(cheerful music) - [Narrator] Illinois Stories is brought to you by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hello, welcome to Illinois Stories.

(train whistles) I'm Mark McDonald, in Mattoon, which has a storied railroad history.

Well, thanks to this newly restored depot, it also has a bright future.

Nearly 40,000 people will board trains from this depot this year.

But that restoration project didn't come quick and it didn't come easy.

They started here 12 years ago, and they're not finished yet, but wait 'til you see the progress they're making.

Mayor, I mentioned the history of, the rich railroad history of Mattoon, and it certainly shows in the depot, the Illinois Central Railroad that no longer belongs to the railroad though, it belongs to the city now.

- [Mayor Gover] Belongs to the city, correct.

- You must feel really good about what's happening here.

- Oh, it's been tremendous Mark.

What the people here have done in bringing it from a building that was almost ready to fall down, literally, to what we have today, something that is really a showcase and something that we hope will bring people to Mattoon.

- [Mark] You know, what I like about this project is it's one thing to restore your depot so people can continue to use Amtrak, but if you can be imaginative and find other uses for space as well, it really can work for the community's advantage.

And when we tour this building, we're gonna see some of those uses.

You've really, you've opened up your mind to lots of possibilities, haven't you?

- That's right.

And we've had a lot of different organizations that are utilizing the building.

The historical society, Coles County Historical Society, the arts council, we're getting ready to move our tourism coordinator from city hall to this building, which I think is probably a really good move.

So there are good things that are going to be happening with this building in the future.

- This project is not finished yet, but the outside of the building is.

I mean, this is fully restored now, the outside.

- Yes, yes.

- As you look at the parking lot, which is just to my right of the depot, that still needs some work, doesn't it?

- Yes, we are going to be resurfacing the parking lot.

And that hopefully will be completed by the end of this year and hopefully before the end of this year.

So there's a lot of work yet to be done on that.

- Yeah.

And just to our right, again, if we look down the block here, we can see on that, the mural on that building, which has a lot of color and character to that.

What is that part called?

- [Mayor Gover] That's called Progress Square, which is really a parking lot, but it's more a plaza.

We wanted something that would be attractive that would bring people here.

We have benches, we have tables where people can sit, have their lunch, or just sit there and look at the mural and enjoy it when it's a little cooler.

- Now, speaking of murals, you have a lot of those in town, and I'm looking at this building just to the, I guess that's, I'm not sure what the direction is, but just past the parking lot.

- To the east.

- To the east.

That would be a perfect place for something like that.

- [Mayor Gover] Yeah, and we're hoping that eventually we can get the side of that building changed so that we could put a mural there.

- [Mark] That would kind of tie everything together.

- It would.

And behind that building is the Y and there's a parking lot there that we've recently completed.

We completed the Progress Square, and now we'll do the depot and the lighting there on those three parking lots will be coordinated.

So instead of a hodgepodge of lighting, it'll all look the same, very attractive.

- Tie it all together.

- Tie it all together.

- Now we've got to see the inside of this building.

So can you take us through room to room?

- Sure, happy to do so.

- Okay, let's do that.

- Mayor, back in the day, there would be a ticket seller here and you and I would be buying our train ticket here to get on.

Of course, these days, with online sales and that kind of stuff, it doesn't pay to have somebody man a ticket booth anymore, but the original ticket booth is still here.

- That's right.

- And it's all original.

- Now I can remember when we had a ticket agent, and I would buy my ticket to either go north or go south.

Those were the days, huh?

- And those were the days when they really built buildings to last.

Because this, you can tell that this was not one of the large stations, but it's pretty grand anyway.

- Oh, it is.

And you know, talking about the trains and everything, years ago when they had a ticket agent, there were numerous passenger trains a day going north and south.

And now we have a couple going each way.

- Mm-hmm.

But you're glad of that too.

And in fact, your ridership has gone up, hasn't it?

- It has, every month it seems to go up.

Well over 3000 passengers a month are riding from Mattoon.

- [Mark] That's terrific because I mean that just gives you another... Hey, people get off the train too, and they stay in Mattoon and they spend some money and it's all the better.

- Absolutely.

- [Mark] Now these benches are just exquisite.

And you tell me these are original.

- [Mayor Gover] These are original.

And a lot of work was done to bring them back to I'll say their natural state because there was graffiti, people had put names in the wood with pocket knives or whatever.

- Yeah, you can see that they've carved into them pretty good.

You clean up as best you can, but that's about, that's about as good as you can do.

It's beautiful, they're original.

You can tell they're original.

And of course, everything in this place is original.

It was dirty, but it was salvageable.

- But we got it clean, so... - Yeah, it's really very nice.

- And a lot of people, I would come in for what they did, their dedication and making sure that it got to the point it is now.

- Yeah.

Mayor, when you and I were talking out in front of the depot, we were across the street, but we were looking from there toward this and the camera was looking right into those big doors.

So we're right on the main level here as we speak.

And we were talking about the usage, imaginative usage for spaces, and we're right now above the boarding area, aren't we?

- That's right.

And it's gonna be a pretty spot.

You just have to figure out what the heck to do with it.

- That's right.

The arts council has talked with the city and we have agreed that we will allow the arts council to use this room, this facility for exhibits, for programs, for musical programs, whatever they want to use it for.

And I think one of the main things, Mark, that I'm looking forward to is the fact right now when people come in the front door, they look at this empty room.

And when it's completed, they'll walk in that door and they'll see exhibits here, they'll see paintings, they'll see all kinds of things, which makes for a pleasant entrance for the people as... - Yeah, and they'll see activity.

And then they'll go right around and they'll want to walk right in here, won't they?

(Mark laughs) - Absolutely.

And we hope they will.

- You hope they will.

Now this place has been used for a number of different things.

When you were a boy growing up, it had a connection to our servicemen, didn't it?

- It did.

And I'm dating myself, but I can remember as a real young boy during World War II that this was where the USO met.

And a lot of people in Mattoon supported that, and we had troop trains going through here, north, south and east and west.

The Illinois Central Railroad north-south, the New York Central Railroad east and west.

And so there was a lot of activity here.

- [Mark] And then it became, later on it became a cafeteria.

A cafe.

And it's been vacant for some time.

- A long time, yes.

- [Mark] Well you can tell that you've really got a good start on this.

I mean, you got the drop ceiling out, you've got the woodwork back to where it needs to be.

It's gonna be very attractive, I think.

- It will be once it's completed.

And a lot of the help in getting this done is through the Lumpkin Family Foundation, who has certainly supported this by funding a number of different projects, not just this, but throughout the city of Mattoon and Coles County.

So we're very fortunate to have the Lumpkin Family Foundation here to help us.

- Rob Doyle, we've been talking a lot about the spaces that were freed up when this place was restored.

And in fact, right on the same level as the boarding area, there's a big area that is now the Coles County Historical Society permanent museum.

Fantastic.

- It was, when we started the project of renovating the train station, it was one of my goals to make this museum and to have it not only just a railroad museum, but a museum that we could display all the artifacts that the historical society had.

And so we have a little bit of a permanent railroad museum dedicated to basically, you know, Coles County.

And then in the back room, we have our changing exhibit that we try to change, you know, two or three times a year.

- Now you're a train guy, and many of these items that are on exhibit here actually belong to you and they're on loan to the Coles County Historical Society.

But we've been focusing on the depot, and you've got some interesting display here about what the Depot has looked like through the years.

- Yeah, this was, this is a picture of the depot when it opened up in 1918.

And then this is also a picture of the restaurant that was up there.

And if you look at the picture here, the restaurant was really located in this level, but it was, you know...

The trains would come in here, and in those days, the passenger trains had to be serviced and stuff.

And so there was a time, you know, of a few minutes for people to get off the train, get something to eat type of thing.

And so, you know, the restaurant was well-used.

Another thing that you notice about this building is when we look over here, the building is right up here and there's a trench down in here.

I guess if you look at this picture here, you can see the road.

This is the ground level up here and they moved it down.

If we walk this way just a little bit- - [Mark] Lets explain the subway just a little bit though.

Here we're looking at the subway.

Why did they have to do that?

- Okay, the subway, it's railroad tradition, whoever is at the, you know, gets to the crossing second, they have to maintain the crossing and they also don't get to run their trains through that crossing unless the other railroad gives them permission to.

And so the New York Central of the Big Four Railroad dominated the crossing and made life miserable, I guess, for the Illinois Central.

And so the Illinois Central had one or two things to do.

They could accept it or they could dig a trench and lower their tracks.

- Oh, okay, they could avoid the problem altogether?

- They could avoid the problem.

- Be on a different level.

- And it was more of a problem for the Illinois Central because their trains went north and south.

All the major roads in Mattoon went east and west.

And so if they were stopped, they were blocking the main thoroughfares in town.

And so they dug the trench down, and then the town of Etna is just south of here a few miles, and they had to go into a big hole and then come out of a hole to go through Etna.

And the engines at that time weren't that powerful, and then railroads like to be flat.

They don't like ups and downs.

And so they took all the dirt from the trench and moved it down there and raised their track level.

- Good idea, good idea.

You mentioned New York Central while you were talking about that.

Let's go over here because this is a fantastic panoramic view of... Maybe I'll ask you, Rob, to go in there and show us where today's depot is, the one that we're standing in today.

- The building in is right here.

This is the Illinois Central Depot, and this is all where they trenched out.

- There's the subway.

- This is the subway.

The New York Central Depot or the Big Four Depot, was right here in relationship to it, and their tracks, they crossed on the tracks over here and then went all the way down and eventually on to St. Louis.

We have a model of the Big Four Depot right here, which was unfortunately torn down.

- [Mark] Boy, this is really a nice piece of work.

And so this was still here in Mattoon up to what, seven or eight years?

- Yeah.

Seven or eight years ago the building was here.

It had been abandoned for a long time and had some issues with it and they eventually tore it down.

And now it's, you know, the YMCA parking lot is there now.

- [Mark] And you didn't want to see this happen to the depot we're standing in.

- No, no.

And a lot of people wanted this building to go away, but I thought there was a lot of hope for this building.

80 years ago, this building was the heart of Mattoon.

It was the soul of Mattoon.

And people came here to visit, see what the fashion was, you know, the people from the big city.

When they got off the train, they wanted to see what the fashion was.

You know, the gossip here.

If you bought something from Sears and Roebuck, it came here by train.

And so this was the heart and soul of the town.

And I wanted to save the building, use it for Amtrak and also to let this building become part of the heart and soul of the town again, which I think we've done with the museum, our Santa, you know, our Santa thing that we have every year at Christmas time.

Santa Claus gets on the train in Effingham and gets off here and we usually have 2 or 300 kids and their grandparents or parents here to welcome Santa Claus.

And so it is part of the social fabric of the city again.

- [Mark] Well Rob, thank you.

- You're welcome.

- Jackie Record, these kind of projects don't happen overnight.

Sometimes they take more than a decade, and you and the historical society started back in about 2000 trying to save this depot so that you could not only make it a good depot, but also make it something that the historical society could use in the future.

And you've actually pulled it off, haven't you?

- We did, with a lot of help from our friends.

- And your friends meaning the railroad, the city, the people at the federal level.

Everybody came together, but actually it really needed people at the local level driving this project starting back in 2000 when this depot was kind of literally falling apart.

- It was.

The windows that you see were boarded up.

The staircase was filthy.

The building smelled bad and many passengers were afraid to ride the train, frankly.

But all that has changed now.

- [Mark] Yeah.

In fact, and you've got a very enthusiastic bunch of passengers, don't you?

The passenger list gets bigger every year.

- [Jackie] It does.

I have a printout from Amtrak that says that the total last year was 37,137.

- [Mark] Wow.

- [Jackie] And this is a town that has fewer than 18,000 population.

- That's terrific.

- It is.

- Back when you started this process, the first thing you had to do was get this building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

And that's a kind of a feat in itself, isn't it?

- It is, but it is a unique and beautiful building.

I don't think there's another quite like it.

It's a three story building, as you can see.

And it had a lot to recommend it, and it had not had a lot of changes.

It was falling apart, but it was a good sturdy building that had not been modernized or so-called remodeled.

So it was a good candidate for the national register.

And then we had some local amateur historians, but they're very, very skillful, who know how to do that.

We have seven other buildings in the community that are listed on the national register.

- And of course the city had to agree to buy it from the railroad.

- They did.

- And there was a little bit of, a little bit of discord there as well, wasn't there?

- We've been through maybe four city councils in this period of time.

And the one that agreed to buy the building was voted out of office in the next election.

We found ourselves dealing with a completely new set of people.

And they said, "Well you know, we have to do this because the former council signed off on it, but we don't think that's a good use of our money.

So don't ask us for any more."

(Mark laughs) - Don't ask us for any more.

- We just waited for the next election and asked them.

- You've got a building now, but don't ask for any more money.

As a matter of fact, you and your group and the town had to raise a little less than a half a million dollars to actually get this thing going, didn't they?

That's a lot of money for a small town.

- It is, no it is.

And we had some help from some foundations, but a lot of it came from individuals as little as $10.

And of course there were many larger sums, but many people realized that this is the heart of our city.

We don't have a courthouse.

We don't have a town square.

This is in the middle of our town.

We couldn't really have a decaying building that was owned by a foreign corporation sitting in the middle of our town.

Or at least most of us did not want that.

So people became supportive and enthusiastic, even those who don't ride the trains.

- Dick Wise, behind every history museum, there's a research center, right?

There's a place where you got to store stuff.

The collection's, everything's not always on exhibit.

You know, you got to have stuff put up, put aside, take care of it, see what it is, put it where it belongs.

And when you got this new place in the depot, that really opened up some possibilities for you, didn't it?

- Oh, it's so much better than the place we were in before.

It's much larger.

It has windows.

And in addition, we were able to kind of reorganize things so that we have a better handle on all of the materials that are here now.

- And this space that you're in has a really interesting past too because the old depots, this one was built in 1917, when they were running steam trains, this had a very specific use, this space, didn't it?

- Yes, it was a water testing laboratory.

Of course you have to test the water because of the lime content that would foul up the engines.

So this was a place that they ran the tests.

- This was the lab.

Okay, well that's interesting.

Now you've got, okay.

Now let's go back here a little bit.

And maybe the most storied politician from Coles County is also on exhibit here.

Who are we looking at here?

We're looking at Orland Ficklin.

He was a Kentucky native, migrated to Illinois just as Lincoln did, served in the Illinois House of Representatives for several terms, served in the House of Representatives in Washington for several terms.

And in both instances, one of his seatmates was Abraham Lincoln.

They were close friends.

They were both attorneys, and they were both involved in the Matson slave case.

So they have a long history.

And in fact, Mr. Ficklin is pictured on the stage with Lincoln in the famous painting that Robert Root did of the thing.

And in fact, this picture is by Robert Root.

Apparently he was so enamored of Mr. Ficklin that he did a separate portrait a couple of years later.

- Let's pick one of these aisles, Dick, to go down.

Let's pick this one here.

- All right.

- And let's find something, pick out something interesting for me.

- Here's one of the things that we have.

It's a fire horn.

And in the 1800s, it was common to present a fire horn of this type to a police chief or a fire chief who had done meritous service.

And this one was presented to Chief Redfern in 1889 for his service at the opera house fire in Mattoon.

And he simply would use this, it was an honorary thing, but it also had a use because he could use it to direct fire crews.

- So before they had loudspeakers and amplified systems and everything, he would call out orders into that.

Can you give us an idea what that would sound like if you were calling out?

- Roll up the hoses!

(Dick and Mark laugh) - Okay, it works.

It's not only something ornamental for your office, but it works as well, huh?

Okay.

- It was a very useful item for the fire chief.

- Okay, now who was Dr. Dudley?

- Okay, Dr. Dudley was a physician.

He lived here in the 1880s up through about 1945 or 50.

He was a well known physician and these are some of the materials from his office his son gave us.

- Let's take a look at some of this.

These would have been some of the medications, I guess.

- [Dick] These are medications.

These are also medications in here.

And then we have the tools which look kind of fearsome and lots of patent medicines of course, which were common.

- That's a look into the past, isn't it?

So his family made sure that the historical society had all of his professional belongings.

Neat.

- [Dick] Yeah, he was a very well-respected doctor.

- Well Norma, the Coles County Historical Society, due to this restoration of the depot, has a new home.

And you've got a lot of space.

- Yes, more than we had before.

And what it has done is enabled us to put all of our collections in one place.

We've had them in different places.

So it's great, great.

- Yeah, and your collections cover not only the museum here in the depot, but you've got some other holdings too, don't you?

- Yes, we have the Greenwood school, which is a restored country school, and it's on Eastern Illinois University's campus, and we do programs there now rather than museum work, but we do have schoolchildren visit in the spring and fall to see what the experience was like in a country school.

We have Dudley House, which is a house museum that we own, the historical study owns.

And then we have the Gannaway House, which is in here in Mattoon, which is leased to us by the Lumpkin Foundation.

And it has a house museum effect to it too.

- You know, I came in here and I thought, well show me what you're working on.

What happens in a research center in collections?

And go ahead and show us what you've got here.

- Well one of the things, we just recently moved.

And so we're still trying to restore some stuff.

And this, this box is very fragile.

So what I'm trying to do is build a cardboard base and then I'm gonna put something over the top of it so that I can know what is in here and still put it on the shelf, and... - [Mark] Would you open that up for us?

It's an old erector set.

- It's an old erector set.

- [Mark] Ill be darned.

I remember those as a little kid.

- A really old erector set.

- Yeah, older than me, but I do remember the old erector sets.

That's really neat.

That's gonna be a collector's item, isn't it?

- Yes.

Well, it is.

- Yeah, it already is, right.

- And one of the real problems with things is that they're fragile.

And so you have to be sure that you keep them.

- And the box is worth as much as the rest, you know, because it's all one item, you know, it's all one thing.

Yeah, neat.

- Yes, that's true.

- Well, thank you for the visit.

- You're welcome.

- Well Kim, okay.

We've seen your permanent exhibit there in there on railroads.

Now this whole space here, this is just for your rotating exhibits, right?

- That's absolutely right, Mark.

What we have in here right now is baseball across three centuries.

Mattoon, Charleston, Coles County has a very strong and rich history of baseball.

- We're on our way to first base.

- We are on out way to first base right now.

And it's interesting because we've got this set up, the whole thing set up as a diamond and the kids just love running it.

- I'll bet they do.

They come in and they just want to run the bases, huh?

And then they figure out, "Gee wiz, in baseball you really do have to run?"

- That's right, you have to run, you actually have to exert yourself a little bit.

But it's interesting too because what we're going to be doing after this, Mark, is going back to the Civil War exhibit.

So this is our rotational area for rotating exhibits.

- Okay, and so then of course, next year, you'll rotate some more through here.

And it's nice to have space, isn't it?

- It really is.

It's fantastic.

And on top of that, not only is it nice to have space, but it's just nice to have historic space.

And this is just, I hate to say this.

I hate to use the term "oozes," but it really does.

It's just a wonderful location.

- Yeah, and we have gotten to see a lot of that during this program.

Thank you to everybody for helping us view it too.

It's been something.

- It's our pleasure.

- Change is just common here at this depot in Mattoon, as you've seen the change go through and the evolution from the time that it was sort of a, they called it a wreck, with the windows boarded up and had to be cleaned out.

Well, now it's looking good.

Some of the changes are this new exhibit here in the history museum, and also that great room that we looked at, that's gonna be something to see in the future.

And pretty soon that parking lot will be finished as well.

With another Illinois Story in Mattoon, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching (cheerful music) - [Narrator] Illinois stories is brought to you by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

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