Janet Blackburn, Neville’s postmaster for 39 years, paid him no mind, wondering aloud: “Do you know what happened to the plaques on the war monument?”

Part of the town memorial to two dozen soldiers who died in the world wars, the brass plaques, Ms. Reid said with regret, had been badly damaged by a cleaning man using the wrong chemicals. Meanwhile, the door of the white clapboard building opened and in walked Norma Bowling, a retired nurse’s aide, carrying a plastic bag. “Here are the bell peppers I promised you,” she said, handing the gift to Ms. Blackburn.

In Neville, and in many towns around the country these days, homespun conversations over post office counters are often turning from the latest gossip to a worrisome, newly pressing issue: the United States Postal Service has warned 3,700 communities, many of them in rural areas, that it is considering shuttering their local offices over the next few months.

“I just wish that they would leave our post office alone,” Ms. Bowling said. “If I couldn’t come here to get my mail every morning, I’d feel a big part of me has died.”

Townspeople in places like Neville are fuming and fighting back, often writing letters to Washington and enlisting members of Congress. Many say their post offices — Neville’s was founded in 1816 — have served as the gathering spot and heart of the town for generations, and that the closings would force residents, many of them elderly, to drive several miles to another post office.

If Neville’s closes, the nearest one remaining would be in Moscow, four miles to the north. Other nearby towns, Higginsport and Chilo, immediately east of Neville, also face closings, prompting residents to ask why the Postal Service seems to be picking on these communities along the Ohio River. “You’re throwing the little people, the rural people, under the bus,” said Dan Burke, a marketing representative who goes to the Chilo post office once or twice a day to mail proposals to potential customers.

The Postal Service ran a deficit of nearly $10 billion in the fiscal year that just ended, with much of that stemming from health care and pension obligations and from e-mail driving down the volume of first-class mail. Insisting that they desperately need to cut costs, postal officials have called for ending Saturday delivery, laying off 120,000 workers, and shutting rural post offices like the one in Neville, a town with barely 100 people — down from 500 when it was a booming river town in the steamboat era. Periodic floods have driven away many residents.

Many here note that the people who would be hurt most by the closings — the rural elderly — often do not use computers or e-mail.

Susan Brennan, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, defended the proposed closings. “Regarding rural America, the fact is that our network of post offices was established decades ago to serve populations that in many, many cases moved on years ago,” she said. “The residents in these communities already go to neighboring towns to shop for food, go to the drugstore, purchase gas, go to the bank — they can take care of their postal needs there.” Postal authorities have also proposed installing branches in some retail stores, with Ms. Brennan suggesting that the move might buoy ailing small-town shopkeepers.

Inside Neville’s post office building, which was once a grocery store, the Postal Service’s notice of “possible closing or consolidation” remains tacked to the bulletin board. Citing a “declining workload,” the Postal Service letter noted that the branch’s “walk-in revenue” declined to $15,487 in fiscal 2010, down from $21,806 the previous year. A closing, it estimated, would yield savings of $347,126 over 10 years — almost all from eliminating Ms. Blackburn’s job.

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