Salisbury Southern Railroad Passenger Depot, Salisbury North Carolina

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The Salisbury Southern Railroad Passenger Depot, designed by Frank P. Milburn and built in 1907-1908, is an impressive and well-preserved example of the Spanish Mission style popular in the early twentieth century. An important reminder of the vital role of the railroad in the development of the town of Salisbury, it is one of the few remaining examples of the eclectic Milburn's many public buildings in North Carolina, and one of the most ambitious railroad depots surviving in the state.

The Salisbury Southern Railroad Passenger Depot is one of the relatively few extant public buildings designed by Frank Pierce Milburn, a leading southern architect of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Milburn was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on December 12^th, 1868. He was educated in the common schools in Kentucky, and later attended Arkansas University and the Arkansas Industrial University. He then returned to Kentucky, where he spent five years (1884-1889) studying architecture in Louisville. In 1889 he joined his father, Thomas Thurmond Milburn, and together they designed and built the Clay County Courthouse in Manchester, Kentucky.

In 1890 Milburn opened an office at Kenova, West Virginia, but by about 1893 he had moved to Winston, North Carolina, where he was the architect for the Forsyth County Courthouse and the Wachovia Bank Building. About 1896 his design was chosen for the Mecklenburg County Courthouse at Charlotte; here he also became the architect of the first steel frame building erected in North Carolina.

After an active period as a resident of Columbia, South Carolina, Milburn in 1902 moved to Washington, D. C., where he became architect for the Southern Railway Company. During the next fifteen years, he designed nineteen railroad stations, twenty-six county courthouses, fifteen residences, nine college buildings (including five for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and many other public buildings throughout the South. He died at the age of fifty-eight in Asheville on September 21^st, 1926.

The railway station designed by Milburn for Salisbury was apparently a much-needed facility. Contemporary newspaper articles suggest a high degree of public interest in a new passenger station to replace the original, a dilapidated structure built before the Civil War. One newspaper characterized the need for the new facility as "a matter that has been uppermost in the public mind for the past two decades."

Salisbury had long been an important railroad town. The first locomotive arrived on January 4^th, 1855, when the Charlotte-to-Salisbury portion of the North Carolina Railroad was completed. By 1860 the Western North Carolina Railroad was complete from Salisbury to within thirteen miles of Morganton. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Salisbury became a major terminal on the Southern Railway's Charlotte-to-Greensboro "main line." (Its neighboring town, Spencer, was selected in 1896 to be the site of Southern's railway shops and transfer shed, making it one of the busiest and most important rail points in the South.)

By the early years of the twentieth century, Salisbury was being characterized as a "fine railroad center." "No city," boasted the Salisbury Evening Post in 1905, "is better located for traffic."

Twenty-two passenger trains pass by, arrive and depart from the city daily. An exclusive postal train also brings mail from New York City within fifteen hours from the time that the racer from the North leaves the metropolis. The Southern's passenger service is good, its patronage enormous. Within five years the revenues have been doubled and July past was the greatest record-maker within the history of the Salisbury station. There is no way to calculate its extensiveness. The wholesale and retail merchantry, never was so large, and these dealers keep the station crowded with their wares. "RAILWAY FACILITIES," Salisbury Evening Post, August 1905

In March 1907, the Southern announced that it had let a contract for the construction of a new passenger station on the same site as that occupied by the old terminal (which was to be razed). The Charlotte Daily Observer, in reporting on this announcement, reaffirmed the belief that the new facility would be "the handsomest main line structure between Washington and Atlanta" and suggested that it would be "an ornament to the city where adornments are most needed."

Construction of the new passenger station commenced April 9^th, 1907. Frank Milburn's design was carried out by the Central Carolina Construction Company of Greensboro, successful bidder on the project. The station was completed and officially opened to the public on September 1^st, 1908. The structure apparently won the immediate approval of the Charlotte Daily Observer's Salisbury bureau chief, who wrote on August 31^st:

After years of rather impatient waiting the city's needs have at last been recognized by the Southern's officials, and, as if to make up for their tardiness, they have spent lavishly to give the city a passenger depot to be proud of putting over $120,000 into it.

The facility was designed primarily as a passenger station, with separate waiting rooms for white and black, restrooms and parlors, a ticket office, a mail room, a telegraph office, and a conductors' room. Apparently most of the freight was to be handled by a nearby Southern Express Company freight office (also designed by Frank Milburn), which stood "just to the north" of the new passenger station. The express office was razed in 1971, but the passenger station remains very nearly as it was when erected in 1907-1908.

Building Description

The Salisbury Southern Railroad Passenger Depot is an exceptionally fine instance of railroad architecture. Designed in the Spanish Mission style by Frank P. Milburn and built in 1907-1908, the depot reflects the early twentieth century's interest in structural functionalism as well as in abstract geometric design and the use of strong colors. The station, which runs the length of two city blocks, is a masonry structure built of mechanically bonded pressed brick pierced by a multitude of round and segmental-arched windows. A two-course water table stands out as the dividing line between the dark red brick base with its deeply raked joints and the tan brick of the body of the building, which is tightly laid with flush joints. The depot is divided into two blocks; a main block to the south, and a smaller block to the north. Each is covered by a roof sheathed with earthy red Spanish tiles characteristic of the style.

The main (southern) block houses the passenger waiting room as well as the ticket offices. It is E-shaped in plan, fifteen bays in length, and stands one-and-one-half stories high. A steeply pitched hip roof covers the main block. Gables intersect the hip roof at both the north and south ends of the west elevation to create the upper and lower arms of the "E." Each end breaks out into a bold curvilinear-shaped gable framed by small corner battlements. The focal point of the west elevation is, however, the center tower of the principal block. The square-in-plan tower is engaged at the lower one-and-one-half stories and then rises up two more levels into a monumental freestanding slab that dominates the site. The tower is lit on each face of its tall upper story by a cluster of three round-arched multi-paned windows slightly recessed within a round-arched panel. Above this grouping, the tower walls rise up to form a parapet enclosing an observation deck that rims the perimeter of the tower. Ornamenting the exterior wall of the parapet is a series of raised panels arranged in a stylized form reminiscent of crenelated battlements. A single grotesque gargoyle juts out from each corner of the parapet, adding a charmingly eccentric note to the tower's severe silhouette. In the center of the deck stands the yardmaster's signal room, a cubical form capped by a shallow pyramidal-hipped roof with broadly overhanging eaves.

A round-arched arcade, protected by a pent roof, extends between the first story of the tower and the projecting gables; the three arms of the "E." The spandrels of the arcade are built of cream-colored bricks which provide a striking accent beside the tan voussoirs of each arch and impost area and the red brick of the plinth below. The covered arcade provides sheltered access from the inner waiting room to the tower, to the wings, and to the street. Above each arcade, the roof of the main block is pierced by a large hipped wall dormer with wide overhanging eaves.

The facade of each gabled projection contains loosely interpreted Palladian window motives. At the first level is a two-over-two sash with a two-light transom above, centered between two one-over-one sash with one-light transoms above. The window grouping is shaded by a hipped hood supported by boldly molded wooden brackets. Above the center is a flat-paneled round arch composed of six courses of radiating voussoirs arranged in graduated levels of relief. Piercing the face of the shaped gable end above is a second, more overt Palladian window motif, consisting of a round-arched louvered vent flanked by shorter rectangular blind panels. Underlining the three forms is a molded sill braced by four thick cavetto-curved consoles.

The smaller, one-story northern block measures fourteen bays long and three deep, and is bisected by a covered concourse that connects the low passenger platform by the tracks on the east elevation to the street along the west. Railroad administrative offices and storage rooms are housed in this wing. The block is covered by a broadly splayed gable roof supported on the west elevation by chamfered wooden braces that spring from corbeled imposts. The northern gable end contains three louvered vents arranged as a Palladian window. A pent roof, contiguous with the gable eaves, is attached to the northern elevation; its bracing system is identical to that found on the west elevation.

On the east elevation, the gable roof is connected to a shed roof which runs the entire length of the eastern elevation and serves to shelter the passenger platform below. Segmental-arched one-over-one and two-over-two sash windows alternating with raised paneled doors surmounted by fanlights pierce the entire eastern elevation in random fashion. The shed roof is supported by a Howe parallel chords metal frame truss system with lateral bracing to ensure against wind pressure. Each steel purlin is supported on engaged brick posts with heavily corbeled caps along the inner wall and on braced metal posts sunk into the concrete slab platform along the outer edge of the shed. A simple truss extends longitudinally under the middle of the shed, reinforcing the principal truss system at right angles. The functionalism of the platform shed reveals the utilitarian purpose of the depot as well as Milburn's desire for structural clarity.

The interior of the principal block forms a huge open space lit by one-over-one sash windows with fanlights. It has had some slight alterations, including the removal of the partition between black and white passenger waiting rooms, the closing of the restaurant which occupied the northeastern section of the main block, and the removal of the ticket office from the first floor of the tower to the southern end of the waiting room. The waiting room features a two-course brick chair rail, a heavily molded wooden cornice, and, located at the center bay, a transverse round arch supported on large pilasters. A similar arch frames a huge oculus with four equilaterally positioned keystones at either end of the waiting room. The floor is dramatically decorated with poly-chromed tiles arranged in a diaper pattern of squares and diamonds.

The interior of the secondary block is divided into numerous office and storage cubicles and remains virtually unchanged.