Former Milwaukee Road Passenger Train Depot in MI
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Station, Menominee Michigan
- Categories:
- Michigan
- Railroad Facility
- Passenger Station

The Milwaukee Road depot at Menominee is associated with one of the major rail lines serving the city and the Upper Peninsula between 1860 and 1938, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. It also notes the brief existence of railroad passenger service in Menominee during the twilight of its logging era.
In 1857 the Michigan legislature granted thousands of Upper Peninsula land to railroad companies for acquisition and future rail development. Authorized by the Congressional Land Act of 1856, the grants created several Upper Peninsula rail systems, which by the 1870s laid track near and through the region's mining and timber heartlands. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific, recipient of 34,227 acres in land grants, was one such railroad. Affectionately known as the Milwaukee Road, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific's route maps formed three sides of a square. An east-west route ran from Marquette to Ontonagon, while southerly routes joined Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Menominee, Michigan.
Menominee had reached its logging zenith in 1889 when twelve saw' mills produced 332 million feet of sawn lumber. A Department of Commerce report of 1891 called Menominee the nation's second-largest producer of pine lumber. By 1900 the white pine forests of Menominee were a stumped and denuded landscape.
To counteract their slumping logging business, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific gambled on passenger service in Menominee. In 1903 they constructed a rail passenger depot, sharing its station tracks with the Wisconsin-Michigan Railroad. Conceived as an inter-urban shuttle, the railroad ran three daily passenger trains in each direction between Menominee and Ellis Junction (now Crivitz) until 1914. After 1915 trains carried both passengers and freight, a demotion to "mixed status."
The gamble failed. Passenger ridership dropped 80% between 1916 and 1920. The last train passed Menominee station in May 1927, and the station closed a month later. The Wisconsin-Michigan railroad continued to use the station as a freight stop until 1938.
In 1979, a private partnership, Depot Enterprises, purchased the Menominee depot for possible renovation and restoration under provisions of the Tax Reform Act.
Building Description
Located on a 1.05 acre site north of the railroad tracks and facing southeast toward the Menominee River, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Depot is a one-story, rectangular frame structure, measuring twenty-four feet in width and eighty-eight feet in length, which rests on a poured concrete foundation. Constructed in 1903, it is a vernacular rendition of the type of architecture developed in the late nineteenth century to accommodate passengers arriving and departing by train.
The station's main section has a gabled roof, ample overhanging eaves supported by horizontal metal brackets, clapboard siding faced with wood, and two brick pedimented chimneys. A covered waiting platform, measuring twenty by twenty-four feet, with a hipped roof supported by vertical Doric columns, stands at the eastern end of the building.
The original interior contained two waiting rooms, restrooms, a baggage area, and a ticket office. It is finished with maple flooring, three-foot-high wainscotting, and twelve-foot-high walls and plaster ceilings. Since 1938, when passenger service ended, interior walls separating the two waiting rooms have been removed, and the former ticket office and baggage area combined into one room. The building exterior has suffered no alteration.

Looking southeast (1980)
