The Mashantucket Post Office The Mashantucket Pequot tribe is now the largest private employer in the state of Connecticut, and the boom in economic activity has given many tribal members career opportunities they'd never had before. “I always wanted to work in the Post Office, from the time I was a teenager in Atlantic City,” says Tribal Member Denise Porter, postmaster for the Mashantucket branch of the United States Postal Service.  “I was very excited when I got the job working for my own people.” In March 1993, the United States Postal Service opened a postal unit at Mashantucket.  The unit performed all the standard post office activities—selling stamps and money orders, providing national and international services, and maintaining post office boxes.  This was another service that [former Tribal Chairman] Skip Hayward wanted to provide to his people,” says Ms. Porter, “a place where they could walk out of their office and come right around the corner and do all their mailing of packages, buy a money order, get a single stamp, pick up their tax forms and also have a friendly conversation with the people that work there.  Skip Hayward wanted Mashantucket to be a real city, and we are.” For the Mashantucket Pequots, the name of the post office was a symbol of sovereign identity, but when the Post Office first opened, there was one thing missing: a Mashantucket address. All mail addressed to reservation residents and businesses had to be addressed not to Mashantucket but instead to the neighboring town of Ledyard, Connecticut. The Pequots believed that the post office should reflect the tribe’s identity as a sovereign nation.  And in February 1995, the U.S. Postal Service granted the Tribe’s request to have its own postal branch, designated Mashantucket, Connecticut, 06339-3180.  The designation was a victory for the Tribe—but not the end of the story.  The 06339 ZIP code was still shared by Ledyard and Mashantucket, and the Tribe was hopeful that as its volume of mail continued to increase, the U.S. Postal Service would grant Mashantucket a ZIP code all its own.  That final symbolic victory took place in the summer of 2002, when the Mashantucket Pequot reservation was granted its own ZIP code, 06338.