A postal village is generally a community, settlement, or hamlet (place) that has a post office and is designated as such by the postal administration. It may be seen as a rural neighbourhood.
This term seems to have been most common in the latter half of the 19th century when it was in common use in maps and gazetteers, variously abbreviated p.v., P.V., PV, and p-v. The term is generally used for a community within a township (rural region) as opposed to an incorporated village or other municipal government. By establishing a post office in a particular community it receives official recognition, often for the first time, for a name, an important step in the development of any community.
Famous quotes containing the words postal and/or village:
“This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)