The July 4th flood left only the floor and foundation at the Hunt Post Office.
It’s symbolic, in a way, because to many, the post office is the foundation of the small Hill Country town.
“This is kind of the center of Hunt, and I’ve had a lot of people tell me that this is really where they came to do their congregating, to really visit and to connect with one another,” Gaylynn Hierholzer said. “This was a heart of Hunt.”
Hierholzer has been the postmaster at the Hunt Post Office for three decades.
When KSAT met her at what’s left of her home away from home, it was Hierholzer’s 30th anniversary on the job.
“I’m just heartbroken,” she said.
After nearly a foot of rain in the early morning hours of Friday, July 4, caused the Guadalupe River to gush well beyond its banks, only the foundation and the decades-old tiles of the office floor remain.
That morning, a friend of Hierholzer texted her a picture saying the flood damage was severe.
Hierholzer asked the friend to take a picture so she could see how the post office fared.
Her friend replied, “Gaylynn, that is your post office.”
“It was unrecognizable, just unrecognizable,” Hierholzer said.
When she was able to reach the post office that Saturday morning, she said a nearly 1,500-pound safe that sat in the office was gone.
It was later found roughly one-quarter mile down the river.
“But what I thought was funny — a man walked up and he handed me something and said, ‘This is yours.’ I took it, and then I flipped it over, and I looked at it, and it was my badge,“ Hierholzer said.
It was her postmaster ID badge, which she left near the safe the last time she worked.
Somehow, that badge, the size of a playing card, stayed put.
“And it still has mud all over the back,” she said, showing off the badge that was pinned to her shirt. “I’m just so proud to have it.”
KSAT met Hierholzer in the parking lot of a church in Ingram during an interview for another story about the flood aftermath.
Hierholzer said so much attention had been paid to the post office’s famous neighbor, The Hunt Store, a place well-known before the flood.
It’s become a repeated background for politicians’ interviews in the aftermath.
To Hierholzer, it was important for people to know about the Hunt Post Office, too.
“Because so many of the customers have come to me and said, ‘but our post office was the heart of our town, and you’re not really a town unless you have a post office,’” Hierholzer said. “And it’s just touched my heart that it meant as much to them as it did to me.”
For now, mail for Hunt residents is being processed in Ingram while Hierholzer works to find a temporary replacement space for Hunt.
The original post office, built in 1975, was leased. Hierholzer was told that the U.S. Postal Service wants the owner to rebuild in the same location.
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