Post Office of the Week #13

Baraboo, Wisconsin 53913

photographed September 2025

When white folks arrived at the site that’s now Baraboo in the late 1830s, they found well-established farm fields and well-trod trails at a breathtakingly beautiful site among the wooded hills along the Baraboo River near its sandy-soiled confluence with the Ouisconsing River (that’s “Wisconsin” to us). They also found folks already living and working there who told them to kindly fuck all the way off. Which they did at first. Until they didn’t. A very Wisconsin story.

Baraboo was named for the river it grew up along, which itself was named after… possibly an 18th Century French fur trader dude? I like to imagine that “Baraboo” is a Sauk or Kickapoo bastardization of a French name in the same way that Wisconsin is an English-by-way-of-French bastardization of Algonquian words. Now the seat of Sauk County, this city of 12,000 is a popular tourist destination, given its proximity to Devil’s Lake State Park, and its history as the home of the Ringling Brothers Circus. The highway overpasses around Baraboo are decorated with masonry images of elephants on parade, and downtown Baraboo boasts a great number of historic buildings, the county courthouse central among them. The Baraboo Range (or the Baraboo Hills) have been the subject of extensive study by geologists around the world, and the pink and purple stone – called Baraboo quartzite - that people climb around at Devil’s Lake was formed almost 2 billion years ago. In a shack along the Wisconsin River near Baraboo, Aldo Leopold observed and wrote about this land and the changing of its seasons in his Sand County Almanac.

What I love about Baraboo’s post office, located near the namesake river a couple blocks removed from the downtown historic district, is how completely oblivious its architecture is to local flavor, history, character, all of which Baraboo boasts in abundance. This is true of a lot of post offices, especially those built during the post office boom of the 1960s (indeed, there was a boom in post office construction in the 1960s). This was by design. "They’re federal government buildings, after all," went the thinking. But in its big, unabashed functionality, Baraboo’s post office is practically industrial, its "modern" plainness easily upstaged by the shiny restored 1950s-vintage Broadway Diner (decent breakfast, nothing special) right across the street. It could just as easily be a paint store or the offices of a plumbing contractor. It’s not an ugly building, but it makes no concessions to “pretty” or “unique” or “special”, and (Oh! Oh-oh!) that’s what make it beautiful. (My apologies for planting that One Direction song in your head.)

post office history

Post Office of the Week: Baraboo, Wisconsin 53913