Toni Stewart is a familiar face to anyone who frequents the Waterville Valley Post Office. As the Postal Manager — a title she strongly prefers over “postmistress” — Toni is more than a purveyor of stamps and packages. She’s a central hub of community life, a keeper of secrets, and a dedicated advocate for the valley she now calls home. As listeners discover in this episode of Waterville Unwrapped, Toni’s path to this tranquil mountain town was anything but ordinary.
Her journey began far from the White Mountains, rooted in a career that sounds straight out of a detective novel. Toni served in the Air Force security forces before spending thirteen years as a private investigator working out of Norristown, Pennsylvania — with most of her cases taking her into the five boroughs of New York, Washington, D.C., and all over Philadelphia and New Jersey. She handled everything from workers’ compensation and contract disputes to sensitive domestic cases. “You have to be whatever that moment calls for,” she explains, describing how her role as one of the firm’s few women often meant going undercover in domestic investigations.
The conversation takes a gripping turn as Toni recounts harrowing experiences from those years. She describes a terrifying surveillance morning in the Badlands section of Philadelphia — parked outside a squatter’s house, watching a man walk a woman out at gunpoint, while drug activity swirled around her Jeep and strangers surrounded the vehicle. She also recounts being shot at in Atlantic City while trying to document where a student lived for a school district residency case — and driving back to the same neighborhood afterward to get the footage she still needed. “I started doing stupid things like that,” she reflects. The final straw came on Easter Sunday, when a case she was working ended with a man suffering a fatal heart attack in his driveway. “I think I was a slave to my job,” she says.
Finding Peace in the Mountains
It was a love of hiking that first drew Toni to New Hampshire. She became obsessed with the White Mountains and, after reading Grace Bean’s The Town at the End of the Road, set her sights on Waterville Valley specifically. At 38, she told enough people she’d live in New Hampshire by 40 that she felt she had no choice but to follow through. Her first purchase was a 600-square-foot house — a “nightmare,” she laughs, with a septic system that turned out to be a fifty-gallon drum barrel — that she bought for $29,000 cash.
Her neighbor at the time ran central reservations for the resort and pointed her toward Waterville Valley Resort. Toni ended up running the season pass office starting around 2013, then worked with a regional attractions company and did a mail route for the post office — until New Hampshire winters at minus-17 degrees with no heat in the vehicle convinced her that wasn’t a long-term plan. When the town’s HR contact mentioned that the previous postal manager was getting ready to retire, Toni jumped at the interview. The requirements were clear: love of dogs, willingness to care for elderly residents, and a commitment to going above and beyond for the people of Waterville Valley. “I had to want to drive packages to people’s houses, do whatever you could do to make life for the people here easier,” Toni recalls. It was a perfect fit. She started in 2022 and, alongside her colleague Kat — who shares the same May 9th hire anniversary — aims to run the post office for a very long time.
The Post Office: A Community’s Heartbeat
For Toni, the Waterville Valley Post Office is unlike any other she’s encountered. “It is the central location for really everything that’s going on in town,” she says — businesses opening and closing, injuries, illnesses, passings. Her PI training in listening serves her well. She watches every Planning Board and Select Board meeting, takes notes, and credits that habit to Ray, a longtime resident and passionate fly fisherman who would come in daily and ask, “So what’s going on in town today?” Ray also taught Toni to fly fish — something she says changed her in ways hiking alone hadn’t. “It taught me how to slow down and just really enjoy the moment.” Ray wrote a book about fly fishing, and Toni notes that the cover features him standing in Corcoran Pond.
Beyond the mail, Toni sees her role as a rumor-squasher and community connector. “There’s only so many rumors I can squash in a day,” she says with a laugh, but she takes it seriously — directing people to town hall, reaching out to town staff, and keeping lines of communication open at a time when she sees real tension between the town, residents, and the resort.
That mission is matched by an almost fierce commitment to keeping the post office open at all. Toni reveals that at one point in her four years on the job, they came within twenty-four hours of closing. “I go to bed every night thinking I have to do my due diligence every day to make sure that post office doesn’t close,” she says.
More Than a Full Plate
If all that weren’t enough, Toni was recently sworn in as Deputy Tax Collector, won an unexpected three-year seat on the Thornton Planning Board through a write-in campaign under her official name, Antonia — a race she originally entered for a one-year alternate position — and is working toward her real estate license. She also makes wood-burned signs from recycled pallets, and she suspects her work hangs in quite a few Waterville Valley condos and ski houses. “I know that my work is in a bunch of these houses,” she says.
The episode is filled with warmth and humor — from the “dog of the month” reveal in the Wig Wag (a duo who spent the winter living on a boat, one of them swimming with manatees) to the origin story of “Brodie’s Bench,” a recycled plastic bench Toni rescued from the pickleball courts and installed in the post office after it was earned through a plastic bag collection program that a community member organized. Toni has a backup bench sanded and ready at home, just in case anyone comes to reclaim it.
Toni’s warmth, dry humor, and deep-seated love for Waterville Valley shine through every exchange. For anyone who’s ever wondered about the person behind the post office window, this episode is a genuine delight.