Railroad Town Depot Railroad Town Depot
Grand Island's only remaining depot, a brick structure completed in 1911 for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, can be found at Sixth and Plum Streets. It is presently owned by the Hall County Historical Society.
Cairo's old Burlington depot also is gone, purchased and dismantled for scrap lumber by Elmer Riedy. However, Riedy did donate brick from the depot's platform and other depot memorabilia to Stuhr.
The "Marshal's Office" in Stuhr's Railroad Town was also a tiny depot at one time. It was located in the Adams County village of Hansen on the old St. Joseph and Grand Island line.
Stuhr Museum's depot in Railroad Town, a gift from the Union Pacific back in 1966, came from the village of Oconto in south central Custer County. Yes, you still find visitors to Railroad Town with roots in the Oconto area who remember it at that location.
Oconto was a stop on what was originally know as the Kearney and Black Hills Railroad, which never quite achieved the destination implied in its lofty name. Not only did the road fail to reach the Black Hills of South Dakota, it was a long time before it got beyond Nebraska's Custer County.
The Custer County town of Callaway, 68 miles northwest of Kearney, was the original terminus of the line, which began operations in the fall of 1890. Oconto sat 53 miles northwest of Kearney and 15 miles southeast of Callaway. In 1912, the branch line was extended another 35 miles to Stapleton in Logan County.
The tracks of the K & B H picked up the Wood River valley out of Kearney, cut across the northeast corner of Dawson County enroute to Oconto, and then followed the valley of the South Loup River to Callaway and on to Stapleton.
The K & B H began as one of the many early subsidiaries of the Union Pacific, and fed into the U.P. main line at Kearney. Callaway, the first terminus, was fittingly named in honor of S.R. Callaway, general manager of the U.P.
The village of Oconto probably derived its name from a Menominee Indian word meaning "place of the pickerel," according to Nebraska Place Names, published by the University of Nebraska Press. A pickerel, of course, is a fish, any of several small species of pike. In Wisconsin, where the Menominee once dwelt, there's Oconto County and the towns of Oconto and Oconto Falls in the Green Bay area, off Lake Michigan.
The depot from Oconto in Railroad Town is a perfect example of the so-called "combination" depots used by railroads in small communities. It's a one-story, 18 by 50 foot frame structure under a pitched roof. The Union Pacific believes the depot was built in 1895, but it might date back to the start of service on the K & B H in 1890.Two partitions separate the interior into three rooms. On the north end is a small passenger waiting room, heated by a coal or wood-fired potbelly stove. The center room is the office of the depot agent, ticket window opening into the waiting room. The room on the south end is used for the baggage and freight.
The depot in Railroad Town, like many other early rail stations, has a trackside bay window in the agent's office. This bay window offered the agent an excellent view of activities on the depot's platform. There's also a counter in the bay window where the depot's telegraph equipment and a lever to operate the depot's order board is located.
On the exterior, jutting out from over the bay window, is the order board. With the target turned parallel to the tracks and the lantern displaying green, the engineer knew to pass the station without stopping. When the target was turned perpendicular to the tracks and the lantern displaying red the engineer knew to stop at the station to pick up passengers, freight, or track orders.
While wood planks were used in the construction of most early trackside platforms at Nebraska depots, the Railroad Town depot from Oconto has a brick platform, "Humbolt Bricks" impressed on each brick. These bricks were manufactured at Humboldt, Richardson County, in southeast Nebraska.
The depot is painted a shade of dark red, much like early Burlington depots in Nebraska. Most early Union Pacific depots were painted a mustard yellow, the color the Oconto depot wore when it arrived at the museum.