We paved paradise
Tue, 2016-09-13 05:00
News Staff
My front porch
Lynette Sowell
In looking through the archives of the Leader-Press newspaper from decades past, I’ve seen numerous references to the Santa Fe depot, along with plenty of pictures. It seems that the train didn’t just run through Cove (at random hours of the day and night), but it stopped here. Not once, but twice a day at one point.
It used to be that cotton would get shipped away from our town and people made some good money from that. Then, passenger trains would stop, too. You could go right downtown, hop the train and be off on an adventure.
Back sometime in the mid to late 60s (I don’t recall which year specifically), the Santa Fe Railroad people told the city it was considering shutting down the depot. There was a general uproar about that, and as the news story reads, 300—yes, THREE HUNDRED business owners and others from the community showed up to tell Santa Fe how important this depot was to them.