It was the IRS notice that finally raised my ire.
No, not for the reasons you might think. I wasn’t being audited, having wages garnished, or being told to shell out more money to Uncle Sugar.
Instead, the agency wrote to inform me that it was correcting my address. I had repeatedly written on my tax returns that I lived in the town of Franklin, Conn., but in fact, the letter said, I was using an “invalid” address. Instead, the letter lectured, I lived in North Franklin, the town connected to the ZIP code, 06254. Henceforth the government would use that address in communications with me (which I pray will be infrequent).
The letter was irritating, but it came as no surprise. Computers at UPS and FedEx had made similar incorrect “corrections” to our town name whenever I attempted to print package labels. Mail from insurance companies did the same thing. Every GPS system I have ever used to help me find my way home corrects my address to “North Franklin,” seemingly hell-bent on a conspiracy to inform me that I did not, in fact, live in Franklin, but in an entity called North Franklin.
But I don’t. There IS no separate town of North Franklin in Connecticut. My small municipality with fewer than 2,000 souls was inhabited by Europeans in the 1600s but was renamed in 1786. It was, as a town official pointed out, “named after Benjamin Franklin, not Benjamin NORTH Franklin.”
So what gives? Why is a faceless, Post Office bureaucracy trying to rename our town? It isn’t, I discovered. It’s just that the ZIP code has become ever more powerful in this technological era.
The U.S. Postal Service really just wants to deliver the mail, agency spokeswoman Amy N. Gibbs assured me. “ZIP Codes are often not aligned with municipalities. Many communities have mail delivered from a Post Office with a different name than their community. Nowadays, a developer might want a fancier address connected to a neighboring ZIP code. But we can’t do that. We have to deliver the mail based on efficiency,” she said.
My gripe is nothing new, it turns out. The Post Office gets scores of complaints about ZIP codes and assigned towns every year.
The ZIP code, short for Zone Improvement Plan, began in mid-1963 as a way to speed mail delivery. At first, that’s all it was used for. But in the modern era the ZIP code is used for everything from setting automobile insurance rates to attracting higher prices for real estate. There’s a reason why the 1990s television teen drama “Beverly Hills, 90210” used that particular ZIP code in its title. It referred to the posh neighborhood that the bored teens in the series could roll their eyes about. Home values and reputation have reaped the benefits of the drama’s link to exclusivity ever since, although honestly, the area didn’t need much help.
ZIP codes have even been used in public health, but that can quickly mask problems as much as it can find them. Michigan pointed to lab results in ZIP codes to push back against activists in Flint who said that their children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. Yet the water system is not contiguous to the ZIP code and one-third of homes listed as living in Flint were outside the city limits, as geographer Richard Casey Sadler wrote, thus making the problem look less serious than it was.
Because of the power of the ZIP code, some towns get “disappeared” altogether. Several towns in my state are lumped into a neighboring town’s ZIP codes, and residents have to go through the humiliating experience of listing their address, which physically may exist in one town, under the name of a bordering town.
But that’s not my town’s issue.
We haven’t been lumped in a different municipality. We’ve been totally renamed.
To figure out how it happened, one of the nation’s two U.S. Post Office historians got involved. Post Office Historian Stephen Kochersperger emailed me copies of a map from the 1898 and other documents. The answer lies, he said, not with the Postal Service, but with a Mrs. Aseneth A. Manning who, in 1873, applied to establish a new Post Office in Franklin after the old Post Office closed years before.
In those days, the title of postmaster came with no salary. But since Post Offices could be and often were located within businesses, handling the mail guaranteed foot traffic. The name of the Post Office was the choice of each postmaster. - including Mrs. Manning. She could have chosen the name of Franklin, but she didn’t. Instead, she chose the name “North Franklin,” perhaps because the office was located in the northern part of town. In any event, that’s been the name under which mail has been delivered here ever since.
It turns out that Franklin is the most common name for a city or town in the United States, according to the U.S. Postal Service, with at least 28 of them from sea to sea. Franklin as a place name beats out even Washington, Clinton and Madison, all popular and all the names of towns in my state and dozens of others.
So perhaps I should be grateful. After all, Mrs. Manning could have done worse. If she had named the office “Bloody Acres” or “Idiotville,” we might have been stuck with one of those names for the last 150 years.
I live in Long Neck, DE but my zip code defaults to Millsboro. That's b/c there used to be a post office here but the story is that the postmaster was known to use the PO to share "after hour delights" with some of the local women. One day, his wife caught him and burned down the PO. The postmaster and his paramour were badly scared and barely made it out alive. The PO was never rebuilt in Long Neck - no PO, no need for a postmaster. The story goes that he collected his pension and lived a very quiet life after that. So far, the IRS hasn't insisted that we live in Millsboro. And, when I change it on things I order through the mail, I get it to change to Long Neck w/o difficulty. Which is good because the name of my street exists in Millsboro and Long Neck. You can't make this stuff up.
Thank you for getting to the bottom of this vexing mystery. I live in Franklin too... And I refuse to go along with the meaningless addition of North to our Town's fine name!
I happen to live in the northern part of town and my first assumption was that this is why North was inserted to the west of Franklin. It's as obvious as it is wrong, apparently.
Then, for the longest time, I pondered if North Franklin was a borough or village within Franklin, like Baltic is to Sprague, Mystic to Groton, or Gurleyville to Mansfield. I was almost willing to accept this notion.
However, I am not satisfied to learn that this boils down to a zip code snafu and that somehow, if the post office didn't put North in front of Franklin, our mail would find itself in some remote midwestern town also named after Benjamin.
Nope, not satisfied at all. I was hoping to hear a romantic tale about a family feud in the 1800s, whereby one half of the family moved to North Franklin and the other half stayed put. I could live with that story forever even not knowing exactly where the line was drawn.
Maura, truth be told, and I take it as a "win", I was able to convince DMV to ink Franklin on my driver's license despite the fact that our ZIP code reverts to North Franklin. I expected a bit of an argument when I said, point to North Franklin on a map, please. DMV is like honey badger, ya know, doesn't give a sh*t (about the Post Office). :-)