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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
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1986 Fall
Rush Schedule
Mu
• Fri. Sept. 5
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• Sat. Sept. 13
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