The Louisville & Nashville Railroad Depot is historically significant to Selma because of its inclusion in the Water Avenue Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, its location within the viewshed of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and its current role as the harbinger of community history. Once a site of passenger and cargo transit for Selma, the Depot now serves as a key repository for the city s rich and multifarious history. Description: The Depot is a two and a half story, brick building in a mix of late Victorian era styles, influenced largely by Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Mission architecture.
It encompasses a roughly symmetrical building with a hip roof and front parapet with a tripartite arrangement of arched windows with thin, applied lintel, a bracketed and dentiled cornice, a turret to one side, and an entrance covered by a large, bracketed hood. The building sits on a rough faced stone foundation. It features a cornice over the first story and stringcourses in the second story, at the sill level and over the windows. The cornice is broken to the center of the building to allow for the parapet. The primary entrance is one side of the center of the fa ade and includes double doors with narrow sidelights and a large transom, and is flanked by narrow, one over one light sash windows. The typical window is a one over one light sash window with a stone sill and wide lintel.
The octagonal turret to one side rests on a square base first story, where there is a doorway and single. A molded brick chimney rises to the opposing side. The building is flanked by one story wings covered by a hip roof that extends to form a covered area supported by large brackets and include double door entrances and a window to the far end. History: Constructed in upon the ashes of a Confederate Naval Foundry destroyed by Federal troops during the Battle of Selma in the building became home to the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. Founded in the company s tracks traversed more than miles across thirteen states.
The Selma Depot was one of the largest and most embellished structures outside of the company s headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, with decorative wooden brackets, cast concrete finials, and a turret that provides a vertical marker for circulation, containing an open well stair that connected the passenger floor LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE RAILROAD DEPOT (Old Depot Museum) HABS No. AL 696 (page 2) with the office above. As a company designed structure, most likely executed by the German born architectural engineer and truss pioneer Albert Fink the Romanesque Revival building features red brick, details in Portland stone at the base and belt, wooden cornices and brackets, copper flashing and roof detail elements.
It separated White and Black passengers with a sealed wall between the what the plan labels the Colored Waiting Room and the canteen. Further spatial division, albeit less impenetrable, existed between the sexes in the waiting rooms reserved for White passengers. The ticket office served as the barrier between these gender segregated spaces. Black passengers had to buy tickets from an outside platform window. The rooms dedicated for use by white passengers contained restrooms whereas the two small restrooms in the Colored Waiting Room did not specify genders. L&N Railroad porters, who were predominantly African American, shared these facilities with passengers. When the last passenger trains ceased service in the the Depot served as Selma s forensic office.
The brick walls were then covered in gypsum and the plaster and lath ceilings concealed beneath the dropped ceiling s acoustic tiles that accommodated new wiring and austere fluorescent panel light fixtures. A once distinctive interior devolved into a characterless series of utilitarian spaces: the terrazzo floors hidden by linoleum, the monumental arched threshold to the women s waiting room covered, the coal cellar shuttered, and the railway tracks removed. Less than two decades later, the building transitioned once again to become the Selma and Dallas County Interpretive History Museum and Archives, commonly known as the Old Depot Museum.
It was impossible to study the historic fabric of the building s interior until a radical renovation and reorganization of the museum in revealed layers of architectural history and a cache of forgotten collections. Research indicates that this structure is one of only four nineteenth century masonry depots from the extensive L&N railway network in existence. Selma s Louisville & Nashville Railroad Depot is unique in that it has been in continuous use as an adapted structure.
Although not independently listed, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad Depot is a part of Alabama s largest contiguous historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, the Water Avenue Historic District.1 Once a crucial commercial corridor, this neighborhood features architecturally significant structures (circa ranging from single family dwellings to a hotel, warehouses, and specialty stores and businesses along the Alabama River. 1 The district is established in then expanded in a new boundary expansion proposal is currently under review. LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE RAILROAD DEPOT (Old Depot Museum) HABS No. AL 696 (page 3) Here, cotton moved through Dallas County s prosperous agricultural region and then further south to Mobile Bay.
For much of its recent history, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad Depot (now Old Depot Museum) served a cabinet of curiosities rooted in Selma s role in the Civil War and Civil Rights. Curator Beth Spivey initiated the substantial renovation and reorganization of the museum and its collections, transforming the museum from a fascinating cacophony to a rich thematic space with a primary focus on artifacts related to African American history and culture that were either not previously on display or not featured prominently within the museum. Once tucked in a lonely corner of the museum, but now exhibited prominently across two floors, are the Masonite murals by Alabama native and African American artist Felix B.
Gaines Funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Arts Project, Gaines completed these visual dedications to the local African American community s resiliency in Initially displayed prominently in the WPA funded Dallas County Colored Community Center, a structure now unoccupied and referred to as the WPA funded George Wilson Community Center, these murals detail Gaines s vision of the oppression endured by African Americans in the Old South and the potential prosperity in the New South. Thanks to Spivey s recent efforts, the Colored Waiting Room of the historic Old Depot is now the center of the museum s civil rights interpretation. This space, the most visited in the museum, is home to an unparalleled collection that, until several years ago, was unavailable to the public.
Prominent artifacts include possessions belonging to Dr. Martin Luther King, arrest receipts for African American citizens charged with parading without a permit, and the irreplaceable logbook of the segregated Good Samaritan Hospital, which documents the injuries and death of Jimmie Lee Jackson that precipitated Bloody Sunday. Hospital records also include the treatment of admitted African American marchers following the events of Bloody Sunday. The reorganization and interpretive shift of the museum toward a regional approach to African American history and culture, including expanded educational programming and outreach, directly align with several other institutional changes in Selma.
For example, the area is now home to the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute (founded as well as the new Selma Interpretative Center for the NPS expanded facilitating interpretation for the 54 mile Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail (established in conjunction with the Civil Rights Trail that covers 130 sites in twelve states (established Although not explicitly named in the national trail, the Old Depot Museum supports the seven sites in the Selma/Dallas County region by contributing to local tourism and the trail s mission to enrich access to LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE RAILROAD DEPOT (Old Depot Museum) HABS No. AL 696 (page 4) authentic, historic, and engaging sites within the landscape of American civil rights.2 The museum s exhibits still present histories in tension.
Selma s tourism is mainly tied to its civil rights sites; yet the structure of the Old Depot Museum recalls much older antagonisms considering that the building rests on the site of a former Confederate foundry. As a railroad depot, the architectural fabric s physical partitioning of White and Black passengers reflected the racial tensions associated with Jim Crow. The museum s layout exposes the tension between the competing historical narratives of the Civil War and civil rights, with the exhibit rooms sharing a brick wall.
On one side of the wall there are scenes from Bloody Sunday; on the other side are uniforms and a couch that belonged to Edmund Pettus, a brigadier general with the Confederate Army, United States senator and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan who, posthumously, provided the problematic moniker for Selma s steel through arch bridge (dedicated May The wall between these two rooms, once the physical barrier in the segregated train depot, is now only roughly punctured and framed with double doors.
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