Passenger trains ceased to travel through Elmore, Ohio long ago, but the town's lovingly restored train depot still gives visitors a taste of Elmore's history as a bustling stop along the Toledo, Norwalk & Cleveland Railroad line.
The railroad played an important role in the development of this little town about 20 miles southeast of Toledo, Ohio.
The railroad line running east from Toledo to Norwalk via Elmore, Fremont, Bellevue and Monroeville started rolling in September of 1852. The line merged with the Lake Shore Railroad in January of 1859 and later that year with the Michigan Southern & Indiana Railway to extend the route to Cleveland.
Workers completed the Elmore train depot in December of 1869, allowing freight shipping all over the country from in and out of the area, thus boosting Elmore's economic growth in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Westward expansion further fueled growth along the railroad corridor as more and more people emigrated to the western states via the rails.
The twentieth century saw a decline in railroad traffic, and passenger service at the Elmore station ceased on December 16, 1949.
Freight trains continued to run through town, but those trains stopped rolling through Elmore sometime in the early 1970s.
The fate of the depot remained in doubt as townspeople wondered about the best use for the building and the property surrounding the vacated railroad tracks.
Elmore's former long-time mayor, Lowell Krumnow, rallied citizens to action, spearheading an effort to form the Elmore Historical Society, which, in turn, purchased the depot building with the surrounding property from the railroad in 1981.
The group worked hard to save this piece of Elmore history, setting forth to preserve the landmark and help develop a beautiful park and recreation area for the town.
In 2001, the group repaired, renovated, restored and repainted the classic depot building for use as a museum.
The building has all of its original rooms like the waiting room, ticket office, freight room and station master's office. The depot's original freight room houses a collection of Elmore memorabilia. The building also serves as headquarters to Elmore's Historical Railroad Club, which holds regular meetings, maintains an HO-scale model train layout and occasionally stages model train demos for the public.
You can book the depot for private tours or photo-shoots. The depot is also open for tours during special events, and folks who were lucky enough to run into Mayor Krumnow in town might score a spur-of-the-moment tour.
People knew Mayor Krumnow for his devotion to Elmore and preserving its historic character, but our visit to Elmore unfortunately happened about a week after his death, so things were understandably quiet in town and we didn't get a chance to see the inside of the depot.
Still, Krumnow's legacy lives on in a nicely maintained depot and other historic structures like a log cabin and a car man's shanty, used by switchmen at the railroad yard of U.S. Gypsum in neighboring Genoa as shelter from the weather in between the work of switching railroad cars.
The park land surrounding the depot also has a playground area, a banquet/meeting hall and serves as an access point for the North Coast Inland Trail (read more about the trail in a post later this week).
Want to learn more about the history of the Elmore area? Check out Elmore and Genoa (Images of America) by Jennifer Fording.
© Dominique King 2014 All rights reserved
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