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Volunteers in LaMoille are
looking to save the village’s depot and caboose, including
Charlie Strong of Elmhurst, who works on the caboose roof.
NewsTribune
photos/Chris Yucus |
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Volunteers (from left) Bill
Stouffer, Mayor Steve Stouffer and Ron Geuther work on
re-roofing the LaMoille depot. | |
Craig Sterrett,
Editor
LAMOILLE —
LaMoille’s mayor was helping with a roofing project on village property
this week, but it wasn’t tax dollars at work.
Instead, volunteers came to the
rescue of a nearly 140-year-old wooden caboose and 19th century railroad
building in LaMoille. When it rains, it also rains inside the southern
half of the old Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad
depot/freight house that the village of LaMoille owns on the
abandoned railroad right of way.
“They got a little money together so
we’re going to try to save this depot,” said Clarion Township farmer
Bill Stouffer, who was on the roof of the depot along with his brother,
Mayor Steve Stouffer of LaMoille, Ken Geuther and other volunteers
including Kris Ridge.
They brought scaffolding and tools
from their shops and farms and lined up wood planks, to which a durable,
green, metal roof will be attached.
In recent months, a local
model-railroad club president, Carl Sennett, who lives in LaMoille,
approached village officials about using the depot and caboose. Stouffer
said members of the summer Buffalo Days celebration committee met
earlier this fall, and decided to donate money to keep water out of the
depot.
“I said, ‘We’ve got to get something done with that roof,’”
Stouffer recalled saying to the Buffalo Days group.
He said the
village will see no costs for the metal roof, which might cost $5,000
tops, thanks to donated labor and Buffalo Days money. He and his family
may be back in the fields for the harvest today and tomorrow, but they
plan to finish the roof soon. He said if area construction workers
volunteer, they can get it done in just a morning.
ADM demolished
large grain-elevator and warehouse buildings in a three-block-long,
one-block-wide swath including the former rail yard west of U.S. 34 a
couple of years ago, and then donated the property to the village after
the company completed paying taxes on the land.
The Stouffers and volunteers had
waited to start on the depot roof until a hoped-for grant from ADM came
in, but they haven’t seen that yet. They went to work this week to get
the building sealed up before winter.
Renter to take over
A local group of rail, history and
model-railroading enthusiasts, North Central Illinois Model Railroad
Club, will rent the depot and the all-wood, circa-1880 CB&Q caboose
from the village.
Stouffer said he believes the village will be glad
to let the club work on the caboose and depot. He said he hopes the
village can create a park on the surrounding land. He said ADM has been
helpful to the village, such as trucking in dirt and material for
filling in low spots.
“We needed a place to set up our
model railroad system and we’d like to build a new layout in the freight
house. The city was real happy that we’d actually utilize it,” said
Princeton resident and club member Steve T. Lewkowycz. He was working on
shoring up and cleaning up the caboose with his son, Steve J. Lewkowycz,
an Amtrak engineer and club member from LaGrange.
Preserving history
The Lewkowyczs have done volunteer work
at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, and club members have a vision
for the LaMoille site. The younger Lewkowycz said they’d like to restore
the east room of the depot as it was as a passenger waiting room and
freight customer area a century ago. He said he’d like to have old
LaMoille photos and rail memorabilia and have the waiting room available
to the public or a historical society.
They want to restore the rail
agent office to how it was (minus “knob-and-tube wiring” of course), and
they want to preserve the weather log/diary passages written on the
office wall in pencil. There’s a lot of graffiti they want to get rid
of, but not those dates and snowfall and temperature statistics. They
also like the rail freight agents’ names and years. One of the legible
years, marked on a bare wooden wall in the freight area, presumably with
charcoal or ash, is 1909, but the building dates back farther than
that.
Lewkowycz motioned to a wide, open door in the
middle of the depot and imagined its use in the early 1900s.
“If you
ordered something from the Sears catalog or Montgomery Ward catalog, it
would be delivered here,” he said.
Craig Sterrett can be reached at
(815) 220-6935 or ntlocal@newstrib.com. Follow him on Twitter
@NT_NewsEditor.
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