid for supplies ordered by the struggling farmers on their new homesteads. This ledger remained at the Dexter post office until the postmaster and U.S. Postal Service offered to transfer it to the museum's collection in 2012.
References:
Heidelbaugh, Lynn “Curator Lynn Heidelbaugh on the Blackdom Cash Book,” National Postal Museum audio 1:18. February 18, 2015. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/freedom-just-around-the-corner-segregation/segregation-postal.
Henderson, Lucy H. “FREE LAND FOR THE RACE IN MEXICO.” The Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition) (1905-1966); Dec 21, 1912; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender (1910-1975) pg. 3.
White, James W. The History of Chaves County Post Offices. 1998.
Wiseman, Regge N. “Glimpses of Late Frontier Life in New Mexico’s Southern Pecos Valley: Archaeology and History at Blackdom and Seven Rivers.” Museum of New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies. 2001. http://www.nmarchaeology.org/assets/files/archnotes/233.pdf
