I've walked on these tracks a lot growing up in the little southwestern Minnesota town of Russell.

Walking along, picking up treasures of loose rail spikes and date nails.

And I threw rocks off the trestle into the river that ran through my grandpa's property.

My family even ice skated under that trestle.

Actually, that track and railroads have always been a part of my life.

My whole family’s.

My grandpa, my great grandpa.

Both were employed by the railroad.

And my father worked for the railroad, too.

He was a depot agent.

He worked for the Great Northern Railway, which later became the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

Dad began his work as an agent.

In the mid 40s.

He intended telegraphy school and then worked at multiple stations during his career.

He started in Iowa, but served most of his agent duties in southwestern and central Minnesota.

So our daily lives always had some connection to the railroad.

In fact,our home was even located next to the tracks.

That's my older brother and sister in our yard, watching the steam train go by.

Many family vacations were courtesy of the railroad too, riding the Empire Building out to Seattle, Glacier National Park, or areas out East.

But the part of the railroad experience the family can relate to the most was the depot,where dad worked.

We spent a lot of time there, stopping in after school until mom got home from work.

And in the summer it was just a short bike ride from home.

I'd play with the office supplies, get teased by the rail crews that stopped by, or I just waited, to see those trains go by.

Oh, and the sensory memories of that building, like stale cigarette and cigar smoke throughout the waiting room.

That heavy odor of creosote coming from the warehouse.

And the sounds.

The rumble of the train as they pass the depot only a few feet away.

And the clicking, as my father tapped out code and the telegraph key.

My dad retired in the late 1980s.

Most of the depots that he had worked, at have disappeared, as have others.

New technology and procedures changed.

Rail service was reduced.

The services of the depot were no longer needed.

It really wasn't until I was older did I realize how vital the depot was to the railroads operation and its service to the community.

Even in retirement, my father loved to talk about his career, to introduce others to the sound of the Telegraph, to let them know what he did in that important little building, to let them know that the depot's history should not be forgotten.

So, what has happened to them?

Those buildings that at one time were the hub of the community.

What has happened to them after those trains came by, for the last stop?

The depot was the hub.

I mean, that's where things happened, If you didn't have a depot, your town kind of dried up.

Go down to the depot, see the passenger train comes in, see what's going on.

Who's coming into town today?

That was a big deal.

People like to go down to the depot and watch the trains.

-Train whistle- So in the 1850s and 1860s, the only way you could get around Minnesota was either on a horse, on a mule, or by ship, boat,on the waterways.

There wasn't any other way to get around.

And with the advent of railroads actually starting back in the 1830s, coming to Minnesota in 1862, the first line was between what today is Minneapolis and Saint Paul, It just was such an advantage over the other modes of transportation.

At one time, the railroads were like the dot coms of a few years ago.

Everybody had a dot com, everybody wanted a dot com.

Every little community wanted the dot com to locate in their town.

The railroad was the superhighway of the day.

When the steam locomotive appeared and railroads appeared, west of the Mississippi, everybody knew this was the next big thing in transportation.

After 1870, things go pretty well crazy in this state.

1870s, 80s.

There are expansions of lines all over the place.

Eventually, of course, they wanted to get to the Dakotas because of all the AG out there.

And they also connect with the Red River in Fargo and that area.

So there was kind of a natural progression out from the Twin Cities area, and to the northwest and up in the area where Bemidji is today.

If you look at the road map today, you'll see that in every 25 or 30 miles, there's a community along this stretch of flat land in the Dakotas.

Now, the reason that is, is because back in the day, A 440 steam locomotive, the American Standard, could go about 25,30 miles before it had to stop and get water.

There was plenty of fuel, but water to make steam, because they were so inefficient back in the day, they could only go 25,30 miles and they had to stop and get water.

And wherever that train stopped, people got on, people got off and commerce began.

And that's why you see all these little towns, 25 to 30 miles apart, along old major rail lines that are now paralleled by highways.

So it was the railroad that determined where those population centers would be.

And of course, to stop in a little town, well you had have a depot.

A town, basically had to have a storefront for the railroad.

That's how I view depots.

It's their business center on a local basis.

the depot was the place where the train stopped.

It was a place where people got off.

It was a place where, supplies that had been shipped, were taken off the train and put in a warehouse.

And similarly, items that were in the freight house that were going somewhere else, the train was going, would get loaded back on, passengers for points ahead on the line, would get loaded on and away they’d go.

-Train whistle- They were also used as control points for trains.

For the operation of trains.

The depots were, linked together, usually by telegraph.

And you had to have a way to move the trains along the railroad without hitting each other.

So if you had a depot every few miles, that they could telegraph instructions, called train orders, to the depot agent, they would come from the dispatcher of the dispatcher of the railroad, -Telegraph key- Typical depot, average sized town, might have 4 or 5 employees at it.

A smaller depot may not even be open 24 hours a day.

There would be a depot agent and he was in charge.

Some railways called them the station agent.

Others called in the station master.

The station master was the person who had ultimate responsibility for everything that the railroad did in this town and in this area.

If it was a 24 hour station, you'd have three shifts.

Sometimes they had a clerk that would also work with them.

A larger community, say like Duluth and the Union depot here, that's going to have offices, it's going to have clerks, it's going to have dispatchers.

It's going to have a management, it's going to have a freight entity.

Of course the railroads, even today of course, now it's mostly computerized.

But they were huge into paperwork.

They had armies and armies of clerks.

Because picture a railroad that's thousand of miles long, with thousands of shipments.

How do you track all that?

And the railroads were the ones that actually came up with, in essence, bureaucracy.

And of course, the depot agent was one of the backbones of that system In an agriculture area, they probably had a local elevator there.

And so they would be serving that elevator and they would, that elevator might come in or call and say, we expect to have our grain bins, you know, they're filling up.

We need 25 grain hoppers, by next week.

and then the depot agent would get a hold of the railroad, the powers that be, and say, all right, we need 25 cars in Clara City, next week for the elevator.

A train order was a very thin sheet of paper, that you used carbon paper, and there was usually 2 or 3 copies.

And what would happen is the dispatcher would either telephone or telegraph to, they called them the operator in the depot.

Agent.

Operator.

And it would be an instruction from the dispatcher about the movement of trains.

Here's a sample, actually, from Clara City of a Burlington Northern train order.

And for example, here it writes,Extra 6123 West take siding, meet extra 1528 East at Hanley Falls.

Order number 639.

The previous order is annulled.

And that was enable those trains to meet on a single track line.

So that would be typed or written up and everything was in duplicate.

there was usually a what they called a train order signal, which was a big semaphore like signal in front of the depot, Sometimes had lights, mostly with semaphor and he could pull a handle and put that semaphore down, which would indicate that there's orders for that train.

He could even stop the train with that semaphore, but generally put it at a position that as the train came, they could look down the track, see the semaphore in position, knew that they were going to have train orders to pick up there.

And then what would happen is the operator would, make several copies of that order, and then he would put it in what's called a train order hoop, and it would go outside.

And as the train pass by, the, engineer or fireman would lean out of the locomotive and grab the order, and the conductor in the caboose would also grab an order.

So there was duplicate copies so that they both knew what was happening, so that to prevent the two trains from running into each other.

You’d have the train orders, you'd have way bills, you'd have selling tickets if there was passenger trains, you had, less than cargo, they call it LCL freight to handle.

So a train might come in, the baggage car would open up.

They'd have that order from Sears, you'd haul it into the baggage room.

Then when the you notify the person at the area that that shipment had arrived, that's another duty.

They would come down.

You'd have to do the paperwork to hand it over to them, so they, they could be quite busy.

Among other duties of the station master was, staffing the telegraph in the early days.

When telegraphy came through, it was, a breakthrough in communication as much as the train was a breakthrough in transportation.

you could be self-taught or you could go to classes and, and telegraphy was very interesting because it was one of the first jobs on the railroad, that women could do.

Here's the telegraph setup.

And it has been unchanged for, 100 years or so.

There have been gradual improvements, but the basic idea is, you can send a pulse across a copper wire and it can either be, have a short space in between or a long space.

So the parts of the telegraph, this is the key.

This is the sounder.

This is where the clicks are coming from.

The Prince Albert tobacco can was a, a widely used, resonator.

Tucked in the sounder here, as this part of the telegraph is known, it would help, make the sound from the sounder, loud enough to be heard.

Quite, quite a distance.

-Telegraph key- They would also, because they were all telegrapher, they could be Western Union agents and they would deliver telegrams There are two different kinds of telegrams.

There was a postal telegram, which could be sent through the railway.

Obviously there was also a Western Union, which had a telegraph office.

If there was a community big enough, then the telegraph, like Western Union, would have their own office, their own telegrapher, and their lines, they had their own lines.

The railroads typically brought the newspapers.

So if you had seen the Minneapolis Star, the way that it got to Bemidji was by train.

And it would come out of the baggage car and be distributed and went out to the town to be delivered.

So, and of course, you had a telegraph operator and all these depots.

So if some momentous event happened, it came in first to the telegraph operator who could say, you know, President Garfield has been shot.

How would you know that otherwise?

Unless it came through the Telegraph operator?

Because, you know, you didn't have Instagram.

You want to go somewhere?

Where do you buy your ticket?

You buy your ticket at the depot.

You want to, You want your mail.

You don't necessarily get it at the depot, but it is shipped via the depot, to the local post office.

Every railroad had, its own, unique design of a depot.

It also depended on how much money either the local community could contribute to a depot or that the railroad, you know, could afford to build.

This community is this big.

It gets that standard construction depot.

Well, this one's bigger.

It gets that model depot.

And that was a way for them to kind of standardize, the buildings that they were constructing.

And that made it easier to service those buildings.

You know, in a tiny town, you didn't generally need much of a depot, but for example, the Clearbrook and Remer and places like that, because they were in the middle of no place and were very small, you had to have that quarters in the depot.

So the depot became bigger simply because they had to provide living quarters for that person, because it was so isolated.

And then, of course, there were the mega depots, and those were built for a completely different reason.

Those are built to show a community, a large one, just how rich and powerful the railroad was, so they all built depots to outdo each other.

And that's how you got these incredible depots.

It's keeping up with the Joneses to a large degree.

Railroading, for better or for worse, was generally a business.

It wasn't nostalgia.

They weren't doing that just to have fun.

They were there to turn a buck.

All airports are a little different, but, yet they all have the same thing.

Well, same thing had to be true for the railroads.

You were going to a station you may never have been to before.

And you need to know how to navigate that station.

So the best example is let's take a little town.

The little town depot would have an office on the ground floor in the middle.

That's that little bulge out window.

And typically in that bay, that's where the telegraph key was and the telephone.

By leaning slightly forward at the bay window, the station master could look down the tracks and could look up the tracks and could see just about everything that was going on on that side of the depot.

Then they might have a window where they could sell tickets, a rack with all the tickets, to the various destinations that he could work off of.

And then on one side, of course, you had the men's waiting room, and on the other side you had the women's waiting room.

And each with its own separate facilities.

The freight area sometimes was attached In the larger depots, though, the freight house sometimes was located separately away from, that that was another stop Generally the layout was, you know, waiting room, baggage room, freight room, operators area, every depot, bay window generally.

Early depots were basically built of wooden frame construction.

I know a lot of cases.

In second round, the depots are built of brick.

They're much more ornate structures.

Within 15 to 20 years, it's very common for local citizens to start raising an uproar about, hey, we need a new depot.

We're tired of this shed, this chicken coop, this rookery, whatever.

It's been standing for a decade and a half.

Aren't we more important than the worthless little depot you're making us use now?

The railroad viewed the railroad depot or its depots as, a reflection of the importance of the city also.

With the advent of the automobile, and especially the Good Roads movement, there was a thing in the 20s and 30s to build better roads.

And the government got involved in building roads.

And as they got into more and more rural areas, it took away freight business because it went to truck, it took away passenger business because it went to car.

And for the most part, by the 1870s, they're kicking back and doing a whole lot.

And I'll nothing on some of those depots.

There's one train up and one train back a day.

And on a hot day, there's four.

So, they're running out of work, essentially.

When business drops, one of the first things that a railroad will do is start slashing its own wrists.

And also known as taking out the lower people on the scale, pay wise.

Reducing Section Men were generally first.

Agents and depots were often consolidated.

Sometimes what they did was they would start particularly in these rural areas.

They'd had mobile agents instead of, they might have an agent in Bemidji, and he would drive out to the communities where they had the depot, and he would handle the work there from basically a van.

And then the final conclusion was when you were an able to give train orders by radio.

That finished off the few remaining depots that there were.

By the time the depot is no longer being used, the railroad sees it as an ornament that it can no longer afford.

It comes down to, we don't want to pay taxes on this thing.

We have no real use for it.

And to some degree, and may even be a case of, do we want to spend the money to have it removed, or just let it sit and let it collapse and then haul it away?

Different communities did different things with their depots.

The real reason was you could get them for dirt cheap.

They'll give it to you.

You can have this depot.

It's yours.

And just take it.

Problem is it's on railroad property.

You have to move it.

So that's a lot of what led to the tearing down of these places was the railroads wanted to get rid of it, but they didn't want the liability of it still, on their property.

Oftentimes they'll offer it to the community first and say, would you like to have this depot?

You want to preserve it?

You have to pay to preserve it.

So you'll see a great many depots preserved in Minnesota because of that.

A small depot might be offered for sale and, many times farmers and folks would move a depot on to their property and reuse it.

They might use it for a storage shed.

They might use it for a house.

And then if there were a large brick depot, those are usually outlast most of the other ones because they're very expensive to tear down.

And they make great museums and things for communities.

So the railroads were, again, very good about maybe selling it to the community or donating it to the community so it could be reused.

4321.

I used to be on, Channel Two, so, I remember the voice checks.

All right.

Well, let’s start with the book.

Shadows of Time.

It's, the catalog of the, surviving, railroad depots in Minnesota.

Of course, I couldn't put them all on my book, so I had put a priority on them.

If you look at the cover of the book, there's a picture of the, Madelia, Minnesota depot.

If it wasn't for that depot, I wouldn't be here.

My mother arrived at the depot on the orphan train back in 1910.

Well, the depots are rapidly disappearing, like barns and some of the other structures in Minnesota.

And so I'm trying to preserve interest in it.

And, appreciation of how important railroads were and the depots in Minnesota, both through, growth of immigration and, economics and so forth.

But just the historical nature of it to preserve the the old.

Actually, once I started, probably five years, I traveled, 7000 miles throughout the state, went to every county I did prioritize which ones I put in my book.

Number one, if they're on the National Register.

Because that tells me it's important.

Second, I wanted to get one from, each county.

I think that there was ten counties that never had a depot.

The third was when they're put to use as a museum.

And then after that would be a commercial house, ah or, a commercial business or, residence.

I try to put some story with these depot to make it, humanize that Wadena one, depot.

I think in the early 1900s, they had a kind of an old depot.

I remember which line it was on, and they wanted the new one, new depot, but they were constantly, said, you can't have it.

I don't know, James Hill or someone.

So strangely, there was a fire in the depot.

Okay, so the fire department goes out, the Wadena Fire Department, and the citizens of Wadena came and they stood on the hoses so they couldn’t put out the fire.

So eventually Wadena got their brand new depot.

By hook or crook.

But they were really hubs of human drama.

You know, families were united there.

Soldiers came home from the war, immigrants arrived.

So, they had both a human and a commercial aspect to them.

Well, we talk about cathedrals or, monuments?

They're living history and their past history.

So I think that's why they're important.

Anything that's not going to be there, it makes you want to have record it and have images of it.

For the people to remember it by.

And my father worked in the Jackson Street shops, which was one of the shop facilities the Great Northern Railroad had in the Twin Cities.

I thought it was great years ago when I was a little kid, they still had a lot of depots, and you could stop and visit with a depot agent.

It led to me, later in the 60s when I’d drive around with my dad, so I'd tag along and take snapshots whenever I saw a depot.

That was a basis of material to do sketches because the times I've done the sketching, most of these buildings are either gone or moved somewhere or changed so they don't look anything like they did in the days when there were trains and more things going on at them.

That's what started my interest in this.

And, but then I also the, the art thing strikes me too, like I don't know, certain images, just they show the building and they, you've got like, it looks like the track going to some unknown locations in the distance.

I'll take and do a rough sketch in pencil with the, you know, image that I'm drawing.

And then what I do from there is I take my technical pen, which is filled with ink.

Basically am going over a lot of the lines that I've, you know, roughly sketched in here.

But then I'm adding in a lot of detail as I go, I know railroad guys love that I put all the details that were on the building years ago.

There's enough young people with an interest in the past and history.

Because these have been gone so long, there's a lot of people that probably weren't even born when these were around, but they're kind of fascinated with what was in their town and that.

Guess I'm interested just because it's, vanished way of life.

And it's kind of fun to record the way things were.

The lucky points in my book are those towns that had enough foresight to preserve their depots.

To step in before the railroad lambasted them and hauled them away.

There are a number of absolute classic depots in Minnesota that still exist.

Here the railroad came in 1873.

From here on north, there were no real paved roads.

And the only travel you could do would be by the Mississippi and steamboats.

And so the railroad thought, well this would be a good spot to make a stop, because they could load stuff on to the steamboats and send it on its way.

This wasn't the first depot they built.

And it was an old wooden structure and it was built in 1873.

It was put in use, until about 1910.

1911.

Then the town had grown enough that the merchants in town decided, we should really have a nice depot here.

And the railroad came and looked at the old depot and said, yes, you need you know, we feel you could use a new depot.

But then during that time, the railroad had a change of heart.

Northern Pacific decided they were going to come in and remodel the old one.

Then Northern Pacific finally came in and said, all right, we're going to build you a brand new depot.

Everybody got, okay, here we go.

Then about a year later, they changed their mind again That prompted a group of businessmen to meet with the, heads of the railroad here.

As I read the account of the meeting, it was quite heated.

But the end result was they were going to get a new depot.

And then I think February 1st, 1916 is when they officially opened it for business.

They spared no expense when they built this place.

Used the finest woodwork.

At one time, the floors in here were all polished, well, it's not marble, but terrazzo, which would look, you know, quite similar to polished marble.

The tile on the wall around is by Tiffany and Company.

Another interesting feature, that bench over there.

It's not a very comfortable bench to sit it.

If you sit in it, it seems like it’s just not right.

the reason they did that was to keep the vagrants from coming in off the trains and sleeping on the benches.

They did that on purpose.

If you go to the outside of the building, you'll see black railings.

And they were there to keep the freight carts from banging into the building, but they're all covered with spikes on top.

That so the panhandlers couldn't sit on them and panhandle when the trains came in.

They tried to think of everything.

Passenger travel here ceased in 1969.

Then they felt there was no need for these depots anymore.

At that time, the local historical society stepped up and said, well, if you're going to tear it down anyway, can we just have?

And the railroad awarded it to the historical Society with the stipulation that it be used for public use.

So we've turned it into a small museum.

We don't have a lot of room in here.

We strived to kind of keep this one nice and open, so people get the feel of what it's like to walk into, one these old buildings.

The floor layout of this is, we have a main waiting area here.

And then there was one wing on that end which housed the women's lounge.

We've turned the women's lounge into a county, records resource center.

then there was another wing on the other end which housed freight room and the ticket rooms and of course the men's lounge.

I have to say virtually every visitor that steps through the door that hasn't been in here, they're just, they look around and it's like, well, wow, you know, this is really nice in here.

Well, yes, it was.

Everything was top notch at the time.

It's been here, what, since 1916, in the same spot.

Everybody that's a grown up here's got used to seeing it.

And if we're gone, it would really be noticed.

This is the former Great Northern depot.

It was built in 1910.

It was the last major building that James J. Hill was involved in.

Jim Hill died in 1916.

When the Soo Line had come in, they had a freight depot as well as Northern Pacific had a freight depot, but they wanted to combine their passenger depots.

The one across the street is called a Union depot because there was two railroads in there.

And at that time the Great Northern had a wooden depot, and Jim Hill had a pretty good sized ego.

He did not want to be outdone by these two little railroads.

So, that's when this was built.

And it opened to the public about 1912.

This is a well designed depot as everybody knows.

So a mail was on the furthest west.

The bathroom facilities were kind of in the middle.

You see those windows, that's where you bought your tickets to go on the train.

And then immediately to the west, East of there would have been the women's passenger area.

And then as you went down the ramp, that was the Railroad Express agency right there.

So, if you came in and picked up a package that's where you would pick that up.

Jim Hill was pretty clever.

If you drive down Minnesota Avenue and look straight ahead.

What do you see?

The depot.

Clever.

The big merger that took place that affected this area was the Burlington Northern, which took the Great Northern and Northern Pacific.

And when they consolidated, that's when they start streamlining things and getting rid of liabilities and closing buildings.

And,when they closed buildings, this became a liability.

And we had Roger Mackenroth, who was a road master here, and he was instrumental in saving this building.

He got the marching orders to demolish this building.

It was on his pile of papers, And he kept putting that paper on the bottom.

At that time we had some real key players that were on our board, different businessmen that were big parts of the community.

We had a mayor at that time that wanted to save the building.

We could get a grant from the state of Minnesota, but we had to match it.

we got a chunk of money out of the county to donate.

The city of Bemidji donated some, equal amount.

And we had a huge fundraiser.

Burlington Northern had already given us the building.

But we needed to do some work.

So a few people behind the scenes paid for a new roof on there.

That was before the grant, unsung heroes, you know, It’s just, just the way it goes, In about 2000.

And we had some real challenges there.

The low bidder gets the job.

That does is necessary.

mean that's a good thing.

That low bidder got the job and walked away.

But it was bonded.

And so the bonding company had to hire another company to finish the project.

So, that was, I guess I would say that was the unique part of this one.

A lot of us became involved in trying to save this building.

It's part of our history, you know.

You know, how do we look in the future, if we don't remember our past?

In 1894, a new railroad was building tracks from Brainerd to this area at Hubert Lake.

And the railroad that constructed that was the Brainerd and Northern Minnesota Railroad.

Immediately in 1894, Hubert Station was designated as the third of three stops out of Brainerd.

So Hubert's station was established as a loading spot for logs, and then the logs were transported, into Brainerd.

Carl Zapffe was a local historian and did tons and tons of research, he has suggested that the first depot was constructed in 1911.

And the depot was constructed, on the south side of the tracks, tracks being between Hubert Lake and Upper Fishtrap Lake.

The depot was built and remains today as a one story structure with a hip roof.

It's divided into two parts.

There's an enclosed freight house, and there are three bays, each ten feet wide.

An open air waiting area for passengers.

The size of the structure was relatively small.

It was only 12.5ft wide and 32.5ft in length.

I have read that there were potentially up to six other depots, designed similar to this one in Minnesota.

But as far as anyone can find, this is the only one that remains, which makes it really, really special.

Train traffic to the area started up slowly after the depot was built, but began to accelerate in the 20s and 30s and 40s.

It was busy here.

There are passengers coming for the cottages, vacationers arriving to go to resorts.

In the late 1920s, Brownie Cote, the owner of Camp Lincoln, became the postmaster.

He put in a request to change the name of the post office from Hubert to Lake Hubert, thereby not only giving a name to the new girl's camp, Camp Lake Hubert, but also changing the name of the train station and the community.

So today we are now Lake Hubert.

In 1967, the Northern Pacific Railroad made the decision to demolish the depot.

At that time, local residents initiated an effort to save the historic depot.

Hugh McCaffrey was the postmaster and owner of the Lake Hubert store at the time.

He purchased the depot building from the Northern Pacific Railroad for only $1.

McCaffrey needed a site to place the depot.

He contacted nearby property owners seeking someone to donate the land to relocate it.

Herb Kletschka was the third person he contacted, and he offered to donate a small tract of land nearby.

Money was needed to move the depot, build a foundation, and make repairs.

A Save the Depot drive was supported by four community groups The Lake Hubert Conservation Club, later the Lake Hubert Conservation Association, was the primary group responsible for fundraising and managing the remodel.

So in September of 1968, the Lake Hubert Depot was moved northwest of the original site, approximately 400ft to its present location.

It's still on the south side of the Burlington Northern train tracks, facing the same direction that it did originally.

Well, they had to, build a foundation of concrete blocks and do any structural repairs that were necessary.

By the year 2000, the Lake Hubert depot was in need of repairs.

It had a long life.

The options were to find money to make the much needed repairs, or perhaps tear it down.

Board members applied for and received a grant from the Minnesota Historical Society There was also a significant grant from the Koch Foundation.

John Holbrook, leader of the fundraising efforts at the time, said that it was very easy to raise money from Lake Hubert residents, which suggests the importance of the depot to the local community.

In 1980, the Lake Hubert Depot was listed on the Minnesota and International Railroad Freight House and Shelter Shed Extension on the National Register of Historic Places.

I'm really glad that the depot was not demolished.

So that today we have the physical reminder of Lake Hubert's early history.

The development of the railroads in this area were largely due to serving the lumber industry in this area.

The river was fantastic for helping to move lumber and timber, but eventually you needed the railroads to move even more of that product and to bring goods and services and people to this area.

So this particular line eventually worked its way out of Saint Paul.

And like many railroads, they came in phases.

They came in stretches.

And the particular line we're sitting next to actually came a little bit later because of a re-alignment.

And Northern Pacific, if you go back and look at how they aligned to their tracks through town, the original line came in essentially into the heart of the town.

And eventually they cut this, they call it a cut across to shorten the time to get the the traffic through.

So the cut across that they made to to shorten the time, came in the late 1890s.

And then Northern Pacific decided that we needed a better facility to handle the traffic, to handle, especially to handle the people with the passenger traffic.

So they enlisted Cass Gilbert.

Cass Gilbert, the renowned Minnesota architect, was hired by Northern Pacific, and he designed close to a dozen buildings for them, including four depots.

And if people don't know Cass Gilbert, he designed the current Minnesota State Capitol.

And so he's a, in architectural circles, he's very well known.

So what we're sitting in here is a very elegant example of his style of architecture.

And that's what makes it very unique.

So, Northern Pacific built this because they wanted to have a nice place for people to get on and off the passenger trains.

In 1900, when this building was built, this community had barely been here in any form or fashion for about 30 years.

And so it was still a very young community.

This was still very open frontier territory and trying to modernize it and dare I say, civilize it, but let's say modernize it.

This was a part of that effort.

And you couple that with everything else that was happening at the time.

The opening of a hospital, the opening of a library, the building of a public school, all those elements that make a community a desirable place to live, then this depot was part of that effort.

What we're sitting in is essentially would have been the passenger waiting area where people would have come in, picked up their tickets in the main entrance, then you would have had a desk there for, you know, your ticket taking.

And then the station agent would have been back a little further from that, and then you would have come in here and you would have had a luggage check in, and then you would have just literally sat in here like a waiting area, like at an airport or a bus station.

And that's what this was.

And the westbound or eastbound passenger would pull right up to the edge here.

And they, just like in the movies, somebody would step off with their conductor hat and just say, all aboard!

And on and off they went.

Passenger service in Little Falls ended in the early 1970s.

And even by then, freight traffic had gone down significantly.

The reason for having freight rail stopping in a community diminished significantly also, mainly because it was replaced by truck traffic and vehicle traffic and passenger traffic.

And eventually this particular depot was maybe open one day a week.

And eventually got used for storage.

By then, Burlington, what was called Burlington Northern Rail line, made the decision, from an economic standpoint, it just wasn't feasible to keep these buildings.

And so you started to see them saying, well, if we're not going to have any rationale for having a building like this open, we want to get rid of it.

In this community, you had a group of concerned citizens that wanted to save this building, and rightfully so.

This is a gorgeous facility, but it had fallen into disrepair, And so they created an organization in this town called the Cass Gilbert Depot Society, which then worked very hard to try to do a restoration.

They scraped off five coats of lead paint from the outside of the building, and worked on trying to update the inside too.

But that takes time and that takes effort, and most importantly, that takes money.

And at more than one time, this building was slated for demolition Incredibly enough, it took the intervention of the then lieutenant governor of the state of Minnesota, Marlene Johnson, who stepped in and said, come on, give it six months, guys.

Let's figure out how we can handle this.

And that reprieve gave them enough time to figure out a plan to finally get this building restored and opened.

And in, I believe it was 1990, the Chamber of Commerce said, we'll move in there will be the tenant.

The eventual action was we're going to keep it where it is.

And the Cass Gilbert Depot Society took control of it and eventually it went back and is now owned by Burlington Northern, Santa Fe or BNSF Railway Company.

And it is leased to the Chamber of Commerce.

Thankfully it happened.

And now this building is constantly used for events and for the chamber.

And this is a National Register Historic Site, one of several in the community and one of many depots in the state and nationally.

And part of that was the fact that it was a Cass Gilbert depot.

That was a big factor in that, because there's lots of depots out there that could have been eligible for the register.

But being that Cass Gilbert designed this depot that was a major factor in why this building was able to be listed on the Register, 40 years ago actually.

And if you took a poll now and asked people, hey, are you glad the depot buildings here, they would pretty much universally say yes.

You know, the railroads used to be the center of American life.

They were into everything.

Even today, if I go and talk to folks, they'll say, oh, my grandfather worked for the railroad or worked in the railroad shop.

Today the railroads are very far removed from the public consciousness at all.

So people don't even know about railroads other than the fact when they're stuck at a railroad crossing and they're mad that the train is holding them up.

That's about the only, only way they interact with the railroads anymore.

So the the great thing about preserving them is to remind people that, hey, this was once a big deal.

Railroads were a big deal.

And this is, the depot was their window on the community.

So you can introduce people to that history and say, this is what once was.

You weren't around for it, but this is was you know, instead of an airport, you went to the train station.

Instead of driving down the road, you got on the passenger train.

Instead of Fedex bringing the package, the train brought the package.

So, by saving those depots, you can open up that world to them and show them what it used to be.

The railroads at one point were the largest industry in the United States.

So, it's important to remind people that have no connection to it in this era, of what used to be.

I don't care what part of history you're interested in.

My line is if you work it hard enough, it all comes back to the railroad.

Because the introduction of the railroads changed America, changed it from an agrarian society to the world leader we are today.

Preserving that history is important, as all history is important.

It's a cliche.

I can't understand why it's a cliche.

Everybody says it.

But if you don't know history, you are doomed to repeat history.

If we look back at, at these depots, you can kind of connect the dots of, our society and see where we've come from, maybe get a little bit of an idea of where we're going as a, as a group of people.

So depots are, a very important moment in the history of this country.

Very, very important.

I can't emphasize enough how important the railroad depots were to the social and economic and cultural focus of a community.

They were vital when this was literally the only way people could travel, the only way commerce could be hauled, the only way mail could be hauled.

you can't diminish the importance of a depot in a community, When you look at other communities that lost their depots, because they couldn't generate that community support to keep them, you will hear that frustration and that lamenting of, I can't believe we let that go.

It's not just some old building.

It meant something in its day.

So, now when you see a depot, still standing, Maybe you can look at it a little differently.

I know I do.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, And, the members of Lakeland PBS.