Railroad Depot

Railroad Depot

In 1900 a new, larger Lowell train depot was built on the west side of Lowell. It was located south of today’s traffic signal at Hudson and Main on the east side of S. Hudson between the tracks. It opened on January 4, 1900, with trains scheduled through Lowell from Saginaw to Grand Rapids. Soon after it opened, the Pere Marquette Railroad took ownership.

Prior to the new depot, the Lowell & Hastings Railroad depot was located on South Washington at Front Street. The Lowell & Hastings Railroad was built from Freeport to Lowell where a round table and engine house were built south of the Grand River in 1887. In 1891, a three-span Howe truss bridge was built over the Grand River, and the railroad was extended to the Front Street depot. The bridge was built by Jared N. Brazee, the builder of the Fallasburg covered bridge. The Grand River bridge is still there. An existing small house was utilized for the passenger depot and a freight shed was added onto it. Sidetracks were built to the Lowell Cutter Co., Lowell Woolen Mill, Forest Mills, Ecker Planing Mill and the lumberyard. Soon after, the track was extended across the Flat River over the north edge of Island Park to the King Milling Co. The shed at King Milling which extends into the river was their train car shed.

While Lowell & Hastings was considering extending lines to the north, the company sold to The Grand Rapids, Belding & Saginaw Railroad Company in 1898 and then it was sold to Pere Marquette Railway. In 1899, railroad tracks were completed north of Lowell to Belding, Greenville and Saginaw passing through Moseley and Smyrna.

Just prior to the opening of the new depot, a Lowell Ledger article read: Traffic Manager Clark suggests that it would be a good plan for people on the west side adjacent to the new railroad track to clean up their back yards, so that strangers passing through town on that road may get a good impression of it. Good idea. Pass it on.

In January 1900, the paper reported that the new Pere Marquette depot was to be lit by electricity. “It will be an ornament to the village.”

The Pere Marquette Railroad received at Lowell during the first 15 days of March 1915 – 47 carloads of commodities (merchandise, coal, lumber, corn, hay, fertilizer, lime, spraying mixtures and grain); 45 carloads were shipped out (sprayers, grain, household goods, scrap iron).

A new trestle bridge was built over the Flat River in 1915. King Milling was recorded to have shipped a carload of flour to Rocky Mount NC (1038 miles away) at 4:30PM, March 13, 1930. It arrived at 1:30am on March 16.

In 1936, an auxiliary siding (railroad track going directly to a business for loading) was constructed to reduce the congestion of handling freight shipments. Prior to this, there was one siding which was used jointly by King Milling Co., C. H. Runciman Co. and Lowell Specialty Co. The north auxiliary track goes into the shed over the river. This is the track used by King Milling to unload wheat to the mill as well as load out boxcars of bagged flour from 1891 to the 1980s. Now bulk cars haul the flour out. The south auxiliary track was used by Runciman for grain and bean loading/unloading especially after the 1960’s when they built their steel bins just south of the tracks. The L. W. Rutherford & Sons canning factory shipped their mincemeat and canned tomatoes from the south siding too.

The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co. operated the railroad as the Chessie System from 1947 to 1980; then it became CSX Transportation Line. In 1967 three cars in a 98-car C&O freight train passing through Lowell on Christmas Eve derailed and smashed two trucks and damaged the railroad station. The roof of the station and the signal system were torn up.

From 1987 to 2006, it operated as Mid-Michigan Railroad Inc. The railroad was abandoned in 2007 to the north and south of Lowell and the tracks were removed except the tracks used to receive wheat at King Milling Company. The Lowell depot was no longer needed and was taken down in 1989.
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Harry Briggs was the station agent and cashier at the Lowell Depot when it was the Pere Marquette RR line beginning about 1918 to the 1930s. He was followed by Morris Blazo who was the final station agent. Many of the furnishings from inside the depot when it closed can be found at the Lowell Area Historical Museum having been donated by Clara Blazo, wife of Morris, and a few others.