insidenova.com: After a long hard fought battle, the Town of Washington, Virginia, has preserved its centuries-old post office.

Following a 35-minute presentation to Washington Mayor Fred Catlin, former Mayor John Fox Sullivan, and other town officials, the Architectural Review Board gave unanimous thumbs-up to a project that will see a new brick veneer post office constructed within town boundaries along Leggett Lane.

“An ‘endless’ process which finally has ‘ended’ with the decision to stay in town,” remarked a visibly pleased Sullivan after seeing the architectural drawings for the first time….

It was two years ago that the post office announced it was leaving its current Main Street location and almost a year since it was revealed by a third party that it would leave the historic town altogether for a new highway location midway between Washington and Sperryville.

To say the town was caught off guard by the abrupt change in strategy — and lack of communication — by postal officials would be an understatement. Catlin and Sullivan called postal officials’ site selection process “opaque and non-transparent,” detecting “behind-the-scenes-machinations” they couldn’t understand.

The Rappahannock News later discovered that a top U.S. Postal Board official  in Washington, D.C. had abruptly weighed in on the site selection, prompted by an influential Rappahannock resident —  a former chairman of the U.S. Postal Service’s governing body [James Miller] — who personally wanted a new highway location two miles south of the town.  Read more.  (For more background, see this earlier article.)