Thursday, September 4, 1986/The Battalion/Page 5B r I Plush boxcar among collection st to show n discipline ons between -lice and hw.. i, who retiree e-r 21 years ling IH vean H grow froir, helped the funds, build icility opened r’s fifth ando bout 1.41 )o|)iilar piece jperating c; usel, which local park, it years tnic; ed. It's her llection, iff of paicte tricians is issport to h will ope: ide part nf of dO.IXKi by Frank. founders oil npany Crei lon't wantt in the cour fiest childre Museum draws railroad fans r first year rssing me, i o traveled ildren. retired his . act, whid: annine. nnle aeain and the Id theie asked . “I told k: ‘g- wave at the rked. When smiles goto in business e Wildlife Pi n building k and hangs he high writ a rooster. 1 ross a streid ms, walks k* sat Hall is (ferent ra» wice and r< ys. )vv business in NOBLESVILLE, Ind. (AP) — Multimillionaire Henrv Morrison lagler, a New York native who made a fortune as one of the found ers of Standard Oil Co., knew what he wanted when it came to building i miniature mansion on wheels. “This is one of the most opulent nd plush private rail cars ever juilt," said John D. Horachek clui ng a tour of the rolling palace at die indiana Transportation Museum. With about 500 members and housands of visitors each year, die museum with its collection of rail- oad equipment and other transpor- ation artifacts gets plenty of expo- ure. Imagine something the size of a arge box car. Fit the inside with stained glass windows near the ceil ing, and the walls with ornate white Florida satinwood. Run the finest carpeting from the sitting room at the back, to the front dining room with the bronze and onyx fireplace, and Flagler’s stateroom in the mid dle. There's even a set of electric bells for getting the attention of the help in the servants’ quarters. Flagler, who sold his share of Standard Oil in 1881 for S200 mil lion, wanted only the best. “This car is an eye, a window onto a world we can only imagine,” said Horachek, operations manager of the museum. The more than 60 rail cars are the focus of the museum’s collection at Forest Park, sitting in large sheds and a miniature rail yard, ever ready for walking tours. "It’s not a museum of display cases where everything is stuffed and mounted,” said Horachek, ex plaining that the museum’s two die sel engines and assorted dining and passenger cars have mostly been bought at scrap prices for restora tion. “It's the historical process,” he said as he watched two workers care fully rivet a former interurban elec tric car. “We’re not simply putting paint on things, we’re going back ahd restoring it to just the way it was.” Railroad buffs, particularly, have Residents remember town sacrificed to Army in WWII EAGLE POIN1. Ore. (AP) — A drive along Antioch Road northwest of Eagle Point reveals a few clues to how a happy rural community became a casualty of World War 11. Pocked concrete pillboxes and overgrown infanttv trenches mark a strange and fatal seven years in the history of the pioneer community called Beagle. Before 1942, Beagle was a friendly settlement of 100 fami lies who farmed, logged, worked orchards and lived mostly on what their hard work and dry land would yield. At its peak. Beagle had a post office, a general store, a grade school, weekly Sunday School meetings, and the Beagle Stic kies, a ball team that played Sams Val ley and Table Rock teams. But Beagle’s idyllic days ended with Pearl Harbor and the l nited States' participation in the war, when the U.S. Army decided to put the Camp White cantonment on the Agate Desert and turn Beagle into a training ground. In 1942, the government pur chased the property of those Bea gle families, and destroyed the school, post office, homes, barns and fences. But some Beagle f amilies never lost faith. They gathered one year after leaving—July 4, 1948 —for a picnic in Grants Pass. And they kept gathering every July, and these last dozen years they've pic nicked in the shady f ront lawn at Thelma Beers’ Sweet Lane farm. More than 100 people at tended some of those early pic nics. Nineteen attended this year. In 1942, the government purchased the property of those Beagle families, and destroyed the school, post office, homes, barns and fences. When the United States joined the war, Beagle families felt a re sponsibility to Uncle Sam. But they also felt frustrated and an gry being forced to leave behind their lives and lands. “We weren’t happy, let’s put it that way," Mrs. Beers says. “We didn’t want to move out of our homes. But you didn't fight the government.” Beers moved to Beagle in 1914, at age 4. “This had always been home to me.’’ she says. “All but 10 years of mv life I've lived within a mile of right here.” Boys were sacrificing their lives, says Charlotte Sweet; it wasn’t right for them not to sacri fice. “We had to be casualties of the war just like they were,’,’.she says. The relocation was, hard for the Sweets. Sweet and her hus band Marshall had just built their home and just gotten rural elec trification. Marshall had lived there since 1910; lie died 4‘/a years ago. T here wasn’t time or space to relocate the Antioch Cemetery, which sat at the heart of Beagle. So the Army laid the stones face down and buried the entire ceme tery 6 feet under. The earth pro tected the cemetery through the years of mortars and maneuvers, and in 1949, the Army hauled the dirt away, put the stones back in place and polished them clean. In 1949, the government of fered the land to the old owners, at about the same price they’d sold it for with fences, barns and homes. “When we bought it back, it was all down and destroyed,” says Beers, 76. Sweet, 71, says, “Yes, we were all delighted to come backet.” The Sweets got their 38.8 acres for about two-thirds of the $2,309 they received from Uncle Sam in 1942. “And boy, was it bare,” Sweet says. “There wasn’t a scrap of lumber left in the whole area.” Most trees still stood, but they’d been pelted by shrapnel. The land was full of potholes. Farmers who returned to their fields tilled up shell after shell. There are lots of stories about di sasters and near disasters. When Beers moved into her place, she filled three shell craters with dirt and decided to plant seedlings. Today a locust and two cedars help shade her home. When her husband Uloyd plowed that first year he hit a phosphorous shell. It sputtered and arced like a sparkler, but mercifully spared the new trac tor. Spades and even digger squirrels helped the Beers un earth about 11 more shells in the next few years, she says. been attracted to the museum’s cause. The group bought the diesel en gines in Chicago, where they had been shunted off to a siding awaiting a trip to the scrap yard. Paying less than $8,000 for each of the behe moths, volunteers, including present and former Conrail workers, refur bished the locomotives completely. Craig Presler, a volunteer who sits on the museum board, remembers the dining cars the group restored. “It’s a fascination with this kind of thing to take apart a 91-ton piece of equipment, put it back togetner, get it going 60 miles per hour and serve dinner on it,” Presler said. The point of such restorations, the museum members say, is to eventually run the equipment on regularly scheduled excursions from a central location, such as Union Sta tion 20 miles south of here in India napolis. Interest in such rides has been demonstrated by the success of the group’s Fairtrain, which has carried thousands of people from Carmel to the Indiana State Fair each August since 1983. The museum’s office is located in a tiny railroad station transplanted from Hobbs, Ind., and a working 1924 interurban car carries visitors on a 1-mile track. Many members talk wistfully about days gone by, when the elec tric interurban network carried pas sengers throughout Indiana, and train equipment of the type on dis play was considered high-tech. “People have a jet-set mentality to day,” Horachek said. “They don’t want to enjoy traveling, they want to be there yesterday instead of tomor row.” But some visitors, merely curious at the out-of-place railyard in the city park, leave the museum with a greater sense of history, Horachek believes. “You’re touching items that were a way of life, the care and concern of people who are now dead,” he said. “You’re reminded of how many peo ple have gotten on and off these trains, what their lives were like.” The collection, which includes a working 1898 locomotive used in the Singer factory in South Bend, fo cuses on the period from the turn of the century to the 1940s. “It’s a time period during which America became a world power through the use and development of the machinery we are preserving,” Presler said. And Flagler, who helped form the Florida East Coast Railway after sell ing his interest in Standard Oil, would be pleased were he to visit the museum today, the group’s mem bers believe. “If he were to w alk in here today, at the age of 100 and something, I think he would smile,” Horachek said. “I think he would be quite at home.” 7 Davs a Week Z3M Your Party Professionals Sigma Alpha 1986 Fall Rush Schedule Mu • Fri. Sept. 5 • Sat. Sept. 6 • Fri. Sept. 12 • Sat. Sept. 13 -Happy Hour 4-6 I Flying Tomato -Treehouse I Party Room 9:00-? -Happy Hour 4-6 Flying Tomato -Treehouse I Party Room 9:00-? 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