By Dennis Sadowski
Of all the Lorain County communities that had a post office, but no longer do, perhaps the one with the most unusual name was Copopa.
Pronounced kah-poe-pa, the post office’s name was derived from the Native American name of the Rocky River – Copokah – that flowed through Columbia Township.
However, the word was incorrectly written as “Copopo” on documents in 1824 sent to postal officials in Washington seeking the establishment of a post office by Thomas G. Bronson, an early settler. He had operated a post office from his home beginning in 1817. In another misstep, someone in the Post Office Department misspelled the name yet again when approving the request. The error was never corrected.
Officially, the Copopa post office opened on June 23, 1824, with Bronson as postmaster.
Some of the facts surrounding the Copopa post office are murky. The Columbia Historical Society, headquartered at the Bronson House Museum on West River Road in Columbia Station, has worked to piece together the town’s history of postal services.
Blanche Nemeth, 82, society president, said the Copopa post office for decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries was located in a general store at the southwest corner of what is today’s Ohio routes 252 and 82. The post office closed Feb. 29, 1924, nearly 100 years after it opened.
Another post office, known as Columbia, had existed in the township prior to the opening of Copopa. Records compiled by Elyria postal historian Jack Standen, who died in 2022, indicate that a post office named Columbia opened on Jan. 1, 1810, when the township was part of Cuyahoga County.
That post office closed in 1818, but was reestablished Sept. 20, 1819, operating until an unknown date in 1823. By then Lorain County existed, at least on paper. Official government business did not start until May 24, 1824.
Columbia Township was settled by a group of 33 people from Waterbury, Connecticut, who arrived just as harsh winter weather hit in late 1807. The intrepid travelers journeyed for more than two months to the Western Reserve, some by water part of the way and some exclusively by land. They quickly built a couple of structures before Christmas to get through the winter.
As the community grew, the need for a post office became apparent. Thomas Munson was the postmaster of the Columbia post office. Then Bronson stepped in at Copopa.
For the record, a post office known as Columbia Station, opened July 26, 1852 about 1.5 miles northwest of Copopa after the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis Railway line was built. The post office there was in two different businesses on Station Road near Root Road over the years.
Bronson served as Copopa’s postmaster less than three years, leaving the post on March 26, 1827. The Copopa post office eventually relocated to a general store operated by the Bastard family, who emigrated from England.
The negative connotation of the family name led many folks to change their legal name to Churchward. But some kept their name including Robert L. Bastard Jr. and his wife Mary. The clan played an important role for many years in maintaining the Copopa post office.
Thomas C. Bastard was postmaster from 1845 to 1849. Others with the same surname, including Robert, served from late 1860 through at least the end of the 19th century and likely later.
Mail from Copopa survives, but most of it that I have seen dates from the 1880s through the early 1900s. Earlier mail seems to be rare.
A visually striking postmark was used during 1887 and 1888 at the tail end of a period when small post offices had to purchase their own canceling device from an outside vendor. The marking is a 32 mm double-circle circular date stamp that contains the town name at top and the name of the postmaster, R.L. Bastard Jr., below in a decorative font. A separate target “killer” was used to cancel the stamp.
Later postmarks were the standard issue style eventually provided by the Post Office Department with a simple font and month/day/year format.
By the time Copopa closed in 1924, most mail in the area was being handled by the Columbia Station post office. A modern post office was built in 1958 on Station Road just north of Royalton Road. Today the Columbia Station post office is located on Royalton Road.
Dennis Sadowski can be reached at sedowski.dennis@gmail.com.
