[train whistle blows] - Railroads were the lifeline for so many communities in America.

- We're talking about railroading.

The one word that comes to my mind is connection.

- If you didn't have that railroad line as a city, you were really at a disadvantage.

[Music] - One of the most fascinating things about living in the circus train and being a part of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum Circus was to go through our country on the train, and they started right here in Venice.

[Music] - The train revolutionized the area.

[Music] [Music] - When people come to Venice, driving across the Venice Avenue Bridge, the first thing you're going to see is off to your right the Venice Train Depot.

We're celebrating our centennial now, 100 years.

It still serves as a symbol and really a gateway to Venice.

[Music] - The mightiest machines produced by human ingenuity have made possible record efficiency and progress.

- Railroads were the lifeline for so many communities in America in the late 19th century.

It brought goods from out east to communities out west and reverse back out east.

[Music] So if you didn't have that railroad line as a city, you were really at a disadvantage.

After the Civil War, a lot of families started moving down south of Tampa into this area, taking advantage of the Homestead Act.

- Lincoln had signed into law.

They would give you 100 acres of land if you do three things.

First of all, you've never taken up arms against the federal government.

Secondly, that you would develop the property.

And third, you had to live on the property for that five-year period.

- They came down here primarily to farm, grow, citrus and cattle ranching.

They had to live off the land and off their own resources.

[Music] - The only way into this area were sandy roads through the scrub, palmetto scrub.

They call them, "wish-to-God roads," as in I wish-to-God I'd never taken this road.

And it was not uncommon to throw a shovel in the back of your Model T, so that when you got stuck in the ruts, you could dig your way out.

The train revolutionized the area.

[Music] Building a railroad was like our modern day airports.

If you didn't have a railroad coming to or near your town, you weren't going to grow.

You weren't going to develop.

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers bought this property of Venice and wanted to develop it.

Then John Nolen came to this area to design the city in 1925.

John Nolen was considered one of the world's foremost authorities on city garden landscape.

The idea was you don't clear cut an area to build a city.

You let nature run through it.

And that's what makes Venice very unique today.

You sense the nature is part of our city.

When shovels started turning dirt by the beginning of 1926, there were no structures in Venice at all.

By the end of that year, there were 185 buildings either constructed or under construction.

- But if they're going to make money, they had to get people here.

Now, they did use boats and yachts, but really it was the railroad that would bring people down here.

Now, what's interesting is Nolen didn't want it downtown.

He wanted it in the outskirts.

They're trying to sell this place as an amazing, kind of eccentric, Italian style community.

So that first impression is that depot, and $47,000 later, we get built the Train Depot, this Mediterranean revival masterpiece.

- The depot is designed much as the city was in the Mediterranean style architecture.

- It's a beautiful building, and the train depot opened in 1927.

[Music] Having the railroad here in Venice meant that they could draw people in from other parts of the state and other parts of the country.

As tourism was growing, they were really pushing Venice as a vacation destination, and the railroad was the means to get people here, especially with the Seaboard Air Line Railroad going up the East Coast.

- When people traveled from New York City to Florida, it was an experience.

It was like a hotel on wheels.

It was fine dining, entertainment, no matter what your age is, six years old to 60 years old.

There's an aspect of a train that will captivate.

[Music] [Music] - It was a huge lifeline for the city, not just because it was bringing in passengers, but it was bringing in people and goods and businesses that would help grow the economy and help make Venice what it is today.

[Music] - You're in Venice.

We like to refer to what we call the three angels.

The first one was, of course, the Kentucky Military Institute.

They came here in 1933 and established their winter quarters.

- Now, you had basically our first snowbirds.

[Music] - I first came to this community in 1962 as a cadet at Kentucky Military Institute.

We wore uniforms like the one behind me.

[Music] This building is called the San Marco.

Originally, it was opened as a hotel when KMI came in to town.

In 1933, this would have been the main building for our campus.

[Music] Here in Venice.

We were right in the middle of town.

It was a perfect place to go and interact with a lot of the community, so it was fun.

[Music] - They shot in the stores.

The parents came down to visit and stayed in the hotels.

Every December after Christmas, there will always be a huge parade bringing the cadets from the depot to their campus downtown.

Without that influx of people, it would have been really a failure for the city.

[Music] - The second angel was the Venice Army Air Base.

- The Army came down here during World War II to establish the Army Air Base to train pilots and mechanics here.

It brought in thousands of soldiers, all of them coming by rail to train here.

And of course, all the supplies needed, all came down here by rail.

- Increasing our population of Venice by tenfold.

- And for a lot of these pilots, they fell in love with Florida.

So now, after the war, they're taking the train back down here to come here for vacation or to buy a home.

There are also German POWs who were brought to the base, who did a lot of the manual labor.

- We actually paid them a small amount of money to buy candy or cigarettes or those kinds of things.

- And they loved it here so much.

They came back to this country after the war and they were taking the train out, and they were coming here to look for a place to live.

- The third angel was the Barnum & Bailey... Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus.

[Music] - They were actually up in Sarasota, but their lease was up.

They knew that they needed land to build an auditorium because they weren't going to be doing the circus in tents anymore.

So here's the city of Venice with all this land.

They came to an agreement to lease the land and make Venice the new winter home for the circus.

[Music] - I guess a little makeup would be a little mirror.

The secret of good clown makeup is start with a good mug.

My name is Chuck Sidlow, also known as ChuckO the All-American Clown.

The year was 1977.

I had just graduated high school and I took a plane to Sarasota, Florida, and they took us on a bus right here to the Venice Train Depot.

The historic train depot and the circus train was parked on that.

So I arrived to the arena for Clown College, and here I was, one looking around at all these people were doing all kind of incredible things juggling unicycle riding, and I wonder what skill I had.

And the first thing I did is I tripped and I fell down and I felt comfortable as the day is long.

[Music] One of the most fascinating things about living in the circus train was to go through our country on these train tracks.

And when the people come to this train tracks, wherever they come from, all over the country, they know that same train that was in their town started right here.

Real estate was a big thing on the train.

Look at the size of my room.

Oh boy.

It comes in, I got a bunk.

I have what they call a gaucho.

The gaucho is a table and it turns into a bed.

That's me.

My first gag.

Then I had my little coffee pot.

And of course, the most important thing, my personality.

The circus being in Venice was such an attraction.

- People would line the streets to watch the clowns and the elephants and all the equipment heading from the end of the rail line to the circus auditorium on the south side of the city.

- I remember as a cadet watching clowns riding their bicycles.

- You see the smallest man in the world walking down the street.

You see Gunther Geble-Williams going to the hardware store.

You see acrobats from all over the world.

[Music] - It was very much a part of who we were.

[Music] [Music] - As the year started progressing, more cars started becoming available and interstates started growing and more roadways started appearing.

By the late 1950s, we started seeing jetliners appearing.

Jetliners allowed people to travel a lot quicker than a normal train ride, so train travel passenger service started to decline.

- And imagine year after year after year of rail cars with heavy equipment, the railroad tracks were just falling apart.

No one was willing to fix the rails.

And so with that, service ends in the city of Venice in the early 1970s.

[Applause] There's a passion in this community for the past, and that it's critical that we save the records, we save the buildings, we save the photographs.

We need to save this building.

This is an important part of our city history.

So the county stepped in, invested the resources to restore the depot, got the depot onto the National Register of Historic Places, and partned with the Historical Society to put a museum in there, expanding that to include the service car and caboose.

The railroad tracks that were there have been replaced with a recreational trail.

The Legacy Trail, bringing back the wildlife into the community and providing more green space, which John Nolen always envisioned as being a central part of the city of Venice.

[Music] - The train depot has been here over 100 years.

I hope for the future, for the next 100 years, that the excitement, energy, and information that's in this magnificent building can continue to be shared with the public.

- During the years many people pass through its doors.

Developers, circus performers, KMI cadets, World War II officers, and enlisted men.

But the thing that held it all together, the thing that we shared in common was the opportunity it brought us to this community.

It was the common denominator that brought us all together because it brought us here.

[Music] - And as we look forward to the next 100 years, it's going to be important that these places are maintained and remained, because where we've come from helps us to define who we are as we go forward into the future.

It helps to define what Venice is then and what Venice is now.

[Music]