[Music] Well, long before the history museum was a history museum, it was the Great Northern Depot and the Great Northern was actually the first railroad to come to Bemidji and it started here in around 1896 and it was a small wooden structure and it really did not meet the capacity that was growing in Bemidji.

So, by 1900 this was practically a boom town and by the time that the Great Northern put the new station up which happened in around 1911-1912 there were five railroads running in Bemidji at that time.

So, just an extraordinary growth in a very short period of time.

This was the last depot built by James J. Hill and he was a railroad magnet from St.

Paul and he came to visit Bemidji in between the old depot and the new one and was very determined to build an excellent depot for the people of Bemidji and he did and this is a, it's a brick building with beautiful woodwork, beautiful Italian marble floors and it operated as a passenger depot until the 60's and then as a freight depot until the 80's and then it kind of fell into disrepair.

So, folks worked together from the city and from the community, members of the historical society to turn this into the history center as it is today.

So, if we go back a little bit to around 1948-1950 right when the historical society was being formed but still when this was an active depot, down in St.

Cloud in the Waite Park area that cabooses were being made.

So that's where Great Northern cabooses were created was down in Waite Park.

They had a house down there where they made all of their cabooses and the 1948 steel cupola caboose was just coming off the line.

So the cupola which has those nice big windows in the top, that was a real new feature back in 1948 of those train cabooses because it allowed the engineers who were sitting in the caboose to be able to see in the front and in the back to make sure that everything was in line and nothing was going off in a poor way, shall we say.

So now we've got that back in 1948 and that caboose it lived in this area.

So, it was probably stationed out of Duluth.

It made runs to Crookston.

It almost certainly came through Bemidji carrying, you know, as a caboose at the end of a freight line or maybe even a passenger line prior to that but then eventually it was retired and it made its way to East Grand Forks.

[Applause] So shortly after the 200th anniversary, we got an invitation to get a caboose.

The rail club in East Grand Forks had it for some time and then late last year they called us and they asked if we wanted a caboose for the low low price of moving it and we jumped on it.

This historical society has been trying to get a caboose since its formation.

We have letters from old directors who once the passenger lines had shut down started reaching out to the railroads and asking if we could get some kind of car that we could put on display.

So, we were so excited that we got to be the generation that got the caboose.

We worked with the community and between private donations, grants, and other funding, we were able to raise $15,000 to get this caboose moved.

We learned about it around October and by January we had two construction companies helping us out to get it craned onto a truck.

[Applause] Christensen Brothers provided the crane work.

So, they were able to crane that giant caboose onto tractor trailers and it had to be done in a couple different parts so that it because it was too heavy to be moved all together.

And then Reierson drove the trucks from East Grand Forks to Bemidji [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and we got it craned onto the house track [Music] and there it sits today.

It came to us a little rusty on the outside, but still in really great shape.

So, what's nice about a high quality paint is that it's going to not only prevent rust from happening, but it kind of seals it up.

It helps to not get rain or too much moisture inside, which is really wonderful.

And now we have modern day tools putting together an old caboose.

All of the windows and the casings have also been replaced.

That was custom work.

So, we are slowly but surely doing some preservation work on the caboose with the intention of opening it up as a walkthrough historic display.

[Music] Good though.

Wow.

I can see a whole bunch of changes.

Wow.

[Music] Is it a great view?

And we are just super excited that we had this opportunity to bring this piece of history to Bemidji.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the members of Lakeland PBS.