The Old Depot
Jun. 27th, 2004 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
Wrote this to put here and I forgot it. Didn't I?
It's just another local color piece. Welcome to the land of us Cedar Savages.
The Old Depot
The Old Depot Restaurant, in Johannesburg, is neither old, nor is it a depot. There are no railroad tracks within ten miles. The building is brand new. On first impression you'd probably dismiss it as just another old-junk-on-the-walls yuppified Family Dining Opportunity, like an off-brand Chili's, TGI Friday's, Applebee's Ruby Tuesday's-- whatever it is we have here in town. I never could tell those apart.
You might start to suspect things are not as they seem when you approach and notice two aluminum plaques on the wall, one on each side of the entrance:
IN LOVING MEMORY
PEGGY BROWN KORONKA
A MOTHER, A WIFE, & A FRIEND
IN LOVING MEMORY
TEGAN FERLOAK
ONE OF GOD'S LITTLE ANGELS
As you step inside from the cold, a framed paper on the wall tells you the history of Johannesburg. Assembled "from recollections of senior residents in the 1950s," it is a model of incoherence. It tells you about the Johannesburg Company brick building with the Sheriff's office, jail, doctor's office and meeting hall, near the town center, in the space between the brick building and the white building, behind the community hall. All of these later landmarks are gone now, too, of course, making the Johannesburg Company's headquarters only somewhat less difficult to find than Cheops's third cousin's beer garden.
But the history does make it clear that there was a railroad. It was a spur line running northeast from the main line, perhaps fifteen miles away. It served the Johannesburg Company's sawmills here. That's why there could be a railroad here when Johannesburg isn't on particularly on the way to anywhere else. It was just another spur railroad of the logging era. The woods were rotten with them, especially in these highlands where there were no rivers to float logs out.
The Johannesburg spur was better than most. It wasn't one of the narrow-gauge roads the lumber companies themselves built everywhere, and tore out again just as fast.
Nope, some of the photographs on the walls have captions, and some of those captions say this was a Michigan Central spur. That means it was a good operation; Michigan Central was part of the New York Central system, and it was a company to be reckoned with, back in 1903.
One picture shows a small steam locomotive up to its withers in snow, next to a small, drab depot. The depot is wooden, with vertical board-and-batten siding. "MCRR Johannesburg Mich 1905," the writing on the negative says.
I can only imagine how isolated they would have felt in the winter, when the snow got so deep it wasn't even certain the train could make it to town. But they had their railroad. The Company's sawmill, steam-powered (no river for the more traditional waterwheel-powered mill you might expect, remember) provided free steam heat and electricity to the homes of Company employees. They were right up to date. They probably thought they were living in the next Chicago, or at the very least the next Ann Arbor.
It all depended on the forests, though, and they were gone by the 1930s. The sawmill closed. Michigan Central tore out the tracks so well you can't see a trace of them today. The whole region threatened to become again the empty wilderness it had been back when even the Native Americans never came here, because there was no particular reason for them to do so. A climax white pine forest is beautiful, but offers nothing in food; the bare sandy soil that's left when the trees are gone and forest fires have destroyed what little organic soil there was doesn't offer much more.
But they could still grow potatoes, since the soil was marginally less bad than in most of this region.
Behind me, in the kitchen, the cook and the waitress shouted to each other above the hum of the exhaust fans as I sipped my excellent home-made mushroom barley soup.
"And I read the Gaylord Public School used to be called Gaylord Agricultural School? And everyone went out to collect potatoes for six cents a bushel."
"Oh, ya, sure. Used to have them days off from school so everyone could do that. Called them 'spud holidays.'"
They grew potatoes. Even potato farmers want some place to get a cup of coffee and talk to the other locals, or even have a nice roast-beef dinner on Sunday. Perhaps they want it more than most. Apparently, they and the occasional tourist-- they would have been few back then-- were enough to keep a restaurant running here, at least intermittently.
There are four old pictures of the Depot on the walls. The locomotive in snow. The same building from the opposite direction, with some men standing around and two very discouraged-looking horses hitched to a sleigh. One of a crew of men in loose slacks, flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, suspenders, and battered, broad-brimmed hats posing in the freight door of the depot. And finally, near the cash register, a later photo. Much more weathered now, the building has a sign that says Old Depot Restaurant. There are no cars in the parking lot, but the sign looks 1950-ish.
The Traverse City Record-Eagle, my source for all names and hard dates here, wrote that the Old Depot was a restaurant off and on from the removal of the railroad in the 1930s until the 1980s. But it was empty, and had been empty for some years, when the Pohutsky family moved up here in 1987. I can only assume it had been their dream to run a restaurant in Northern Michigan, or why would they use their life savings to buy and renovate a run down depot in Johannesburg, of all places?
But they did, and the quality of their cooking brought them a steady clientele. By the time I moved back up here they were well-established. I think I heard about the quality of their pies by word of mouth before I'd lived in Gaylord a month.
I dropped in once or twice. The atmosphere was authentic enough, if it was authentic to split a little old depot building into a cramped dining room and an even more cramped kitchen. The rest rooms were especially authentic. They looked like they were left over from 1903, with a half-hearted rebuild in about 1949.
They seldom lacked for customers, though. They were good by any standards. I expect they could have made it in Manhattan, although they would have needed to charge ten times as much.
It all came to a crashing halt, literally, on July 29, 2001. The Depot was close enough to a stop sign and right-angle turn in Highway M-32 that a car driven by one Cynthia Kundrat could, and did, miss the corner and plow into the front of the restaurant at sixty miles an hour.
She said she was trying to commit suicide, although I personally would ask why, if that were the case, she would choose to hit a crowded restaurant instead of a nice solid bridge abutment on the freeway. In any case she failed to kill herself.
But she did kill Peggy Koronka, age 29, who was eating lunch with her husband and children. And Tegan Ferloak, four years old, who was with her parents. They were on their way home after church, but had decided to stop in for a bite of lunch.
One of the newspaper reports says five other people were injured, more or less seriously. Another says eight. Ms. Kundrat claimed mental illness, then copped a plea for two counts of manslaughter. She got fifteen years in return for taking two lives.
For some months the smashed-in building stood, half wrapped in plastic and blue tarps. There was some talk in the papers of repairing the historic building, but in the end they didn't. I suppose it would have been just a bit too creepy to open things again just as they had been, and still close enough to the corner that another car might come right in through the front wall at any moment.
The fact that they rebuilt at all, even if it was on foundations well south of the original building, shows they have more courage than I think I have.
As you travel around heedlessly, cruising down the two-lanes, watching the telephone poles and the farms and the signs flick past, you pass hundreds of little crossroads like this. Pause a moment, between searching in vain for good radio stations, and ponder all the history you're passing, unknown, unseen.
It's just another local color piece. Welcome to the land of us Cedar Savages.
The Old Depot
The Old Depot Restaurant, in Johannesburg, is neither old, nor is it a depot. There are no railroad tracks within ten miles. The building is brand new. On first impression you'd probably dismiss it as just another old-junk-on-the-walls yuppified Family Dining Opportunity, like an off-brand Chili's, TGI Friday's, Applebee's Ruby Tuesday's-- whatever it is we have here in town. I never could tell those apart.
You might start to suspect things are not as they seem when you approach and notice two aluminum plaques on the wall, one on each side of the entrance:
IN LOVING MEMORY
PEGGY BROWN KORONKA
A MOTHER, A WIFE, & A FRIEND
IN LOVING MEMORY
TEGAN FERLOAK
ONE OF GOD'S LITTLE ANGELS
As you step inside from the cold, a framed paper on the wall tells you the history of Johannesburg. Assembled "from recollections of senior residents in the 1950s," it is a model of incoherence. It tells you about the Johannesburg Company brick building with the Sheriff's office, jail, doctor's office and meeting hall, near the town center, in the space between the brick building and the white building, behind the community hall. All of these later landmarks are gone now, too, of course, making the Johannesburg Company's headquarters only somewhat less difficult to find than Cheops's third cousin's beer garden.
But the history does make it clear that there was a railroad. It was a spur line running northeast from the main line, perhaps fifteen miles away. It served the Johannesburg Company's sawmills here. That's why there could be a railroad here when Johannesburg isn't on particularly on the way to anywhere else. It was just another spur railroad of the logging era. The woods were rotten with them, especially in these highlands where there were no rivers to float logs out.
The Johannesburg spur was better than most. It wasn't one of the narrow-gauge roads the lumber companies themselves built everywhere, and tore out again just as fast.
Nope, some of the photographs on the walls have captions, and some of those captions say this was a Michigan Central spur. That means it was a good operation; Michigan Central was part of the New York Central system, and it was a company to be reckoned with, back in 1903.
One picture shows a small steam locomotive up to its withers in snow, next to a small, drab depot. The depot is wooden, with vertical board-and-batten siding. "MCRR Johannesburg Mich 1905," the writing on the negative says.
I can only imagine how isolated they would have felt in the winter, when the snow got so deep it wasn't even certain the train could make it to town. But they had their railroad. The Company's sawmill, steam-powered (no river for the more traditional waterwheel-powered mill you might expect, remember) provided free steam heat and electricity to the homes of Company employees. They were right up to date. They probably thought they were living in the next Chicago, or at the very least the next Ann Arbor.
It all depended on the forests, though, and they were gone by the 1930s. The sawmill closed. Michigan Central tore out the tracks so well you can't see a trace of them today. The whole region threatened to become again the empty wilderness it had been back when even the Native Americans never came here, because there was no particular reason for them to do so. A climax white pine forest is beautiful, but offers nothing in food; the bare sandy soil that's left when the trees are gone and forest fires have destroyed what little organic soil there was doesn't offer much more.
But they could still grow potatoes, since the soil was marginally less bad than in most of this region.
Behind me, in the kitchen, the cook and the waitress shouted to each other above the hum of the exhaust fans as I sipped my excellent home-made mushroom barley soup.
"And I read the Gaylord Public School used to be called Gaylord Agricultural School? And everyone went out to collect potatoes for six cents a bushel."
"Oh, ya, sure. Used to have them days off from school so everyone could do that. Called them 'spud holidays.'"
They grew potatoes. Even potato farmers want some place to get a cup of coffee and talk to the other locals, or even have a nice roast-beef dinner on Sunday. Perhaps they want it more than most. Apparently, they and the occasional tourist-- they would have been few back then-- were enough to keep a restaurant running here, at least intermittently.
There are four old pictures of the Depot on the walls. The locomotive in snow. The same building from the opposite direction, with some men standing around and two very discouraged-looking horses hitched to a sleigh. One of a crew of men in loose slacks, flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, suspenders, and battered, broad-brimmed hats posing in the freight door of the depot. And finally, near the cash register, a later photo. Much more weathered now, the building has a sign that says Old Depot Restaurant. There are no cars in the parking lot, but the sign looks 1950-ish.
The Traverse City Record-Eagle, my source for all names and hard dates here, wrote that the Old Depot was a restaurant off and on from the removal of the railroad in the 1930s until the 1980s. But it was empty, and had been empty for some years, when the Pohutsky family moved up here in 1987. I can only assume it had been their dream to run a restaurant in Northern Michigan, or why would they use their life savings to buy and renovate a run down depot in Johannesburg, of all places?
But they did, and the quality of their cooking brought them a steady clientele. By the time I moved back up here they were well-established. I think I heard about the quality of their pies by word of mouth before I'd lived in Gaylord a month.
I dropped in once or twice. The atmosphere was authentic enough, if it was authentic to split a little old depot building into a cramped dining room and an even more cramped kitchen. The rest rooms were especially authentic. They looked like they were left over from 1903, with a half-hearted rebuild in about 1949.
They seldom lacked for customers, though. They were good by any standards. I expect they could have made it in Manhattan, although they would have needed to charge ten times as much.
It all came to a crashing halt, literally, on July 29, 2001. The Depot was close enough to a stop sign and right-angle turn in Highway M-32 that a car driven by one Cynthia Kundrat could, and did, miss the corner and plow into the front of the restaurant at sixty miles an hour.
She said she was trying to commit suicide, although I personally would ask why, if that were the case, she would choose to hit a crowded restaurant instead of a nice solid bridge abutment on the freeway. In any case she failed to kill herself.
But she did kill Peggy Koronka, age 29, who was eating lunch with her husband and children. And Tegan Ferloak, four years old, who was with her parents. They were on their way home after church, but had decided to stop in for a bite of lunch.
One of the newspaper reports says five other people were injured, more or less seriously. Another says eight. Ms. Kundrat claimed mental illness, then copped a plea for two counts of manslaughter. She got fifteen years in return for taking two lives.
For some months the smashed-in building stood, half wrapped in plastic and blue tarps. There was some talk in the papers of repairing the historic building, but in the end they didn't. I suppose it would have been just a bit too creepy to open things again just as they had been, and still close enough to the corner that another car might come right in through the front wall at any moment.
The fact that they rebuilt at all, even if it was on foundations well south of the original building, shows they have more courage than I think I have.
As you travel around heedlessly, cruising down the two-lanes, watching the telephone poles and the farms and the signs flick past, you pass hundreds of little crossroads like this. Pause a moment, between searching in vain for good radio stations, and ponder all the history you're passing, unknown, unseen.
