Michigan Central Railroad Chelsea Depot

The Michigan Central Railroad, opened from Detroit to Chelsea in 1841 and extended by 1852 to Chicago, was the reason for Chelsea's birth and development in the nineteenth century. The railroad provided a market for agricultural produce from the area's fertile soil and led to the development of Chelsea as a shipping point for various agricultural products, particularly wheat and wool. Built in 1880, the Chelsea depot served as the shipping depot for the town's agricultural products during the height of the agricultural boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The depot is a particularly notable example of Late Victorian, frame depot design in Michigan and the only known Michigan station designed by Mason & Rice, one of Michigan's most distinguished late nineteenth-century architectural firms.

The first depot in town, a freight shed labelled Davison Station, was built a mile west of Chelsea in 1841. Vandals torched it in 1847. The railroad replaced this in 1850 with a new freight and passenger shed in Chelsea on land north of the tracks donated by local promoters James and Elisha Congdon. Located at the point where a major north-south road crosses the line, Chelsea immediately prospered as a shipping point for local agricultural products.

The 1850 depot also met a violent end. In 1879 vandals attached a cable to the depot from the rear car of a train stopped overnight. Debris was strewn a great distance along the tracks. The railroad responded by building the present, 1880 depot.

The new station was a testimony both to the railroad's architectural tastes and also to the importance of Chelsea at the time to the railroad's business and profits. In addition to large quantities of wheat and other field crops, Chelsea shipped 400,000 to 450,000 pounds of wool per year from the 1880s to the early 1900s, at a time when Michigan's wool production was generally under 10,000,000 pounds per year. The Michigan Central Railroad replaced most of its older depots along the main Detroit-Chicago line with new structures exemplifying high design standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It appears that none of the larger structures were built from standard designs.

Rather, it appears that each was contracted out separately to an architectural firm. The line retained prominent New York architect Cyrus L.H. Eidlitz to design the Detroit (1883) and Kalamazoo (1887) depots and Spier and Rohns to plan major Richardsonian Romanesque stations for Ann Arbor and Niles in the late 1880s and other small-town depots into the early 1900s. The fine Chelsea depot is the only thus far documented depot in Michigan designed by Mason & Rice, a leading architectural firm in Detroit in the early 1880s.

The depot served for a century as Chelsea's freight and passenger station before the railroad closed it in 1981. The Chelsea Depot Association purchased the structure in December, 1985, and is in the process of converting it into a railroad museum.

The Michigan Central Railroad Chelsea Depot is a one-story, wood-frame structure of Late Victorian design situated on a 56D- by sixty-foot site adjacent to the south side of the east-west ftlrtrak (formerly Michigan Central) right-of-way. The floor plan is rectangular (twenty-eight by one hundred feet) with a hip-roof bay at each end. The broadly overhanging, gable roof has slightly flaring eaves supported on stickwork brackets and the gable ends and gablets on each face of the semi-octagonal bay at each end have kingpost stickwork gable ornaments. In the structure’s walls panels of flush vertical boarding and horizontal clapboarding are formed by chamfered-edge stickwork.

The gables are clad in vertical board and batten. A brick walk surrounds the building and extends to the track side of the station. Over a nominal 42 deep crawl space and supported on a poured concrete foundation wall, the structure rests on a continuous fieldstone footing. Floor joists are 2 x 12 on 16 centers mortised into a continuous 12 x 12 sill at the outside wall.

The joists are bearing on a 12 x 12 carrying beam supported on concrete piers, and running longitudinally on the center line of the building. Wall studs are 2 x 6 and a nominal 16 feet long. Ceiling joists are 2 x 10 and the roof rafters are 2 x 8, each 18 on centers. The roof desk is of wood boards laid tight and the finish floor is of wood boards.

The wall and ceiling interior finish is wood board paneling. With the exception of the asphalt shingle roof and the 3 x 8 double-hung windows, all exterior surfaces are of wood. The siding is a combination of vertical and horizontal beveled siding. Vertical siding with molded battens is used from the roof soffit to the window heads, horizontal siding from the window heads to the sills, and beaded vertical siding from the sills to the floor line.

The Victorian style is defined and accented with shaped wood casings and trim. With the exception of modifications to the chimneys and removal of the roof cresting and finials, the present exterior is unaltered since its erection. The interior retains the 1880 floor plan with the exception of the east room where several partitions and a chimney have been removed so that the future public meeting room will be an unobstructed area. A freight door installed in the southeast corner of the room in 1916 has been replaced with a 3 x 8 double-hung window to restore the corner’s original appearance.

The interior finish is of painted wood board paneling on both walls and ceiling. There is wainscot throughout the building extending from the window stools to the floor. The interior is enhanced by intricate wood moldings surrounding all openings and defining the wainscot.