REA Sign

Sign reading 'Railway Express Agency'

An anonymous donor gave this old sign to the Society. It once hung above the door of the Cliffside Railroad office, which was just outside the post office entrance.

If you were expecting a shipment to arrive—or were shipping something—by Cliffside Railroad, this is where you’d come.

Note the bank of PO boxes inside the open door. Remember the old two-knob combination locks on the boxes?

That’s night watchman Roy Ramsey keying his clock. His rounds took him among the downtown buildings and inside and outside the mill. Nice work if you enjoyed walking.

Night watchman Roy Ramsey punches a clock outside the post office. He's standing beneath the Railway Express Agency sign. — Night watchman Roy Ramsey

“I was in the café the last night before Roy Ramsey retired. He and others came up with the fact that, in all the years he was on the job, Roy walked around the world twice. True or not, that is the number they came up with.” —Sam Davis

Applying a little arithmetic, and the knowledge that the earth’s circumference is 25,000 miles and that Roy walked 7.5 miles per night, we deduced that he indeed could have walked “twice around the earth”—in 26.5 years.

Thanks to Jim Ruppe for the sign photo. The Ramsey photo is from the Roy Lee Harris collection.