(rshsdepot) Pauls Valley, OK

["James Dent" <james.dent_@_itochu.com>]

-From the Daily Oklahoman...

Pauls Valley rallies to keep depot
2001-04-08

PAULS VALLEY -- Not our train depot, they said the day in 1985 when the
railroad man slipped into town minutes before the courthouse closed and paid
for a demolition permit.
The wrecking crew never had a chance.

First, someone at City Hall telephoned Adrienne Grimmett to inform her about
the permit, and to further alert her that the Santa Fe Depot was to be torn
down two days hence.

Adrienne, who was president of the Pauls Valley Historical Society,
mobilized the troops. An Oklahoma City television news crew hot-wheeled it
to Pauls Valley, and a reporter interviewed Adrienne in the dark, cobwebbed
depot, which had been boarded up for years.

Schoolchildren made "Save Our Depot" signs. Citizens of all ages wrote
letters to the president of the Santa Fe Railway.

Some of the letters were poignant, like the one from the woman who told of
rushing to catch the mail train so that she could post the letter to her
sister's husband, who was off at war, informing him that he was the father
of twins.

Or the woman who wrote to tell of accompanying her parents to the depot to
see her father off to war, and then waiting, with her mother, for his return
in a coffin.

Emotions and action carried the day. "We stuck to our guns and got it," says
Adrienne, who once again is president of the historical society at a
significant moment in Pauls Valley's history with trains.

With Amtrak stopping here now, city commissioners recently approved the
construction of a new depot next to the old one. The old depot now in its
second incarnation, has become a museum of the city's history -- train and
otherwise.

But that was a few years in happening. Once the depot had been saved,
salvage was the next step.

"The city said, 'OK, we've got it. Y'all fix it up,'" she says.

The No. 1 volunteer was Louise Deaton, who, Adrienne says, "made this her
life for eight or 10 years." Much of what has been accomplished is because
of Louise's dedication.

Adrienne is a Pauls Valley native whose parents raised her in the home built
by Smith Pauls, the town's founder. She has her own memories of the train
station, which was built in 1905. She and her mother took overnight shopping
trips to Oklahoma City and to Dallas on the train, which was the only way
many people could travel to big cities.

"Kids now don't have any conception how important rail travel was," Adrienne
said.

In the early days, the depot -- like most public accommodations -- was
segregated. Each race had its own waiting room, rest rooms and water
fountains.

What was once the "white" waiting room looks much like it did, with the
ticket window and original benches intact. The schedule board leans against
the wall beneath the ticket window. You can see where the chimney from the
potbellied stove went through the ceiling.

But the depot is more than a train museum. A framed scrap from the front
page of the New York Herald hangs on one wall. It is dated April 15, 1865.
The top headline is the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

A chalkboard saved from the high school still bears the names of Larry
Willis, Dean Hart, Dick Murry and Pete Jordan, who chalked in their John
Hancocks shortly before they graduated. "I need to put up a sign that says,
'Do not erase,'" Adrienne frets.

Another wall holds a gold- inlaid spur that probably belonged to Mexico's
Gen. Santa Ana. A letter from Thomas Edison hangs on a wall.

Amtrak stops twice a day in Pauls Valley. Freight-train traffic is also
plentiful, Adrienne said after one ran through, interrupted her tour of the
depot and shook the concrete floor. "That's why we can't keep our pictures
straight," she says. "Sometimes we'll get a real hot- rod engineer, and
he'll shake us to death.

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