(rshsdepot) Warren Plains, NC, Depot

["Mark A. Thomas" <markt_@_duke.edu>]

There's an article in Sunday's Raleigh News & Observer about the 
old Raleigh and Gaston freight depot in Warren Plains, NC.  
Those who went to the RSHS Raleigh convention will remember 
this. Kent Hannah really liked the freight doors with rounded 
tops. :-)

http://www.newsobserver.com/sunday/features/travel/Story/1109530p-1107330c.html

A couple of minor errors that popped out to me: It's the 
Seaboard Air Line, not Lines;  also, I believe you auger those 
big holes through wood with a "brace and bit," not a "bracing 
bit" as the probably young writer says.

Since I think access to the online story goes away after Sunday, 
4/7, here's the text pasted below.  --Mark T.

Published: Sunday, April 7, 2002 6:40 a.m. EDT

Station break 
Longtime train workers 'retire' to unused depot -- now an 
antiques store -- in Warren County. 



By BARRY D. TEATER, Correspondent 

WARREN PLAINS - During a half-century of riding trains through 
Virginia and the Carolinas, Francis M. "Happy" Egerton stopped 
at, or passed by, the Warren Plains Depot "Lord only knows" how 
many thousands of times. 


Egerton, 96, has been retired from Seaboard Air Lines Railway 
for three decades but still visits the depot almost every day to 
socialize with friends and reminisce about his railroading days. 
He comes to a train station that remains much as he knew it when 
he began working as a brakeman in 1923 and when he retired as a 
conductor in 1971. 


Built during the Civil War in 1863, the Warren Plains Depot is 
among North Carolina's oldest surviving railroad stations and is 
believed to be the oldest depot still standing mostly in its 
original form.


The depot was closed in 1960, and trains stopped rumbling past 
in the early 1970s when the tracks were pulled up. The small 
community of Warren Plains that thrived in the railroad's golden 
age is quiet. But the depot, seemingly indifferent to the change 
of three centuries, is very much alive. 


"This is an old, old structure that I'm just real proud of," 
says Bill Frazier, a retired high school teacher and football 
coach who owns the depot and sells antiques and collectibles in 
it. 


Frazier bought the depot from his cousin, public TV talk show 
host Charlie Rose, in 1996 when Frazier retired from teaching 
and coaching football at Warren County High School (where he 
never had a losing season in 37 years). Rose had inherited the 
depot from his parents, who had acquired it from the railroad in 
1963. 


The three-room station, used mainly for freight in its heyday, 
is built of board-and-batten walls and has a low-hipped roof 
with wide eaves that shelter a wraparound porch. Freight came 
and went through double arched doors on either side and through 
a sliding square door on one end. 


A passenger house once adjoined the freight house, but it was 
torn down just before World War II when passenger trains gave 
way to the automobile. Frazier toes the top of a mostly buried 
stone foundation that hints at where the annex once stood.


The depot's distinctive design merits a two-page description in 
historian Kenneth McFarland's "The Architecture of Warren 
County, North Carolina: 1770s to 1860s." Writes contributing 
author Michael T. Southern: "The well-built, one-story frame 
structure reflects the picturesque movement in American 
architecture that was sweeping the region in the late antebellum 
period and the desire of railroads to project a positive image 
with high-quality, up-to-date, and stylish buildings along their 
rights of way."


Frazier is happy to show off the depot to tourists who stumble 
upon his antique shop, three miles north of Warrenton and five 
miles south of the Virginia line. 


"Everything in here was hand-hewn," he says, admiring the 
craftsmanship that went into the joints and pegs of the complex 
truss system supporting the roof. "This is built mostly out of 
cypress. That's probably why it has lasted as long as it has."


Frazier points to a beam bearing the faint name of W.S. Terrell, 
the first depot agent, who oversaw the outpost from the 
mid-1800s until 1906. The black inscription, hand-painted in the 
elegant cursive of the day, has faded with time. 


Deep gullies have been worn into the plank floor by nearly 14 
decades of working feet, leaving stubborn knots protruding 
upward, like small stalagmites forming in a cave. Among the feet 
that trod here were those of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who 
came in 1870 to visit the grave of his daughter, Annie Carter 
Lee, who had died of typhoid fever eight years earlier while 
vacationing with her mother in southwestern Warren County. 


In another corner, Frazier moves a piece of furniture from a 
corner to reveal two round, inch-wide holes in the floor. 
Thieves sneaked under the depot one night about 1920 and used a 
bracing bit to drill through the floor and into the bottom of a 
liquor barrel. The spirits drained into their containers in the 
crawl space.


Displayed among items for sale are several artifacts that 
aren't. A Seaboard railway sign, rusting and riddled with bullet 
holes, hangs over a doorway. A long, wooden bench bears the 
initials of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, which gave way to 
the Seaboard name when the two railroads merged in 1900. Over 
the bench hangs a giant canvas mail bag. 


Frazier takes from the wall a long-handled "message stick" and 
demonstrates how it was used to hand off messages to a moving 
train before the days of telephones and two-way radios. And he 
shows a red pail that once hung above a water-filled barrel 
outside, to be used in case of fire. Its bottom is pointed so 
the bucket can't be set down without spilling its contents -- a 
clever deterrent to would-be thieves, he explains. 


The depot was built to serve the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, 
stretching 83 miles from the capital city to the Roanoke River 
near the Virginia line. Completed in 1840, the R&G was one of 
the state's first two railroads (the Wilmington and Weldon line 
opened the same year). That same year its rails delivered to 
Raleigh the Tornado, the first steam locomotive the city had 
seen, setting off a three-day celebration of the "iron horse." 


In 1936, Happy Egerton rode those same tracks into Raleigh on 
the first diesel-powered locomotive the city had seen, 
foreshadowing the demise of the steam-powered locomotive. He can 
recite the names of the crew on that maiden voyage as if the 
train rolled into town this morning. 


Egerton, who lives two miles away in Norlina, recalls delivering 
meat packed in ice to the depot before the days of refrigerated 
freight cars. The depot also received deliveries of lumber, 
liquor, produce and bales of cotton for a textile plant.


As a young man in Warren Plains, Frazier unloaded 200-pound bags 
of fertilizer at the depot. The work was good weight training 
for a football player who went on to become a Hall of Fame 
running back at Chowan College. 


People have offered to buy the depot from Frazier with notions 
of turning it into a restaurant or using its timber to build 
lake homes on nearby Kerr Lake or Lake Gaston. But he has 
declined all of them. 


He has also politely rebuffed historic preservationists who want 
him to list the depot on the National Register of Historic 
Places, because he doesn't want to deal with the requirements 
and restrictions that would accompany such a designation.


"I don't want anybody telling me what I can do with it," he 
says. "I like it the way it is. I'm not going to do anything to 
change it over a lot."


Frazier usually shows up at the depot every day, but business 
hours vary according to his whims. "This is vacation," he says. 
"I don't care if anybody buys or doesn't buy. This is rewarding 
because you meet so many good people -- interesting people."


Longtime friends drop by frequently, including Bennie King, his 
high school football coach; Jack Whitby, whom Frazier calls "the 
mayor" of Warren Plains; and Happy Egerton, who drives to the 
depot almost daily despite being in to a wheelchair.


"I've got to keep these boys straight," Frazier says of his 
regulars.


The player, the coach, the mayor and the conductor are living 
testament to what every 60-plus wife knows: A retired man has to 
have a place to loaf during the day. 


For the brethren of Warren Plains, it's the depot. 


The author lives in Raleigh. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mark Thomas / markt_@_duke.edu / 919-660-5853, fax:919-684-2855
Map and GIS Librarian / Economics Bibliographer
Public Documents and Maps Department
025 Perkins Library / Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0177

=================================
The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

------------------------------