life at the depot
In March 1880, Revered Horace Woodworth, his wife, and four of their 11 children left Illinois, bound for Dakota. Just fourteen years old, son Jim had spent less than a year as an office boy for the Chicago & North Western Railroad, now he was being sent to be the depot agent in De Smet. Although Jim would "run" the depot, his father's name appeared on the books as the "official" agent. Later in life, Jim would admit that he was far too young to have taken on such a job, yet he held it until March 1883. At that time, he went to St. Paul to be the chief clerk at the general agent's office of the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railroad.

The Woodworths arrived only shortly before the first train reached De Smet. An empty boxcar served as the first depot, with a packing crate as the platform. The new depot was in the process of being built, and not at the whim of the carpenters in De Smet. The C&NW Railroad had standard sets of plans for things like the coaling station, section house (what Laura Ingalls Wilder called the Surveyors' House), water tower, ash pit, platform, and depot.

Although there were many sets of depot plans on record - from simple to elaborate - those built in Dakota Territory in the early years were often a combination depot, freight room, and living quarters in one building. They were often variations on two main designs, called simply the Number One and the Number Two: a building 60 feet or more in length, with one story freight room at one end, with the office and waiting room(s) beneath a four or five room "home" for the station agent and his family above. A central bay with windows on three sided afforded a view up and down the tracks without having to leave the building.

The photo is of the first depot at Volga; the bay was on the other side of the building, facing the railroad tracks. You can see a sketch of the De Smet depot in the 1883 bird's eye view. See John Miller's Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet, pages 19-20, at letter E.

According to early De Smet records, the depot living quarters were ~20 x 32 feet, meaning that the freight room and the office / waiting room below were each similar in size. Stairs to the living quarters were located in the office. One set of representative plans are shown at left. Since there are no existing photographs of the interior of the De Smet depot, it's possible that the layout varied from the arrangement shown. In the plans I saw, there was only a partial wall separating the kitchen and extra space, which I have shown as a dining room. Plan Number 1 differs only in that the overall size is smaller, and the stairs have a turn in them; they arrive between the kitchen and living room on a smaller, open landing.

In Little Town on the Prairie, we see the depot through Laura's eyes, when she and Mary Power attend Ben Woodworth's birthday party (see Chapter 20, "The Birthday Party"). The girls enter at the waiting room, then they pass through it (and the office) to get to the stairs.

At the top of the stairs was a "little hall" (enclosed landing). They would have gone through the living room to Mrs. Woodworth's bedroom, where they took off their wraps. Unless the rest of the guests arrived while Mary and Laura were primping, the text suggests an arrangement by which the girls can access the bedroom from the landing, then pass into the living room (swap the living room and adjacent bedroom locations).

According to the De Smet newspaper (January 1883), Jim was still in the habit of "shocking" visitors a year after Ben's party: Highly interesting experiments in electro-magnetism are conducted by Prof. James Woodworth, at the depot. They are most deeply interesting to the experimentee. The look of pained astonishment which he assumes is only equaled by the gentleman who discovers that some guileful plebian in whom he confided has worked on him a twenty cent piece for a quarter.

The De Smet depot burned to the ground in April 1905. It was replaced with a smaller, one-story depot. Jim Woodworth went on to become Vice President of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:03 PM