Life along the lines

>>Browse a multimedia presentation including historic photos and audio clips from Paul Corbin

~ Southeast Missouri is dotted with train towns -- towns that sprung up along the railroad lines. Some were just stops for steam engines to recharge their water supplies, others were bustling depots with people and goods moving in and out numerous times a day. Here residents of those towns reflect on their history and ties with the railroad.

When the last train passed through Advance, Mo., there was no fanfare, no podium with bunting for public officials to mark the day for posterity.

In fact, it seemed as if few people in the town even noticed the Frisco line's last hurrah.

But Paul Corbin did. The date was Nov. 27, 1965, his 51st birthday.

"There was no celebration, no one to meet it or anything," Corbin recalls as he sits in his Advance home, just a short distance from the place where the tracks used to run.

A visitor to the town of about 1,200 people in northern Stoddard County today wouldn't even know trains once ran through Advance. No visible trace remains of the tracks but a highway, Route C, that runs along the old rail bed.

The railroad was a part of Advance for 84 years, at one time supporting four passenger trains daily and a bustling depot. Shortly after that last train ran through town, though, the rails were gone, and the only remnants of the railroad were some old photographs and the memories of people like Corbin.

Even though the railroad no longer runs through Advance, the town owes its very existence to the rail industry. Advance is just one of many towns in Southeast Missouri that share the same origin. Some were "tank towns" -- small settlements where steam engines would stop for water. Some were larger towns that supported a depot bustling with people and goods.

Some are still there, but almost too small to notice -- Rockview, Brownwood, Painton, Sturdivant. Others are still thriving, but small, communities -- Chaffee, Advance, Scott City. Others, like Corbin's home of Greenbrier, have disappeared except for a few dwellings.

Advance's early history reflects the origins of many of them.

In the 1880s the area around Advance's current site was largely swampland with farms here and there.

But Cape Girardeau railroad tycoon Louis Houck had ideas of bringing a rail line through the area near Advance's current site. He attempted to purchase land nearby, but property owners wanted too high a price. So Houck bought cheaper land from Joshua Mabery, a local farmer, a short distance away. The town was advanced to another location, giving it the name Advance.

Soon the line would continue through towns like Brownwood and run all the way to Zalma, supporting a thriving timber industry among the hardwood swamps.

By the time Corbin went to the nearest high school near his Greenbrier home -- about 5 miles away in Zalma -- it was the late 1920s and the line was a Frisco line. The railroads were beginning to die, but they were still an important part of the local economy.

Today he's the only surviving member of his 1933 high school graduating class of 11.

"I walked along the railroad track part of the way when I was going to high school," said Corbin, who also trapped opossum and raccoon along the Castor River that he followed to school. "I followed the Castor River, the banks of the Castor River, to the place where the railroad crossed the Castor River, and I followed the line into Zalma.

"I've seen cross ties stacked 6 to 8 feet high, 30 yards wide and a quarter of a mile long."

The mills that created those ties are now gone, as is the factory that created wooden boxes in Brownwood. Left behind are small dwellings of a few houses with no local economy of their own.

Unlike the Advance area, the trains still roll through many of Southeast Missouri's old train towns. In some places they're still a source of jobs and an important part of a town's identity.

Chaffee is one of those places.

When Chaffee celebrated its centennial last year, the railroad was a centerpiece of that celebration. Magnets were made with the words "We'll be railroading until we die!" and a mural was painted downtown, picturing a large steam engine and the long-demolished roundabout in the background.

The Frisco Railroad created Chaffee as a depot stop in 1905 after the company decided not to put its depot in Cape Girardeau. Now Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which bought Frisco, still has an office there, and Chaffee residents still work on the railroad.

Today a sign hangs over a bar downtown, train tracks painted on it, with the name "Frisco's." A short distance away is the city historical society's museum -- a place full of pictures and artifacts of railroad history. In another spot a street sign marks Frisco Avenue.

Photos at the museum show bustling downtown scenes, men working at the huge roundabout, and the depot that was torn down in the 1980s.

"You wouldn't believe how many businesses were in this town," said Betty Mirly, a member of the historical society. Now Chaffee is largely a bedroom community. People get what they need from a quick trip to Cape Girardeau.

But at one time, the best way to get to Cape Girardeau was by train, and several ran there each day. But as the car became popular that would change, and the railroad's decline would begin in Chaffee.

"People lost jobs, and by that time, more and more people had cars," said Mirly, whose grandfather worked on the railroad. "The railroads went on to just freight service."

Several people had come to Chaffee just to work on the railroad, and many of today's residents can trace their lineage to those people.

Erline Whitesell's father moved to Chaffee for a railroad job in 1936.

"Just about everybody worked for the railroad," she said.

Many of the descendants of those railroaders have set up their lives in Chaffee. Some have created successful businesses, some work for the railroad, some work in Cape Girardeau.

H.B. Rice's grandfather took a job on the railroad soon after it came to Chaffee in 1907. Now he has a successful insurance firm in town, and loves the railroad.

"Everybody's a railroader around here," he said.

Rice remembers the "chug, chug" sound of the engines he heard as a boy -- a sound that put him to sleep. He says he can still hear that sound in his head.

The sound of the trains was also familiar to Charles King, whose family moved to the Delta area when he was just a boy in a family of 11 children. King's father moved to Delta to find work on a farm at a time when two major railroads -- the St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern and the Frisco -- crossed in Delta.

The old rail bed where the Frisco ran is still there. Overgrown by weeds, it crosses Highway 25 in the middle of town. That bed is a remnant of a town that, like Advance, sprung up in the late part of the 19th century.

Delta was a hub of activity, a sort of frontier town on the edge of the Southeast Missouri swampland -- one of the last dry spots for miles in the journey south. It was once named Stilttown, for its houses that were built on stilts to rise above the floodwaters.

The town, today about 500 in population, was the site of a hotel, bars and a bustling train station. Delta was almost like a piece of the Old West in Southeast Missouri.

"It had the makings of a tank town that saw more than it's fair share of fights and stabbings," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University.

Today the trains pass by the town, not stopping on their way to other destinations. And even when King's family came to the area 65 years ago, the railroad had already seen its decline.

But the trains still went by Delta, and created some unique situations for King. He remembers seeing the leg of a man lying along the tracks decades ago -- a man who had tried to jump on a train and failed.

And he remembers hobos who used to stop at a house he bought for his parents to live out their lives in -- a house that still sits just feet away from the tracks.

"There used to be hobos here and mom wanted to fix them something to eat," King recalls as he stands under a shade tree at that house -- a structure that's now broken down. "I said 'Mom, don't ever turn them down because if they're hungry they might get mean.'"

King says he'll probably tear down the house soon, and the railroad will have one less building sitting alongside it. When King is gone, another of the few remaining who remember the tail end of the railroad's prominence in Delta will also be gone. There is no museum to preserve the town's railroad history, and no one to remember the trains that used to ride the abandoned lines that cut through town.

Yet the trains will still pass by on the line that remains, cutting its way across the countryside toward Dexter, Mo.

In Chaffee, people will still identify with the railroad. People will still work on the railroad. And through family histories, they'll still have stories of the old days of the railroad.

They'll be railroading until they die.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182