HISTORY LESSON: Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railway Depot
The Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railway Depot was built in 1907 at what was then the corner of 8th and Main streets.
The building featured four large limestone columns at its entrance. After a consolidation of railways depots, the building served as Evansville’s white-only USO Club, then a community center after 1946.
To make way for the Civic Center, the depot was torn down in 1966 but not before the limestone columns were disassembled and salvaged.
Preliminary plans were drawn to reuse them as a public monument, but the plans soon stalled. They spent nearly 10 years in pieces, stored in a weed field behind the waterworks garage.
After nearly being turned into stairs for Willard Library, the public monument plans were dusted off. The columns now make up the centerpiece of the Four Freedoms Monument, completed in 1976 as part of the U.S. Bicentennial celebration.
This photograph, courtesy of the Evansville Courier & Press Photo Archive at digital.evpl.org, shows the stone columns, in the weed field, before they were reconstructed.
History Lesson is a pictorial history of Evansville compiled by Daniel Smith, local history and digitization librarian at the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library.