"Some people all around the area have Knoxville addresses and are being told they live in Knoxville, which is so far from the truth that it's pitiful," Haines said. "It steals your identity, really, and we don't want our identity stolen."
To this identity, Yourtee and his daily trek to the post office are critical.
Yourtee lives atop a hill, in a stone house that evolved from a cabin built there in the mid-1700s by his great-great-grandfather, Henry Boteler, the area's first white settler, and has been passed down within the Boteler and Yourtee families.
The town was named for its founder, John Brown, who in 1824 built a house on land his family purchased from the Botelers, according to a Brown family history titled "The Curtain Falls," by William C. Ridenour. Brown later established beside the road a tannery and post office, where he was appointed postmaster.
Control of the post office was passed down within the Brown family for more than a century, with only a short break during the Cleveland administration, Yourtee said. When John Brown's grandson, the childless George T. Brown, retired from his job in 1940, a Morning Herald article called it the end of the nation's oldest family postmastership.
When George Brown's unmarried sister, Sarah Ellen, died in 1974, the town said goodbye to its last resident to bear the founder's name.
But as the current postmaster, Mary Ellen Younkins, 53, will tell you, the Brownsville legacy is far from dead. The post office is still for the most part a one-person, family-oriented operation - she took over the position formerly held by her mother and aunt in 1979, runs the post office out of the front of her aunt Helen's house and enlists the help of her cousin's wife, Barbara Anders, who lives next door. It's also still the heart of the town.
"It's about the only point in town now really to meet people, other than the churches, and one of the rites of passage, I guess, is when you're finally old enough that your folks send you down to get the mail," Younkins said.
It's also the place where the town's stories change hands. When Younkins gets letters from children doing school projects on town histories, she said, she directs them to Yourtee. He can tell them about his grandfather, a doctor who practiced medicine horse-and-buggy style, charging a dollar a visit, or his grandmother's sister, who cared for a wounded Union army captain.
