Chatham Railroad Museum To Celebrate 65 Years

CHATHAM – Say you’re in the heart of Chatham and want to get to Harwich fast. But Route 28 is clogged, as is Route 137. Maybe you need to order and wait for a $30 Uber ride. 

If it was the late 19th to early 20th century, there wouldn’t be any issue. Not only because you probably didn’t have a car and definitely had never heard of Uber (perhaps you had access to a stagecoach), but because you’d instead just hop on the train for 35 cents at the railroad depot in Chatham and get to Harwich in 20 minutes.

That was reality in Chatham from 1887 to 1931, when the town had an operating railroad that provided service to Harwich and Boston for more than 20,000 passengers annually. Freight traffic continued for a few more years until the station’s total closure in 1937. More than a decade later, a couple from Cleveland, Phyllis and Jacob Cox, purchased the depot and donated it to town, which accepted it in 1951.

On July 1, 1960, within that very building and plot of land, the Chatham Railroad Museum was established. The museum, operated by a team of volunteers and visited by about 6,000 per year, turns 65 this year. 

To celebrate, an anniversary party will be held at the museum at 153 Depot Rd. from 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 12. The anniversary and its celebration were officially proclaimed by the Chatham Select Board. The event will include railroad arts and crafts, a scavenger hunt with prizes, cornhole, model train displays, cupcakes and more. The celebration, like the museum itself, is free. A rain date is scheduled for Saturday, July 19.  

 “It certainly is a recognition of how long the museum has been in existence and supported by volunteers,” Chatham Railroad Museum Committee co-chair Liz McCarte said.

 Ever since Frank Love, a retired New York Central executive and the museum’s inaugural director, first solicited donations of items from more than 60 railroad presidents, the museum has served as a home for railroad artifacts and train history. Inside the original depot building are exhibits of badges, timetables, lanterns, signs, photographs, models and a lot more.

Behind the museum is a restored caboose that dates from 1910. The depot building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The museum has, in fact, existed for longer than the span of history of the railroad in Chatham. There are current volunteers whose parents had previously volunteered. A similar sentiment applies to the museum’s visitors.  

“We have families who the parents are like, ‘I came here when I was a kid. I had to bring my kids here,’ and it’s a legacy in that sense, too,” McCarte said.

Committee co-chair Gil Sparks said his kids loved the museum and so do his grandkids.

“It’s the history, and then the kids just love it, and it’s sort of a generational thing,” he said.

That railroad history, a draw for many, began in earnest in 1886 when the Chatham Railroad Company, under the leadership of Eldredge Public Library founder Marcellus Eldredge, was chartered in 1886 to build seven miles of track to Harwich. The track and stations were leased to the Old Colony Railroad, which was later acquired by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Train service “put Chatham on the tourist map,” Sparks said.

In the final year before the railroad began operating in town, 400 people came by stagecoach to Chatham for the Fourth of July. In the first year of passenger service, 1,600 people came, Sparks said.

The ability to better bring people to and from Chatham was a boon, and so too was the enhanced capability to bring stuff in and out. Freight service in Chatham transported goods like coal, lumber, wiring, fish and cranberries, according to Sparks.

“This railroad, even though it only lasted 50 years, changed the face of this place,” Sparks said.