FIDELITY, Illinois (AP) — Among thousands of Valentine’s Day mailings that have come to this town over the years for the postmark fitting the holiday, the widow’s plea most pulled postmaster Peggy Ruyle’s heartstrings.Tucked in with a stamped, self-addressed envelope, woman’s note lamented losing her husband a year ago, six days after his 85th birthday and just months before the two would have marked 64 years as husband and wife.

“Among the flowers I will put on his grave” this month, the widow wrote, “I want to include this envelope stamped ‘Fidelity’.”

Ruyle said she has read the note a dozen times, and always has the same reaction.

“I choke up every time. I never got a letter this touching,” said Ruyle, 61, who has been postmaster for 13 years.

Few ever see the tiny outpost, population 115. It is little more than a collection of weathered trailer homes 35 miles north of St. Louis, and well off the beaten path. But people from around the world have somehow heard of Fidelity and its shack-like post office. It’s the only business in town.

Each year, Ruyle says, a couple of hundred Valentine’s Day mailings come her way from around the globe, from Maine to California and Ireland to Thailand. Fifty-three new arrivals one morning recently included return addresses from Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Florida.

Many requests include little notes simply asking Ruyle for the postmark. Some identify themselves as collectors special postmarks — Loveland, Colorado; Valentine, Texas; Kissimmee, Florida; Romeo, Michigan; and Juliet, Georgia, to name a few.

Connie Cooper recently made the 12-mile drive from the tiny town of Kane to get the Fidelity postmark on ten “save the date” notices for her daughter’s wedding in September.

It will not be long before Cooper brings in the mother lode to Ruyle — some 300 wedding invitations, all in need of the postmaster’s special attention.

“This is neat, unique. Not many people are blessed with the name Fidelity,” Cooper says.

By some accounts, a horse can be thanked for that. While researching the town’s origins, resident Audrey Bohannon found that a Tennessee group including brothers William and Joseph Russell passed through the area in 1829, prospecting land.

When Joseph Russell’s horse turned lame and could not get the man back to Tennessee for business, Samuel Simmons volunteered one of his horses.

“That’s true fidelity,” Russell apparently said to Simmons, who stayed behind and, with his family’s help, built a log cabin here the next year.

In 1850, the Russell brothers settled the town and eventually got it named Fidelity. The post office came four years later.

The town has seen better times, once boasting an Army barracks, grain elevator, several doctors and dentists, a blacksmith shop and grocery stores — all long gone.

“Unfortunately, it’s turning into a trailer town,” Bohannon says. “People die, people move away and things change.”

But, not the post office. Ruyle stamps each envelope by hand so the postmark will not smudge, and sets it aside to dry before moving onto the next.

“That’s just a small thing, to make somebody happy for just a couple of minutes,” Ruyle said. “It’s worth it.”