The concrete-block depot at Robertsdale

Across the street from where Robertsdale's first railroad depot stood, on the north side of the East Broad Top tracks, is a one-story station of concrete block that the Historic American Buildings Survey recorded in 1989. The survey's account is short. Historic photographs show the original depot as a small wood building with board-and-batten siding, standing on the east side of Main Street between the company store and the tracks; beyond that the survey found nothing about it. The present depot replaced it, the survey says, around the time the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company built its office and the post office, and the new station appears on the Interstate Commerce Commission's 1917 valuation map of the East Broad Top and on the 1926 map of the village. Neither depot shows up in the tax records, which the survey found odd.

A blueprint of 1917 in the railroad's archives proposed a concrete-block station for Woodvale as well. Whether that one was ever built the survey could not say; nothing on the maps or aerial photographs could be identified as it.

A 1991 inventory of the county's engineering and industrial sites, written by Nancy S. Shedd and published by the National Park Service, carries the story past the survey. It records that the building served as the EBT depot until the railroad was abandoned in 1956, then became a television repair shop and a gas station, and had stood empty since the middle of the 1980s. The same inventory counts the small depots at Saltillo and Robertsdale among the structures that survive along the unused portions of the line, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Project historian Lola Bennett did the research and writing in the summer of 1989 under Alison K. Hoagland, and the large-format photographs in the published report were made by HAER photographer Jet Lowe.

According to historic photographs, the original Robertsdale railroad depot was a small, wood structure with board-and-batten siding that sat on the east side of Main Street between the company store and the railroad tracks. Nothing else is known about this early structure.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Robertsdale East Broad Top Railroad Depot, written data pages, HABS PA-5556 data pages, report page 1 (PDF page 2) · character 869 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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