Eagle Landing is a community on Alligator Road in Effingham, South Carolina, in Florence County. It was the first project with Lowe 5 Hunters Ridge LLC, and it carries the largest box count Mitchell Metals has covered.

Twenty-two cluster box units is a serious mail center. In a single row it would run close to eighty feet and would not sit on any ordinary island. Folded back-to-back it comes in at just over forty feet, on one pad.

What changes at this size

Past about fifteen boxes a mail center stops being a piece of site furniture and starts being a small building. The pad is a real concrete pour, the roof is a real span, and the whole thing becomes a fixed point in the community’s layout — which is an argument for putting it in early, while there is still room to work around it.

The 6×6 posts and beams are not optional at this length. A forty-foot roof carrying two banks of boxes needs the section both for the load and for proportion: a lighter profile would hold it up and look undersized doing so.

Cover only, boxes by others

Unlike most projects in this set, Eagle Landing was a cover-only scope — Mitchell Metals fabricated and installed the canopy, with the cluster box units supplied separately. The photographs here show the structure complete on its pad before the units went in, which is an unusually clear look at the frame itself.

The frame is extruded aluminum, so nothing rusts. It is engineered to ASCE 7-16 wind and snow loads and designed to meet ADA and IBC requirements, with the layout following the USPS Builders/Developers Guide for cluster box placement and approach.