County of depot: Lawrence County
location of depot: 767 Main St., Deadwood
Phone: (605) 578-1876
"This Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad depot is located at 3 Seiver Street in Deadwood, South Dakota. It was built in 1897 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966 as part of the Deadwood Historic District. It has been rehabilitated into a visitor center." ~ South Dakota State Historic Preservation Ovffice
"December 29, 1890...just 130 miles to the northwest, the scene was entirely different. A jubilant crowd gathered at the bottom of a pine-clad gulch, loudly cheering the arrival of the first long-range passenger locomotive in Deadwood as a band began to play the Star-Spangled Banner. For the first time, the city was connected to the outside world by a set of iron rails. The age of the stagecoach had drawn to a close, and the era of the steam engine was about to begin, bringing with it new technology, cheap goods and a boost to commerce.
"...there were some who believed the coming of the railroad was anything but a happy occasion. The Black Hills Daily Times reported on the following day that the arrival of the train in Deadwood “gladdened the hearts of thousands,” and described how a crowd of 2,000 waved their handkerchiefs and shouted, “What a glorious sight!” But Estelline Bennett, a Deadwood journalist and historian who witnessed the event as a child, later wrote that “the essential qualities that made Deadwood a flaming frontier town went out with the old stagecoach or were ground to dust under the wheels of the incoming railroad train… in that one day the merry young mining camp bloomed into a surprised town with civic and moral obligations.”
"In fact, although Deadwood was one of the largest settlements in South Dakota, the boomtown stayed a stagecoach community for nearly 15 years, and it was one of the last major Black Hills towns to have rails laid up to its streets. But the railroad had been making incursions into the region for years, and even Deadwood, isolated as it was at the bottom of a steep gulch, had long known that the steam locomotive would soon be at its doorstep.
"But the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad had rail lines in northern Nebraska, which the company quickly exploited to their advantage. In 1885 the railroad reached Buffalo Gap, and in July 1886 the first train pulled into Rapid City, passing the newly-founded towns of Fairburn and Hermosa. Two years later the rails were within 10 miles of Deadwood, terminating in the small hamlet of Whitewood. It took another two years for the railroad to blast its way up narrow Whitewood Canyon and into the infamous gold town.
"In the meantime, the Deadwood Central Railroad began construction of a line between Deadwood and Lead. It was completed in early 1889, and began an incredibly popular light rail service. According to Bennett, the children of Deadwood resident Fee Lee Wong were so enthralled with the small train that they “insisted upon going every day.” The Chinese merchant decided the best solution was to hire “an old Chinaman to take them back and forth until they tired of the sport, but that wasn’t for weeks.”
"As Deadwood celebrated the inauguration of regular railroad service on the Fremont and Elkhorn, a rival railroad was already pushing its way into town. The new route of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad would stretch from the southern Black Hills, starting at a new company-built community called Edgemont, through the high reaches of the mountain range, past Custer, Hill City and Mystic, and down into Deadwood. A Burlington passenger depot was built near the intersection of Sherman and Deadwood Streets, while the Fremont and Elkhorn erected a station only a half-block away on the banks of Whitewood Creek.
"The railroad’s heyday didn’t last very long in western South Dakota, however. Although coal mines in nearby Wyoming kept the railroads busy, the decline of mining and the rise of the automobile was anathema to locomotives in the Black Hills. Although there was still growth in the regional railroad industry into the 1920s – to which Rapid City’s 11-story Hotel Alex Johnson, built by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad in 1928, stands testament – there were already signs of decline, particularly in the northern Black Hills. The populations of Deadwood and Lead began to wane as gold mining played itself out, and the beloved electric trolley line between the two cities was abandoned in 1927. Two trolley cars were converted into cafes that served each town for several years, but they were demolished in the 1960s." ~ Deadwood Magazine TDG Communications