Life in the depot
By Jean Olson of Arlington
I once attended a reading by Minnesota author Faith Sullivan. I had read and loved her novel called The Cape Ann, and I was especially intrigued because the family in the story lived in their small town’s train depot. Until then, I believed mine was the only family on earth that ever actually lived in a depot. During the question-and-answer session after the reading, I told Ms. Sullivan that I had no idea that anyone else ever really lived in a depot. She answered that in the first half of the 20th century, it was a common occurrence for the depot agent’s family to live in the depot’s so-called living quarters.
My dad worked for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, & Pacific Railroad (CMStP&P), but it was widely known as the Milwaukee Road, a name that became its registered trademark in 1953.
When I was born in August of 1946, Dad was the depot agent in Good Thunder, Minn. My parents and my siblings, Karen and Howard (the baby, Steve, wouldn’t join us until six years later) had lived in Good Thunder for two or three years before I was born. They took me to my first home, the Good Thunder depot.
The residential part of the depot consisted of three rooms. The living room was a long, narrow space that stretched across the front of the building, facing the brick area they called the platform, which you could say served as our front “yard.” The tracks were immediately beyond that platform. Our living room contained a scratchy sofa, an upright piano, and probably a chair or two. A wall separated the living room from one bedroom, with a kitchen on the other end of that space. The depot’s waiting room was accessed by a door in the kitchen’s end wall. The bedroom housed my parents’ bed, a rollaway bed for Howard, and another bed I shared with Karen after I outgrew my crib. We didn’t have any more furnishings than we absolutely needed, not because we didn’t own anything, but because there wasn’t enough room for any décor.
Our kitchen had a table and chairs, a small kitchen stove, and an icebox (not a refrigerator—an icebox, with the block of ice for cooling and a pan on the bottom to catch the melted ice). Our “running water” ran not from faucets, but from a pump on the kitchen sink, and it yielded only cold water. Mom heated a lot of water on that stove top. Like many others in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, our bathroom was outdoors and on the far end of the freight house section of the building.
On Saturday nights, Mom would heat lots of water on the coal stove in the waiting room and empty it into a galvanized double tin tub. This had to be done in the depot’s waiting room, since the kitchen had no extra space. She carefully taped sheets of newspaper over the waiting room windows for privacy and then plopped the three of us into the hot water for our weekly bath. The next morning we’d be all clean and polished, ready to head off to Sunday school at the Baptist Church, which incidentally no longer exists in Good Thunder.
Our living quarters made up the smaller portion of the depot. The business side of the building, where my dad did his job, was considerably larger.
The main door of the building opened into the waiting room, an open space with several benches placed up against the walls, and a coal-burning stove in the center. The purpose of the room was to provide a place for arriving or departing passengers to wait for their train or for their ride home. In reality though, a lot of the time it was used for other railroad men, Good Thunder businessmen, and assorted acquaintances to stop by and pass the time visiting with Dad if he wasn’t too busy. In cold or wet weather, Karen, Howard, and I played in the large open space of the waiting room.
Sometimes, if his work was mostly done for the day, Dad would get out his trumpet and practice music for whatever band job was coming up. He played with various old-time and other dance bands in the Mankato area back then. My sister remembers that on some evenings his musical friends would come over with their instruments and jam in the depot’s office space. She loved sitting on the desk and listening to them play and watching as they joked and bantered between songs.
Immediately to the left of the waiting room door was the office, where Dad carried out his duties as agent. He was a telegrapher, and I was fascinated to watch as he hit the little button that I thought looked like a trumpet valve, making the little dit-dot-dash sounds as he sent a message to another agent in a town down the railroad line. I had no idea how he could communicate that way. Eventually, as telephones became standard equipment in the depots, the telegraph was phased out. Imagine those agents if they could see the technology we use today!
One of the agent’s duties was doing a daily yard check. That involved going to inspect each boxcar, flatcar, or tank car that had arrived in the yard and checking its number, contents, and the recipient of its load. A drayman who had a flatbed truck would come and deliver whatever he could from those cars.
On the north end of the building was the freight house. When people ordered goods from catalogs, depending on the size of the item, they were often delivered by freight train, which was a cheaper and more practical mode of transport than parcel post. The drayman loaded up those packages and delivered them to the appropriate homes or businesses.
Just before I turned five, we moved from Good Thunder to Grand Meadow Minn. My dad took a year break from the railroad to attend the Naval School of Music in Washington, D.C. The depot as a home went to the family of the new agent.
Our mother had grown up in Grand Meadow, and since she still had family there, we spent a year (the summer of 1951 until the summer of 1952) living there. You might say we moved on up to the east side that year, living in a rented apartment which gave us more space than we could have imagined. It also gave us a real bathroom, with indoor plumbing! That was the end of our days of living in the depot. But it wasn’t the end of Dad working for the railroad. In 1952 we moved to Mankato, and three years later relocated about ten miles east to St. Clair, where he was the agent until that depot closed.
Over the years, as the railroad became less important because of other, more modern methods of shipping and transportation, the depots and the job as depot agent came to an end. The Good Thunder depot, my first home, was eventually torn down and became just a part of Good Thunder’s history. But in its day, it was a vital part of the community and its livelihood. My siblings and I still feel a twinge of comfort and nostalgia whenever we hear the sound of a train whistle off in the distance. There’s something a little bit lonely, but also a little bit welcoming, in that sound from the past.
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