Susan's Cabinet: Chase Depot and North Alabama Railroad Museum

The Chase Depot building, built in 1937 to replace the 1908 building

Once again, a memory of an event that seems so recent is proven to be much longer ago by the age of my children. It turns out the last time we visited the North Alabama Railroad Museum was over twenty years ago! Along with two of my nephews, who now have families of their own, we explored the museum and went on a train ride. We got to pull the whistle in the diesel locomotive and explore the baggage and dining cars during the ride. When I visited again recently I found I really didn’t remember that much about the place and, of course, there have been some changes.

Exploring locomotive 484 in 1999. It was built by ALCo for the Delaware Lackawanna & Western Railroad in 1949. It was also used by the Reynolds Metals Company in Sheffield, Alabama. It is still operational and is in the colors and paint scheme of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway (with the museum's railroad name, Mercury & Chase).

The North Alabama Railroad Museum in 2020

The museum is an all-volunteer organization and is free to visit. (There is a charge for train excursions.) Volunteers are only on site at the museum two mornings per week, but you can visit “every day during normal daylight hours” and explore the outdoor exhibits on your own. Don’t be deterred if the big gates to the parking lot are closed. Park outside the gate and use the smaller pedestrian gate to enter. Information sheets are available in the waybill box on the side of the depot. You can visit the interior exhibits when volunteers are available and when train rides are offered. There is also a viewing platform where you can watch trains pass by on the Norfolk Southern mainline.

Locomotive 213 built by ALCo for Manufacturer's Railroad in 1941. It is operational.

The museum's collection includes a postal car, horse car, diners, sleepers, box cars, flat cars, coaches, baggage cars, a refrigerator car, and much more.

The Memphis & Charleston Railroad Company (M&C) built the first rail line through this spot in 1856. The line came from Memphis, through Decatur and Huntsville, and linked to the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad in Stevenson, Alabama. There was no depot here at that time. It was probably a water station stop but not a regular stop. (Huntsville, on the other hand, had a large depot by 1860 because it also served as the railroad’s eastern division headquarters).

As a link in the only east-west railroad through the Confederacy, the M&C was strategically important during the Civil War. The Union captured its eastern headquarters at Huntsville early in the war. Their occupation of Huntsville spared the Huntsville Depot (now one of the oldest depots in the U.S.) and, although many depots and other railroad buildings were destroyed in other towns, the section of line from Decatur to Stevenson was “in excellent condition” at the close of the war. By November of 1865, M&C had the entire line passable again, except for the loss of the bridge over the Tennessee River at Decatur.

In 1887 a second railroad came through the area when the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis (NC&StL) extended its line south to Huntsville. The two lines came to within a few feet of each other at Chase (then called Fearns).

The yellow dot is the location of Chase/Fearns. By 1892 the NC&StL reached the Tennessee River at Hobbs Island where the train was loaded onto a ferry for the ride to Guntersville (from there it continued by rail to Gadsden). (Photo of 1892 map from the Library of Congress: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3866p.rr005740)

In 1889, four brothers left Maine for Huntsville and started a successful nursery business on 600 acres of land in northwest Huntsville. In the early 1900s, the Chase brothers bought an additional 900 acres here, where the two railroads nearly met (and came to be known as Chase), in order to expand their shipping business through these north-south and east-west rail lines. By 1906 they had built a brick warehouse for packing and shipping their plants, and in 1908 they built a passenger depot which they leased to the railroads. Because the depot served two railroads, it was a “union” depot, the smallest in the U.S. They added the nursery office building in 1910. The depot was destroyed by fire in 1935, but the Chase family built the current depot on the same site in 1937.

The Chase Depot in 1915 (Photo from Internet Archive Book Images - page 7 of "Wholesale price list : fall and spring, 1915-1916" (1915), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34656754)

The former Chase Nursery office building, built in 1910, now a museum building. (The original ceramic tile roof had to be replaced.)

The former Chase Nursery warehouse is a partial ruin but the museum stores some equipment here.

Henry B. Chase (who became the president of the nursery company) also built a home across the road. He became a prominent Huntsvillian who served as the Mayor of Huntsville (1918-1920) and the first President of the Huntsville Historical Society. He died in 1961 at the age of 91. His nephew then ran the company.

Chase home, across the street from the Depot. It is now the Dogwood Manor Guesthouse.

Over the years, the railroads changed hands. The Memphis & Charleston became the Southern Railway in 1898 and then Norfolk Southern in 1982. Norfolk Southern still operates on this east-west line next to the museum. Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis became L&N in 1957, then Seaboard System Railroad in 1982, and the line from from Decherd TN to Chase was abandoned in 1985. The nursery went out of business in 1993. (Most of the nursery property now belongs to Alabama A&M University.) The Chase family had already converted the depot into a museum in 1966. With the demise of the north-south rail line, the North Alabama Railroad Museum moved to Chase and bought some of the track and right-of-way. The volunteers rebuilt 3 miles of missing track, so they are able to offer train rides of 10 miles round trip on their own Mercury & Chase Railroad.