People who live in cities can come to take the mail for granted.

Someone delivers letters and packages to their door every day, and if they want to mail something, they can just stick the outgoing letter on their mailbox. Often, there’s a mailbox at the corner, and every day someone will stop and pick up whatever is there and send it on its way.

In small towns like Arcola, though, it doesn’t work that way. Mail comes to the post office, not to people’s homes, and residents have to go there to pick it up. If they want to mail a letter, they take it to the post office.

Eventually, everyone comes to know the postmaster, and the postmaster knows just about everyone.

That’s why an apartment fire in Arcola has raised such a fuss. The fire broke out Dec. 18 on the second floor of a building that was built around 1902 and gradually added onto until 1912. The building has housed a bank, a hardware store and a pharmacy over the years, and most recently it held the offices of a heating company, several apartments – and Arcola’s post office.

The day the fire hit, residents helped salvage all the mail from the post office, but since then, the place has been closed. Residents who want to get their mail or who want to mail a letter or package now have to drive nine miles to the post office at Centennial Plaza off Goshen Road in Fort Wayne.

It’s not a strenuous drive, not a lot farther than many people in Fort Wayne drive to work or to shop. But in Arcola, it can be a hardship.

“For some, it’s very inconvenient,” said Postmaster Lane Buckner, who has run the place for nearly 17 years. “We have some customers who don’t drive” and others who are elderly who don’t like to have to drive far to get their mail.

“A lot of people aren’t mobile,” and they rely on people to get them to the post office. “It’s just another burden to place on friends and family.”

The problem is that no one has heard what is going to happen to the little post office, with its pressed tin ceiling and antique bank of post office boxes, each with its own combination.

“I believe all the customers would like to have it back,” Buckner said. And there are a lot of customers, from Arcola, Aboite and parts of Whitley County.

“We did a lot of international mail and express mail,” Bucker said, such as packages to people in the military, packages shipped by eBay sellers, missionaries mailing supplies to Africa and people mailing items to family members in Europe and Asia.

Now, all that has come to a halt, and the post office’s fate hangs in the balance.

“There are a lot of variables,” Buckner said. What can be done with the building? What will the insurance company do? What will engineers say about the building’s condition? Will it have to be brought up to code? How practical is it for the owner to make the repairs and improvements that might be needed? Is there anywhere else in Arcola to possibly put a post office?

“Also, the post office is trying to cut costs,” Buckner says, bringing up an ugly reality: Scratching one post office will definitely save money.

There is a plan to put in something called NDCDUs in the next few days, Buckner says. She doesn’t know what the letters stand for, but an NDCDU is a big metal bank of postal boxes that can be mounted wherever a spare plot of dirt can be found. They are used in some subdivisions.

That will at least take care of letters, but it’s not clear whether packages could be left in those boxes, and it still leaves residents with no way to mail a letter or package without driving to Fort Wayne.

It’s clear what the residents want, though. Wednesday afternoon, Buckner showed up at the shuttered office to secure some personal items and important papers. A resident, Debbie Meek, saw the door open and came in.

She said she’d called the post office in Fort Wayne, using a number on a sign in the window at the Arcola office. She got a recording, she said, and left a message:

“Our post office burned and it’s the heart of our town, and we want our heart back,” she said.