The
CB&Q Depot at Five Points
by William A. Franckey
The Zephyr, Galesburg
It
seems that there will always be great mysteries, The Great Pyramid, The Holy
Grail, The Ark and Amelia Earhart. Galesburg has a mystery; there is no
photographic image of our town’s original railroad depot. True, on the order of
lost knowledge, maybe more people have wondered about what that Custer was
thinking in the final moments of the Little Big Horn battle than why there is
no surviving photograph of Galesburg’s early wooden depot.
A
town’s railroad depot was a point of pride where a community’s activity hustled
to the sound of trains. Trains arrived and departed so people came and went, as
did information. A depot’s telegraph stretched as far as the iron rails did.
The telegraph office linked early American towns with the heartbeat of America
and a prairie town pulsed at the train platform. This made for a place to
people-watch in every sense of the word. Early depots were always front and
center in a railroad’s operation. Passenger depots economically located freight
offices at one end of the building to accommodate commerce and produce. Larger
terminals may have had a separate building for a freight house or freight depot
whereas the main passenger depot would have still served a variety of
functions.
Within the passenger house would have
been passenger waiting rooms, a barber shop, a restaurant, and possibly
sleeping rooms. In addition to a ticket sales, a station agent would be
assigned there and offices for railroad officers whose duties required
immediate access to the concerns of railroading. Galesburg’s original passenger
depot was such a place.
The
depot became the center of attention soon after its construction in 1854. The
structure was an imposing two story wood building with eleven dormers and four
chimneys. The outside was covered with vertical wood board and batten siding.
This was the same depot that Stephen Douglas arrived at on an eastbound train
from Oquawka. Douglas stepped off of his coach on the platform and headed towards
the Bancroft Hotel on his way to debate Abraham Lincoln at Knox College just a
few hundred yards away. The Northern Cross Railroad stretched from Quincy
through Bushnell to Galesburg’s depot with the Central Military Tract reaching
to Mendota. Also, the Peoria and Oquawka crossed at the station platform. All
of this under the control of the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad.
Ownership would be achieved later but control was always at the forefront. The
CB&Q’s small railroad yard was located here with an assortment of railroad
buildings, roundhouses, machine shops and wood and coal chutes for the hungry
steam locomotives. A short distance away stood Galesburg’s freight depot —
practically the same size but with only a single story.
Galesburg
began its railroad heritage with a meeting in the dining room at the farmhouse
of at George Washington Gale Ferris. This is where the idea of constructing a
railroad on the prairie was entertained. Ferris remembered that two or three
meetings were held at the farmhouse. By early January 1851, contracts were
entered into for grading and masonry. A meeting of the incorporators was held
at the Academy, a little building on Galesburg’s Main Street, March 8th, 1851.
Plans and action now would link Galesburg to Chicago and to the west.
William
Whittle, a Civil Engineer, was first charged with railroad construction. Soon,
John M. Berrien became Chief Engineer for Galesburg’s Central Military Tract
Railroad. Berrien is remembered for the fireproof safe he designed in the
CB&Q’s main office in Chicago. During the Great Chicago Fire, Berrien’s
safe proved effective and the railroad’s corporate papers survived intact.
Finally, tracks were laid at Mendota toward Galesburg, connecting the Aurora
Branch Railroad from Aurora to points west. Construction inched across the
prairie and local newspapers reported the progress. Soon a construction train’s
whistle was heard outside of Galesburg. About where the current Amtrak Station
now sits, huge mountains of railroad ties stood and around this area were tents
for the construction workers and track gangs.
Buried
in microfilm is fleeting reference to a platform and possibly a small temporary
structure which served briefly as a depot but was eclipsed by a prominent
two-story wooden passenger house. The first construction train rolled in and
soon the first passenger train linking Galesburg with Chicago. Galesburg was
jubilant at the prospects that a railroad would bring.
Quickly,
this attitude took on a somber tone. Galesburg thought they had gained a
railroad but discovered that the aggressive railroad had instead, gained a
town.
A
look at any city map of Galesburg shows orderly, well laid city blocks but the
railroad had sliced into town at an angle. Clearly there became a “wrong” side
of the tracks with Knox College on one side of the “Q” depot and the noisy and
dirty railroad shops on the other side. To make matters worse, the railroad
brought in immigrant workers and exploited them; the business of railroad work
was a brutal one. Now the little hamlet of Galesburg, whose early focus was
work and religious study, began to see an element of drifters, boomers, tramps
and sluggers from abroad. What Galesburg hoped to develop away from had
followed the town courtesy of the new railroad.
Each
hotel in Galesburg would have two to six men acting as “runners” for the
purposes of solicitation of business. Trains arriving at the depot brought some
passengers who wished to take other trains and consequently had to detrain onto
the platform. Some waited on the platform to board and upon almost every train
were those who wished to get into the passenger house for a meal or other
reasons. In 1857, the proprietor of the Victualing House located within the
depot found the situation so intolerable that he approached railroad
superintendent Hitchcock. Hitchcock added his weight to the situation and an
ordinance was passed limiting the number of runners per hotel. The restriction
applied to the platform but just off company property the ordinance did not
apply. Because of the comings and goings of horse drawn carriages, known as
taxis, trouble remained around the depot.
The
upper floor of the depot had sleeping rooms that were contracted to an
independent business group which operated the Depot Hotel. The other hotel
owners cried foul, that the money generated by Depot Hotel did not stay in
Galesburg but found its way back to Chicago. This was not true but the other
hotels in Galesburg tried to create a boycott of the depot’s hotel thus
increasing their own wealth. This was know early on as the Hotel Wars of
Galesburg.
Abraham
Lincoln was once found on Main Street after having received a haircut and asked
an old acquaintance to walk with him to the depot. Lincoln would then wait for
a train. Also at the depot, was a well known Galesburg personality with the
name of Peanuts. Peanuts was a station boy who worked the depot and platform,
undoubtedly hailing taxis and announcing arrivals and departures of trains.
Stranger yet, the depot was, for a short time, used for religious services on
each Sunday with a different denomination being represented each week.
The
railyards located close to the depot, had a series of tracks where the
railroad’s cabooses, called waycars on the Burlington, were stored. Because of
the increasing amount of taverns, then known as Sample Houses, surrounding the
depot, some inebriated patrons used the waycars as temporary sleeping quarters.
It was said that the nightly commotion in this area reached such a state that
some people living a half mile away from the depot thought the little depot to
be on fire. In front of the depot, five streets came together and of course
this was known as Five Points.
Ed
Morrisey, a local policeman, was assigned to control the mayhem at the “points”
— warrants by day, arrests at night. No photo exists of Policeman Morrisey but
there is reference that he had scars upon scars. Again, if a picture can speak
a thousand words, one can see how a photograph of Officer Morrisey would add so
much to this story.
Galesburg’s
little depot stood witness through good and bad times. A nationwide labor
strike erupted in 1877 which affected Galesburg. The city’s founding fathers
were still alive so civic responsibility was called for by local newspapers.
Some strikers organized large groups to patrol the railroad’s property and keep
it from harm. This had to perplex the railroad management. On July 29,1877 the
railroad received notice that the protection committee would no longer protect
railroad property. The railroad approached Mayor Stewart that the railroad
needed protection so the city of Galesburg added 20 men to the 35 men the
railroad had in place for protection. Soon the strike ended but the suspicious
railroad understood that unrest lingered. Because of practices the railroad
implemented for the next ten years, an ugly, vicious strike exploded in
Galesburg in 1888.
Gala
parties were part of the lore as the depot was obviously a main focus of
Galesburg. During the first week of February 1881, Miss Newman hosted a party
on the occasion of her 20th birthday. The guest list read like a page from
Galesburg Society. The party formed a grand March and enjoyed a festive dance
that lasted till half past ten when an elegant dinner was served. Professor
Ferris furnished the music. Professors Seville and Booth of Monmouth assisted.
The city depot must have felt as neutral ground on that night and not as ground
on the wrong side of the tracks. No one suspected that within a few weeks, the
depot would received a mortal blow.
The
Galesburg depot suffered a minor fire in 1877 but survived intact until a fire
in 1881. Even though Galesburg’s newspaper described the fire as utter
devastation, the depot did somewhat survive. At 4am on a cold morning, March
1st, 1881, the old wooden depot was discovered to be on fire. An alarm was
sounded by the steam whistle at the railroad’s machine shop. The railroad fire
department, Galesburg’ s fire department and volunteers waded through snow
drifts towards the burning depot. In the cold wind and snow, they fought the
fire until the last flames were out. Although the depot and depot hotel
suffered severe damage, the telegraph offices and depot baggage room were
saved. Two railroad coaches were used as a temporary depot until the depot was
repaired in part. The railroad apparently wasted no time in repairing the
structure as the weather undoubtedly dictated the logic of a quick fix.
On
March 19, 1881 a Galesburg newspaper reported that the newly rebuilt depot was
nearly roofed over. Once again the depot became an area for social release.
By
1883, a new grand brick depot farther north at the site of today’s Amtrak
depot, was well under construction so that when completed in 1884, Galesburg’s
original passenger house, the old little “red depow” was abandoned. Although
the freight depot survived until 1921 and the existing switching yards
functioned until 1906 when the new gravity yard farther south opened, the John
Berrien depot disappeared in obscurity.
Ralph
Budd, President of the Burlington Railroad, (CB&Q) assumed control of the
nation’s railroads under Roosevelt during World War II and for the idea of
combining diesel engine propulsion with the Shotweld Process of stainless steel
that created a new type of train called Zephyr. In 1941, Budd asked the question:
Where was the first Aurora Depot? The report handed to him not only studied
Aurora’s depots but encompassed all the depot from Aurora to Galesburg
including Batavia. In this report was a lithograph of the Galesburg depot found
on a 1861 map of Knox County. Around the edge of this 1861 map were
representations of different prominent structures around Galesburg. Among the
varied buildings was a small lithograph of John Berrien’s Galesburg depot.
Clearly by 1941, no known photograph of the Galesburg structure existed. How do
we explain such an avoidance to such a prominent local structure? Possibly
there was animosity felt by Galesburg to its source of problems at Five Points.
So probably this animosity translated into the lack of photographs of such a
vital structure. Did Galesburg lose photographs of the depot in the fire of the
town’s library in 1958? Time and time again, photographs that did survive of
scenes before 1884 somehow leave out the depot. One city directory from the
early 1880s refers to the little wooden depot as not worthy of Galesburg and
the great CB&Q Railroad.
For
years, there has been a small group of people working to find the needle in a
haystack, somewhere there has to be a photograph of Galesburg’s first depot.
Every known photograph was surveyed and scanned to find its orientation to the
town and to the direction of the depot’s location at Five Points. Time and time
again, the depot of a pre-1884 was just out of the frame, just out of reach.
An early
Knox County photographer was Charles Osgood, a local photographer who collected
and sold photos. One wonders, “Maybe some of Osgood’s glass plates of Galesburg
survived and in that collection, there’s a unrecognized depot photograph.”
These things don’t happen though, so a different approach was taken. Using
funds and supplies donated by Bill Selleck, Gary Granberg, and Irene Franckey,
a miniature recreation was created in scale of Galesburg’s depot, freight house
and switching yard circa 1870. This was done just to get a handle on the
changing landscape of the railroad in Galesburg. Even today, as new information
surfaces, this diorama of the early depot is changing. Recently, retired railroad
conductor Mike Thompson has become involved in creating miniature complex roof
shapes of those original buildings at his woodworking shop.
As
each photograph of Galesburg’s old railroad yard was scrutinized, the
orientation was crucial to understanding the photo. Finally a high quality
photograph was acquired showing two steam locomotives sitting back to back on a
full covered revolving turntable. Something odd was at the right of the photo
so that with scanning of the computer and enhancing digital information, that
odd thing proved to be an early railroad coach. This meant we were looking in
the right direction, literally. By using a variety of computer filters that can
sense obscure digital information, a faint outline appeared between the two
steam locomotives. For the first time in easily 60 some years an actual
photograph of the depot existed if only the roof of that depot. It showed
lightning rods among other things. True, it was not the photo we had hoped for
but this was still better than anything we had before.
The
earlier one looks back into Galesburg’s past, fewer photographs exist. There
are a handful from the 1860s of which one is a view looking in a southeastward
direction. Unbelievably, the photograph’s view happened to be in the direction
of Five Points in 1866. Carley Robinson of Knox College, helped to obtain a
very, very high resolution scan from the original photograph measuring just
under four inches square yet high in dots per inch. Computers and powerful
programs used in salvaging lost or obscure digital information has been
described as a “black art.” Sometimes different filters in the computer
programs can lead to different conclusions about information obscured in an old
photograph bu slowly the little photo yielded its secrets. There sitting in the
far distance, barely discernible, was Galesburg’s original depot. To its left,
the Q’s erecting shop appeared, devoid of the machine shop that would soon be
built. One of the biggest surprises was the “engine house.” A brief reference,
discovered in microfilm, suggested that an “engine house” may have existed
briefly before the known locomotive roundhouse of 1871. Sure enough, there
appeared a square building instead of a rounded engine house. Maybe the biggest
surprise was that there was a road directly to the front of the depot. Let
there be no mistake, this forgotten road led the way to all arrivals and
departures of early Galesburg.
9/20/07