By Lisa Carolin
The Chelsea Depot is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and that is no doubt one of the reasons that it is currently being used as a model for other depots.
Last Memorial Day weekend, an old, restored depot adjacent to the railroad tracks in East Rochester, New York, caught on fire and burned down. Owner Stan Slade received a lot of encouragement to rebuild the depot, which housed a hobby shop inside it.
“He has decided to build a new hobby shop modeled after the Chelsea, Michigan Depot,” said John Frank, a member of the Chelsea Area Historical Society and former president of Preservation Chelsea. “The Chelsea Depot has been included in several books devoted to depots and is noted for its uniqueness.”
It was in one of those books that Slade saw a photograph of the Chelsea Depot and was inspired to rebuild a depot just like it.
According to Frank, Chelsea was chosen for an experiment by the Michigan Central Railroad management in 1880 because it was located at the intersection of a major east-west mainline and a major north-south wagon road (now M-52.)
“They thought Chelsea would grow into a major shipping hub for agricultural products and other goods and chose it as a place to improve the design of rural railroad stations to encourage passenger business,” explained Frank. “They enlisted Mason & Rice, a reputable Detroit architectural firm, which came up with a larger and more opulent depot than would otherwise have been appropriate for a village the size of Chelsea.”
Frank says that although Chelsea prospered, it did not become the major transportation hub that was envisioned for passenger traffic, due in part to the advent of the motor car.
“Passenger service to Chelsea was discontinued by Amtrak in 1981,” said Frank. “The building was used for several years for storage and was deteriorating for lack of maintenance. In 1985 a group of concerned citizens, with financial help from local businesses, bought the station and undertook restoration.”
A depot modeled after the Chelsea Depot will be built from scratch on the same site where the former depot burned down in East Rochester. The goal is to effectively mimic the Victorian “Stick Style” appearance of the Chelsea Depot, which Frank describes as having, “widely-overhanging eaves, multiple gables, hip-roofed triple bay windows on each end, and both horizontal clapboard and vertical board-and-batten cladding.”
