The waymark coordinates are for the front door of the Rock Island RR Depot, now the Central Delta Museum, in downtown Brinkley. The depot is a contributing structure to the Lick Skillet Railroad Work Station Historic District.
The PDF of the nomination form for this historic district can be found online at the Preservation Arkansas website: (
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"Summary: The Lick Skillet Railroad Work Station Historic District is composed of a total of four contributing resources. There are two buildings: the Rusher Hotel (A), a three-story , loading brick masonry hotel building (NR-Listed 07/18/86] and the Union Station (B), a one and one-half story, load-bearing brick masonry passenger and freight railroad depot building. The one structure is the concrete concourse (C) that runs along the northern elevation of the hotel and extends to the east, wrapping around the trackside elevation of the depot and turning toward the south. The one site is the small, designed park space, located between the two buildings and abutting the southern edge of the concourse. There are no non-contributing resources.
Elaboration
The Lick Skillet Railroad Work Station Historic District consists of one previously-listed resource, the Rusher Hotel, and three other contributing resources: the Union Station, the connecting concrete concourse, and the small park area located between the depot and the hotel. . . .
Summary
Named for the railroad section camp originally cm this site, the Lick Skillet Railroad Work Station Historic District Historic District, Brinkley, Monroe County, is significant under Criteria A and C, with state-wide significance.
Under Criterion C, in the area of ARCHITECTURE, the district is significant as an intact segment of an early twentieth-century railroad corridor. The two contributing buildings in the district are examples of distinct and once common property types along the railroad corridors of Arkansas and other states.
The two contributing buildings are virtually unaltered examples of two of the most conspicuous railroad-related buildings constructed in the state - the depot and the railroad hotel. Constructed three years after the Union Station by local businessman Gus Rusher, the Rusher Hotel remains one of the most intact examples in the state of a hotel constructed for the purpose of offering overnight accommodations, though it also served as a mid, business and recreational center for travellers and businessmen.
Although railroads erected over one hundred types of structures dong their track md at their terminals, the depot was the most familiar and important to the people and the towns the railroads served.
Constructed in 1912 by the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (CR&P), or Rock Island, the Brinkley Union Station employed distinctive architectural features standard to that line's stations. Despite its use of standardized details and materials, however, the Brinkley Union Station is the only Arkansas Depot of its type: a junction union passenger station with skewed ground plan.
Under Criterion A, in the areas of TRANSPORTATION and COMMERCE, the Lick Skillet Railroad Work Station Historic District represents the essential impact of railroads on Arkansas by the encouragement of industries, the enhancement of agriculture, and inducement to settlement. Business and industrial estabIishments lined the railroad and radiated from the central structure of the depot.
Completed in 1934 and individually listed in the National Register (1986), the Rusher Hotel is an intact example of a commercial hotel intimately connected to the commerce generated by the railroads and dependent on the railroads for its existence.
Expansion of the town, arrangement of the streets, and the more subtle patterns of settlement and residence were also defined by the path of the rails. In this way, and in many other Arkansas towns, the rairoad was the conduit which developed and sustained the community, and the railroad depot and the commercial hotels which developed around it were the social and economic centers of the town.”