Construction began recently on a state park featuring a replica of an old railroad depot in Arkansas City that, at a cost of $890,000 to the state’s taxpayers, should have everything to commend it except the authenticity that only time can bestow. It should also serve as a textbook example of why it’s better to preserve historical sites than have to reproduce them years later.
The real depot served as a terminal for the Union Pacific railroad (“The route of the Eagles”) and stretched from St. Louis south to New Orleans. It was the first rail line to be laid down west of the Mississippi River and carried passengers to and from the Crescent City while transporting lumber and agricultural products of the Arkansas Delta to their destinations. Now it’s been reduced to a site that’s supposed to attract tourists, who are a lot easier to pick than cotton.
So what’s the difference between this new spic-and-span replica and the original? Only the difference between a Rembrandt and a print of a Rembrandt, between looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night in one of the world’s great museums or hanging a reproduction of it on the wall of your college dorm room. How much better to get all the years and years of appreciating the original than making do with a copy.
“Arkansas City used to have an old train depot,” says Randy Roberson, planning and development manager for the state’s Department of Parks and Tourism, which is building this stage setting for an historical re-enactment. “The concept is to make this look like that,” he says. Rather than run a railroad.
This railroad isn’t to be a real one but part of the Delta Heritage Trail that winds its approximately 14-mile way—much like the Trail of Tears—through the sites of some of the saddest crimes in this state’s history. Like the old Japanese internment camp at Rohwer and the killing fields at Elaine. It’ll be advertised as one of the longest pedestrian-and-bike pathways in the state.
Visitors aren’t supposed to shudder at what happened all along its route but to enjoy the scenic views. The horrors have become as unmentionable as the very name of Elaine, the site of a notorious massacre, once was in this state. Why not outline the whole route in yellow tape like some outsized crime scene and hire not cheery guides to show visitors the sites but a real-life version of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, with Sherlock Homes standing by, to explain just how these murders most foul were committed?
Robert Moore, who lives in Arkansas City and is a member of the state Highway Commission, says the new old depot should be a great draw for tourists as the trail wanders around the Arkansas Delta making connections hither and yon. Maggie Howard, a park interpreter at the Delta Heritage Trail State Park in Helena-West Helena, says the park has seen jumps in the number of folks who have come along for the ride over the past four years. And isn’t that what counts?
“We focus on the history of the railroad,” says Ms. Howard. “Helena was a huge lumber town, and the trains used to haul it.” It’s good to preserve the memory of boom times, but Clio, muse of history, isn’t likely to be fooled by a gimcrack little railroad station set up like a cardboard storefront on a Hollywood production lot, though at greater expense and with greater expertise. History can’t be got around with substitutes, no matter how impressive from a distance. Real history has to be got through.
Rails to Trails is the name of a conservancy program with a considerable history of its own. That’s the word from Brandi Horton, who represents that outfit. She says the idea of converting old rail lines to nature trails took hold back in the 1950s when illustrator and naturalist May Watts wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune advocating the idea. Who says letters to the editor can’t prove influential? This one certainly did.
Or as May Watts wrote that historic day: “If we have courage and foresight, such as made possible the Long Trail in Vermont and the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia . . . then we can create from this strip a proud resource.” The strip she was referring to was the old Chicago, Aurora and Elgin line, which was abandoned in 1961 as a suburban railway line between the Windy City and its burgeoning suburbs.
Her letter produced a groundswell of support for rail-to-bike trails that has not yet subsided, as this latest undertaking in Arkansas demonstrates. Soon after May Watts’ letter made it into print, the Illinois Prairie Path Corp., was formed, and successors continue to be formed across the country. It seems that We the People may now be much better at recreating history rather than at making it.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.