History of the Cherokee Depot

The Cherokee Depot was built in 1896 and was used by the Illinois Central Railroad (ICRR) as a Passenger Station until May 1971 when AMTRAK began operations nationwide. The Cherokee Depot was then used by the ICRR as a Freight Station until January 1982 when the building was vacated by the railroad. The depot sat unused for many years and deteriorated. Vandals broke into the building in the mid 1980s and set fires which were, thankfully, extinguished by our capable Cherokee Fire Department! The windows were again boarded up with plywood and the building stayed unused a few more years. In 1989 the City of Cherokee ordered the railroad to remove the canopy of the depot because it was considered a danger in that part of it might fall on a pedestrian and cause harm to the pedestrian. The railroad hired a local contractor who removed the canopy as required (on Thursday, December 28, 1989) and then two interesting things happened.

First, the City of Cherokee sought to purchase the depot at a reduced price from the railroad in order to demolish the depot and make the empty land available as a parking lot. Second, months later the United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, officially designated the Illinois Central Railroad Yard -- Cherokee, and the Cherokee Illinois Central Station, as entered in the National Register of Historic Place on September 6, 1990! The Cherokee Depot and the Cherokee Railyard were listed in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) even though the canopy had been removed from the depot!

The nomination of the Cherokee Illinois Central Station and the Railyard in Cherokee to be listed in the NRHP resulted from a process that began during the 1980s when the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) contracted with PHR Associates of Santa Barbara, California to study the railroads of Iowa, and to nominate for listing in the NRHP those railroad properties considered worthy of listing in the NRHP. At the conclusion of the study, PHR prepared a thorough report in the format of a form of the United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. The form was a Multiple Property Documentation Form titled specifically The Advent and Development of Railroads in Iowa: 1955-1940. It was accepted at SHSI on July 18, 1990. In their report, PHR chose the Illinois Central Railroad as a line study across the entire state of Iowa.

The report makes very interesting reading for railfans - especially fans of the ICRR! When the two events occurred within nine months of each other - the removal of the canopy from the depot, and the listing of the depot and the railyard complex as a Historic District in the NRHP, things started happening in Cherokee.

A young man named Bill Sauer wrote some timely articles in the Cherokee Daily Times alerting the citizens of Cherokee that we were about to lose the Cherokee Depot, an important part of our local heritage. The editor of the newspaper, Tom Miller; and R.J. Baker, Director of the Cherokee Area Economic Development Corporation (CAEDC) included the Cherokee Depot as a topic for discussion in a community meeting they called in the Summer of 1990 for the purpose of discussing issues important to Cherokee. Several of the people who attended the general meeting gravitated to the group that was discussing the Cherokee Depot and what to do about it. These people became the charter members of our volunteer group, Depot Renovation, Inc. We went on to have many more meetings on our own at the Sanford Museum where we eventually decided that we really wanted to take on the massive project of saving the town's railroad depot for ourselves and for future generations.

We met with the Cherokee City Council and were granted the opportunity to go into the depot and look at it and clean it and have an Open House so anyone in Cherokee or the surrounding area could come inside the depot and see for themselves what condition the depot was in. Mick Samsel, first President of Depot Renovation, Inc., arranged the Open House and called it the "See For Yourself" open house. We had more than four hundred visitors to the depot that October Sunday in 1990, and we received two thousand dollars in donations along with many words of encouragement to continue with our dream to save the depot. We were encouraged!

Eventually we reached an agreement among ourselves and with the City of Cherokee that Depot Renovation, Inc. would purchase from the City of Cherokee the depot, the nearby Express Building and the yard South of that building for the same amount ($27000) that the City paid the railroad for the property. We began the process of raising funds in earnest, formed our nonprofit tax exempt corporation, and made the final payment to the City of Cherokee in January 1992! Now we owned a depot! What would we do with it? v As you will see in this website (which we are grateful for and proud of) we decided to stabilize and rehabilitate the depot and the express building, and use them for multiple purposes consistent with our mission to preserve the historic railroad heritage of Cherokee and the surrounding area, and to teach about that heritage.

Eighteen years later we are well underway, but not even close to being finished!