Old Santa Fe Railroad Depot

About this property

The Old Depot Museum is a history museum located in Ottawa, Kansas. The focus of the museum is primarily on the regional history of Franklin County, and the importance of trains to the development of small towns. It features history of local Native Americans, local industries, and has accurate recreations of historical rooms. The Old Depot Museum is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Galveston (LL&G) railway was the first railroad in Kansas to be built south of the Union Pacific railroad in Lawrence, Kansas. This railway was 30 miles long and connected Lawrence to Ottawa. It was constructed primarily by Chinese railroad workers from 1867 to 1868. In 1873, the LL&G railway failed and was sold to the Kansas City, Lawrence, and Southern Kansas Railroad, who constructed a train depot in northern Ottawa in 1888. The depot was designed by George Washburn, and made with limestone from Cowley County. In 1895, the depot was sold to Santa Fe railway, who kept it until railroads fell out of popular use. In 1962, the depot building was donated to the Franklin County Historical Society, who turned the building into a museum the following year. The museum opened on the 4th of July, 1963. The museum received a grant from the ISTEA in 1996, and closed for three years to undergo major renovations. In 2001, a high water marker was placed on the outside of the Depot to commemorate the Great Flood of 1951. The marker stands 9.8 feet (3.0 meters) high, the highest that the water of Marais des Cygnes river reached during the flood. One room of the museum is dedicated to an HO scale model train, with both steam and diesel trains. The model train shows the railroad and Franklin County as it looked in the 1950s, and includes structures that exist around Franklin County. The Old Depot Museum has historic room recreations that show what building interiors may have looked like in the Victorian era. This includes a parlor, a general store, a soda fountain, a dentist's office, and a one room school house. The soda fountain display room is based on the Bennett Creamery, which was once a commercial shop in downtown Ottawa, Kansas. The one room school house is available to be booked for field trips, and students can come visit and experience what a school day would have been like in one room. Visiting children even wear pinafores and suspenders, clothing that children would have worn during the time of one room school houses. One permanent exhibit is focused around abolitionist John Brown, and the Pottawatomie Massacre. This exhibit was created by Traub Design associates in 2007, and its creation was made possible through a grant from the Kansas Humanities Council. The exhibit involves an "immersive" element, in that instead of a traditional visual museum exhibit, visitors go into a dark room and listen to accounts from family members of people murdered in the massacre and people who supported the attack, recorded by voice actors.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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