Railroads played a key role in history, once being the sole and indispensable means of long-distance transportation. I’ve never been a “buff” of any sort, but we had a Lionel train set in my younger years, like many Boomers. Actually, it belonged to my older brother; how he came to own it is a good story but will be left for another day.
I got a fairly deep dive into local railroad history, however, working on the trail of the railroad depot that was a part of Craigville for 100 years and now will be part of an interesting future of downtown Fort Wayne. It is more understandable now how people can become a buff and it brought back a number of memories of growing up in Decatur about a block away from the busy Erie-Lackawanna line and also delivering the Decatur newspaper to that depot as well as the one a couple more blocks to the south — the Nickel Plate depot. I had enough awareness that it exited Decatur to the southwest but had not yet heard of Craigville or Bluffton which of course was where those trains came from and went to.
When we moved to Decatur in 1961, the three major streets that the Erie-Lackawanna crossed still had crossing guards who would emerge from their shacks with a stop sign when trains approached. The two depots continued to operate at least through the mid-‘60s when I was delivering papers. My memory says the agents were really old guys — at that age, however, anyone over 30 looked old to me.
There were a number of historic details that I didn’t think fit into the narrative in the report published in Tuesday’s edition. So if you’re interested …
• Alan Daugherty grew up in Craigville, founded by his great-great-great-grandfather, Peter Hetrick. A digression: When my wife read the story, she asked if Maynard Hetrick was any of Alan’s relation. “He was my great uncle,” he replied, “Why?” Maynard’s daughter Janet married my wife’s uncle, Larry Hutker. Hence, Alan and I are related. Sorta.
At any rate, as reported, Peter Hetrick chose to name the town after a man named William Craig. Why?
“Don’t know,” Alan told me. “Maybe he thought ‘Craigville’ had a better ring to it than ‘Hetrickville.’” And acknowledged that it probably does. Alan thinks Mr. Craig was an investor in the railroad and at one point the railroad company went into a “receivership” — or bankruptcy — that was handled by the same Mr. Craig.
• If you think mergers and acquisitions are a new-fangled part of the business world, a little railroad history will dispel that. In this case, the original rails were built by the Toledo, Delphos & Burlington Railroad. Expanding west, they reached Craigville and then Bluffton in 1879. They would complete the railway to the Illinois line by 1881. This, all according to Craig Berndt, a helpful retired city planner and genuine railroad history buff from Fort Wayne. He’s written several books.
“TD&B went through four consolidations, emerging as the Toledo, St. Louis & Western Railroad (also know as the ‘Clover Leaf’) in 1900,” Craig wrote. “It and two other companies consolidated as the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad in 1923.” This was more commonly called the “Nickel Plate Road,” notably leaving out the “rail,” Craig noted.
The Nickel Plate was merged into Norfolk & Western in 1964, he continued, which merged into Norfolk Southern Railway in 1998. The track at Craigville is now owned by the Wabash Central Railroad, based in Bluffton.
• The TD&B Railroad was originally built as a narrow-gauge track, measuring 36 inches in width. Amazingly, it was converted to the standard gauge 56.5-inch width on June 26, 1887 — all 450 miles of it in one day. Records reveal that “thousands of men” were employed in order to complete that transition.
• Regular readers of these N-B pages will know that Alan is our “Angelkeep Journals” guy and is quite the local historian. Part of what he shared during this exercise is the official birthday of Craigville: April 21, 1879. While we were traveling together to Fort Wayne to meet Don Steininger and Craig Berndt to finish up the depot’s journey, we were discussing Craigville’s heydays.
“I’d be willing to bet that today, more people work in Craigville than live there,” I offered. He was doing a little mental math on how many employees are at the several businesses still operating there.
“Could be,” he finally said.
• Alan, who regularly peruses microfilms of old newspapers, also provided this “sidebar too fun not to include:”
CRAIGVILLE AGENT HAS LEG CUT OFF.
Ike Stevenson, Nickel Plate railroad agent at Craigville, lost one leg under the wheels of a passing freight train Tuesday. The leg was a wooden one, however, and Stevenson merely experienced the inconvenience of two days until a new one arrived. The agent tried to cross the track ahead of the freight engine which was closer upon him than he thought. Suddenly he realized he was to be struck and he lunged forward. Only his wooden leg got caught and it was ground under the wheels of the engine. Otherwise Stevenson was unhurt. Until a relief agent arrived on the scene Stevenson remained in the ticket office and grinned at the trainmen as they went by. He was to assume his regular duties today.
— The Evening News, Oct. 2, 1924, p.1.
“That’s probably too much information, more than you desired,” he closed the email responding to a few of my follow-up questions. I didn’t think it was TMI; didn’t think you would either.
miller@news-banner.com
