Historical Essay Feature: "Trains of the Past”

 Charley Fitzpatrick, St. Vincent depot station agent, circa 1922.

by Roxanne Friebohle

Today, there are actually some people that have never ridden on a train. These people have missed many happy experiences that were common to the pioneers. Trains are becoming more and more uncommon every day. Now people drive their car or take a plane when they are going somewhere. They miss seeing all the different people on the trains and the many sights along the way.

Today, the residents of St. Vincent could sleep all day and never be bothered by the noises of a train. In the pioneer days it wasn't that way at all. Many people were awakened every morning at 5:30 by the cheerful Choo-Choo of a train rolling into town.

The train that came into St. Vincent at 5:30 A.M. was known as the Great Northern Flyer. It started coming to St. Vincent in 1897. This train was the passenger train. At that time St. Vincent was the end of the line so the train stayed at the roundhouse all day. The roundhouse was located at the west end of St. Vincent. Since the train stopped there, many passengers also stopped at St. Vincent for awhile.

During the first years of the trains in St. Vincent (1878 onwards), there was a very large Great Northern Hotel located in the village. This hotel took care of the trainmen and the passengers.

There were also freight trains that came into St. Vincent regularly. The freight cars brought such things as machinery, auto parts, raw peanuts, fruits and vegetables from California and Florida, and bananas from Honduras. There were also many immigrants that rode the freight trains with their whole family, belongings, and even their livestock. Most of the immigrants came from Iowa and Illinois and were on their way to Canada. They would have to stop at St. Vincent since it was the last town before Canada. They had to get checked by the Customs before entering the country. The veterinarians would have to check their livestock also before they could get them through the border. There were cases when some of them settled in St. Vincent because they couldn't wait to get to Canada.

Coal was also shipped by the carloads to the St. Vincent depot. At that time it was used to heat homes. The coal was taken to the elevator which was located at the east end of town. People had to go out there to buy it.

After the freight was unloaded at the depot, it was taken to its destination by a drayman. Archie Darrach (and later Al Fitzpatrick) devoted much of his time to this job during the first days of the depot. He took care of all the freight that came in. He also took care of the breweries in the town. Whenever they ran out of beer he hauled it to them. One time when he was hauling freight to the town hall which was located at the west end of town, his horses became frightened and over turned the wagon. A piano which he was hauling hit him in the head and he never regained conscienceness. He was just one of the many men that lost his life for the railroad.

There was also much freight shipped into St. Vincent that had to go across the river. At that time there was no bridge so it all had to be ferried across the river.

The depot at St. Vincent was a very large one for that time. It was approximately three hundred feet long. It consisted of the Custom offices at the west end and the warehouses at the east. The depot agent made his home right in the depot. That way he could be there at any time to receive messages from other agents.
St. Vincent's roundhouse also played an important role in the railroad days. In the year 1897, the roundhouse was built with the backing of James J. Hill. The roundhouse was erected right west of the town of St. Vincent by Lake Stella. Today, the old stock yards are located in place of the roundhouse.

Today, you'd never believe that at one time St. Vincent was a thriving city. The days of the St. Vincent railroad were filled with much excitement and hard work. The train service in St. Vincent could almost be referred to as William Wordsworth (1) once stated, "Small service is true service while it lasts." The train service was a small one but there was always a way of getting from place to place. The old timers that remember the first trains remember them as a true service.

The depot went through two very hard floods, one in 1897 and one in 1950. The one in 1950 washed the tracks up so badly that they looked like a snow fence. The ties that were washed up were from 150 to 200 pounds. Most of the rails were about sixty pounds a yard and thirty three feet long. After all the hard work and slaving to lay the tracks the flood finished them off. The flood also played an important part in finishing the trains coming through St. Vincent altogether.

One experience during the flood in 1897 was when a women died. Because of the flood they had no place to bury her. They ended up keeping her body at the depot for a month and when the water finally went down they buried her. 

Another reason the railroad was taken out of St. Vincent was that the Northern Pacific train which came from Winnipeg wouldn't merge with them. They had the plans all ready for building new tracks but it didn't work out as planned.

Railroads helped to open a new era in mail and express transportation. There had been much talk of projecting a railroad through Kittson County long before the plan came true. Until 1862, Minnesota had no railroad service at all. In 1857, a charter was granted to the Minnesota and Pacific Railway Company. Later this company became the St. Paul and Pacific. At first, the railroad ran from St. Anthony to St. Paul, which was a ten mile stretch. Later this railway stretched all the way to St. Vincent and even later all the way to Canada.

The first engine used was the William Crooks engine named for its first engineer, who was a citizen of Crookston. This engine was the Great Northern's first engine.

As well as the other accomplishments of the railroads, it greatly increased and stimulated the settlements in many ways. Naturally, there had to be settlers to build the railways but the railroad company also induced settlement by offering its lands for sale. The company had been given a state government grant of every odd section in a strip extending from the Red River twenty miles east and running from Marsh River to the international border.

Railroad lands were offered at $5.00 an acre and rebates of $2.00 per acre, were followed if settlers broke three fourths of their tacts. The land was a little higher if it contained timber.

The settlement of Kittson County began slow in spite of land being sold. This was due mostly to the lack of drainage in the valley.

In order to build up the railroads in the northwest much hard work was needed and strong men to carry it out. James Jerome Hill, a farmer from Rockwood, Ontario was one of the many men that devoted his life to the development of the railroads. He first entered into the railroad business as a freight forwarder in 1865. He kept expanding into various trading and transportation enterprises. He built up the Great Northern much more than any other one man.

James J. Hill also built a very large house in Northcote, Minnesota for his son Walter. Many people from St. Vincent can recall the days when Walter Hill would come racing into town in his jeep, as some people called it. It was really an early Ford that didn't have a top, today known as a convertible. Some days he would be racing into town so fast that his hat flew off his head. But it didn't seem to bother him. He was said to be a very carefree person and full of fun.

Of the many experiences I've heard of people riding on trains, I especially enjoy the one that my grandparents used to tell about their trip from Emerson, Manitoba to Quebec, Ontario. It was a cold day in the middle of winter when they decided to take this trip. They got ready to leave and went to the depot in Emerson to wait for the train. Their parents were worried because it was a little stormy out and they hadn't got so that they trusted trains yet because they were still a new thing to them. My Grandmother and Grandfather didn't have any worries at all. When they finally started out it had gotten a little stormier and it was hard to see. They got three miles out of Emerson when the train ran into a bigger snowbank than it could cope with. It turned out that this storm lasted a bit longer than they had expected. They sat in the train for six days and nights before they could get help. In those days, trains didn't carry much food like they do today. The trainmen killed a cow and went to a nearby farmhouse and got some eggs and a few other things so the people could eat. When the storm finally ended they started out once more for Quebec. After two weeks they finally got there.

From that day, trains have improved greatly. Passengers are as comfortable as if they were at home when they take long trips. Still it seems like it doesn't matter how comfortable they are, they are still fading away into the past.

Today all that is left in many places is the memories and few traces of where they once went.

(1) Bartlett, John Familiar Quotations Little Brown and Company c. 1955 William Wordsworth

Bibliography:
Colliers Encyclopedia; James J. Hill

Friebohle, Glenice, I.; Interview, January 1, 1972
Friebohle, John, A.; Interview, January 1, 1972
Gooselaw, Eli; Interview, January 4, 1972
Kittson County Enterprise; 50th Anniversary Edition; page 68
Nordhaugen, Clarence; Interview January 1, 1972
Ryan, Margaret; Interview January 4, 1972

PROFILES: My Grandmother’s Friends

Left to right:  Mrs. Zaharia, Margaret 'Toots' Ryan, Florence Godon, Esther Cleem (Florence and Esther were Thiefault sisters...), and Alberta 'Pat' Fitzpatrick Baudette, and in front, my grandmother, Elizabeth Fitzgerald Fitzpatrick in the wheelchair...

All the women in this picture (with the exception of my Aunt Pat who just happened to be home visiting that day...) were part of a group of friends who regularly hung out with one another, on an almost daily basis.  Growing up in St. Vincent, I saw many of them myself daily, as we all went about our business.  Most of the time, they were busy keeping house, looking after their families.  But as they went about their days, they would often run into one another at stores or church, in their yards or on the street, or stop by and visit.  Years ago, there was no common desire to avoid people and self-isolate as is common today; quite the contrary - most people sought out opportunities to socialize, to catch up.  

Names that still conjure up well-remembered faces and voices:

• Mrs. Zahara (a Ukrainian lady whose strong accent made me nod a lot without knowing a thing she was actually saying), 
• Matilda Cameron (a well-regarded seamstress whose second husband Wallace Cameron was a famous town constable), 
• Esther Cleem (who along with her husband were victims of a home invasion turned deadly), 
• Mrs. Gardiner (whose family tragedies rivaled my own Aunt Lena’s), 
• Florence Godon, whose husband Bill worked for many years with my Dad at the Noyes depot,
• Toots Ryan (good friend and neighbor-across-the-alley of my grandmother),
• Glenice Friebohle (good friend of my mother’s), 
• Ena Scobbie (wife of first pastor I remember of St. Vincent Evangelical Free Church), and 
• Cousins Hattie  Schwenzfeier, Annie Nordine, Mabel Steien, and Faye Lyberg.

They all loved to gab, to share news and gossip, and to have a good laugh.  In other words, they loved to visit!  They were never at a loss for words.  There were no awkward silences.  If anything, people spoke over top of one another at times, interjected at others, and at still other times, the room divided into two or three subgroups like modern-day ‘threads’, multiple simultaneous conversations, and later came back into one again.  

The one who was more often than not dropping by Grandma’s place, or she to her’s, was Toots Ryan.  Toots lived north of Grandma’s place, just out the back door, through the back yard, and across the alley.  As you’d approach Toot’s house, you would notice the steps were higher than most around town.  That’s because the house had been put up on a higher foundation, my guess to protect the home’s contents in case of flooding.  It was the only house like that in town, but I later thought that was pretty smart thinking.  But as a little girl, the time period I knew Toots well, it never crossed my mind - it was just the way it was.  Her steps were harder to get up than my Grandma’s, each one a bit taller than normal, so I’d have to lift my little legs especially higher and give an extra hrmph to lift myself up.  The top step was a length of railroad tie, then the highest step of all over the lintel into the house proper.  

The door led into the kitchen, which as I recalled had one length of counter along the west wall.  There was a sink like at home, but instead of a faucet and water turns for hot and cold, there was a hand pump, which brought up water up from a private well under the house.  I have a feeling there was probably more of these at one time, but to my knowledge it was the only one left in town by then, the early 1960s.  There was still a town hand pump just kitty-corner from the Ryan home, by the town pond and curling rink.  Knowing more now historically, I think the town pond and pump may have served multiple reasons - for watering animals, water for people, water for fighting fires.  Heck, Grandma would have me go fetch buckets of water for her, to water her garden during the summer, since drinking water for her cost her precious money; at that time, most of us had our water brought in by water trucks, costing x-amount much per 1,000 gallons, stored under the house in cisterns. Anyways, I always thought it was so interesting that Toots still pumped her water.  She had a big stove in her house, too, but I never noticed what kind it was.  

The only other room in the downstairs was her parlor.  The first time I saw the parlor was on a visit to Toots with my Mom; in the parlor were two chairs, and a piano.  I hadn’t started playing the piano yet, but we had one that I was always tinkling on at home, showing an interest in learning already.  So it wasn’t surprising at all that I headed straight for it the first time I saw hers.  It had a fascinating seat, not a bench like ours, but a stool.  I found out immediately that it could be adjusting in height, delightfully by spinning it to the right for up, or left for down.  The stool’s feet looked like the claws of an animal, and clutched within those claw were small, clear, crystal balls.  I opened the lid to the keys to see keys that had faint marbling and yellowing, which I later learned meant they were real ivory keys made from elephant tusks.  A few were missing, but most were still there.  The really cool part was when I began ‘playing’ the keys, I learned the piano was badly out-of-tune.  However, to me, that made is all the more special:  It reminded me of the pianos played in the old western movies on TV - in tune enough to make out familiar melodies, but enough out-of-tune to be an authentic saloon piano!  

Once I wore out my welcome on the piano, I jumped off to rejoin the women (my Mom and Toots, visiting…)  Toots was a shorter-than-average lady, who was almost as round as she was tall.  That day, I was probably about four years old.  I interjected into their conversation with the observation, “You’re really fat!”  There was sudden silence.  Then Toots erupted into what I can now only describe as jolly laughter.  My Mom directed a mortified, “Patricia Kaye!” Towards me.  Toots came to my rescue by saying, “Patricia Kaye, eh?  That used to be my favorite chewing gum!”  She got a kick out of my outburst.  I had no idea I had done anything wrong, stating the obvious.  Toots and I always got along famously after that early meeting - I would often run out my Grandma’s back door and run over to her house and into her house up those high stairs.  

But when Grandma had friends drop by, there was a lot of visiting…and always over tea and baked goods.  The visiting might start off slow and casual, and build up to stories filled with gales of laughter; or they might start out with an excited, “Have you heard…?”  Whether it was a neighbor, or a cousin coming from across the county, in those days, people would often just pop in, no call ahead - no one minded, in fact, it was an occasion to be excited about.  Out would come the teapots full of Red Rose tea, served up with bars, cookies, and sometimes even cake…but always plenty of tea!  If Mrs. Zahara was in attendance when I was there, I would avail her of her talents and beg her for a reading of the tea leaves. I wish I could recall at least one of those readings now…