Tales of the Omaha Depot

Technically this should be Tales of the Omaha Depots.  Confusingly there were two locations and seemingly several iterations at each.  I'll mention some of this in passing but honestly, detailed railroad history is a rather, hmmm, selective interest.

The history of American communities is often based on transportation.  With so much space there have to be reasons to put a town at a given location.  As with many early communities Chippewa Falls was founded on a spot with good water power and at least some prospects for river travel.  But the latter never really panned out, so there was much interest in railroads arriving as soon as possible.

The first line came to Chippewa Falls from Eau Claire in 1875.  Note this 1874 Birds Eye view that already has a train chugging into town!  It was pretty common for early illustrations to take a few liberties in the interest of civic boosterism.

Assuming this at least reflected planned development this depot appears to have been on the South Side of town right near the end of the Main Street Bridge.  Early depots generally seem to have been on the South Side - otherwise rather inconvenient as the main town was across the river - as this avoided the need to deal with the two big hills that loomed over the town to the east and west.  

The Omaha Line, or if you are being pedantic the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railroad, came to town in 1883, with their first depot being on the South Side just a bit upstream from the earlier depot.  One year later in the fall of 1884 they also built a spur line to a depot on the East (or Catholic) Hill across the river.  This seems rather redundant.  An 1886 Birds Eye view shows us both Omaha Depots.

East Hill:

The adjacent W.O. Lamb company sold wholesale "Lime, Coal, Oil, Salt, Sash, Doors and Blinds".

South Side:

Rail depots always have people coming and going.  So the local papers report various tales of pickpockets, derailments, fishing expeditions and so forth.  In October of 1894  William McKinley gave a whistle stop speech at the East Hill station.  In 1918 a contingent of local boys marched off to The Great War at the South Side station, accompanied by a marching band, a crowd of thousands, bonfires lighting their way and skyrockets launched overhead.

It's hard to fathom why the Omaha line actually had two depots in town.  From what I can gather, they were trying to induce the locals to pay for expensive improvements including a new bridge over the Chippewa River in exchange for building a single first rate depot.  When that was not forthcoming operations were just moved to the South Side for good in 1896.  

The South Side depot was never a grand place.  In fact an anonymous writer in the Chippewa Herald describes it as an embarrassment.  On one occasion when there was a fire in the neighborhood disappointment was expressed that it was only a freight car and not the depot proper that had gone up in flames.

Eventually another form of transportation, automobiles and trucks, largely supplanted rail service.  Certainly for passenger service, and with the decline of lumbering after the early 20th century there was much less need for freight as well.  The Omaha depots were converted to other purposes.  On the East Hill a Farmers coop took over the building.  I recall one associated structure, a grain elevator, being there until circa 1990.

The South Side depot faded to obscurity and was also converted to storage.  The State Historical Society preserves this photo of the site:

It is felt that this structure was the freight depot, and that it dates to about 1897, approximately the time of the move of operations to the South Side.  Today there is nothing there but a tangle of brush next to tracks that are still in use.