“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.