When you could escape it all for 25 cents

A whistle from a train moving slowly through a town 7 miles from our house was heard on a windless night when the stars and the moon were hidden from view.

Weather forecasters spent the day before warning of a snowstorm with the potential to dump heavy snow and strong winds across southern Minnesota. It has been a mostly snowless season, with only two storms delivering a total of 8 inches.

Dad would have said a whistle carrying far is a sure sign of an approaching storm. By daybreak, 11 inches of wet snow covered the ground.

There is something about a faint whistle that stirs the soul; a coyote’s midnight howl does much the same for me.

Long ago, a former neighbor lost her husband and children when their car was hit at a gravel road’s railroad crossing. The woman remained on the farmstead with a cow, calf, chickens, and memories as company for several years. She was respected by all for her determination to carry on.

Trains, the weekly newspaper, and the radio once linked our town and its population of little more than 800 to the outside world. The radio carried breaking news and entertainment.

Our town would not exist without the railroad. Railroad officials wanted the tracks to be placed in a town five miles to the east, but negotiations between the two parties fell apart. Business leaders decided to move their stores lock, stock and barrel to the west.

West Concord and surrounding farms built a reputation for producing quality dairy cattle. Buyers purchased cattle and shipped them to the East Coast, Mexico and Canada.

Dairy, as with other livestock enterprises, is well known for its financial ups and downs.
The livestock industry ran into big trouble in 1917. A widespread bovine tuberculosis outbreak sparked a public health crisis.

The federal government responded by testing bovine herds across the country. Four million cattle were slaughtered without compensation to their owners. Bovine TB remains a sporadic problem in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The last TB-infected herd was found in North Dakota in 2018. In Minnesota, the disease was found in four herds in the early 2000s.

The newly created West Concord boomed with new businesses, salespeople, and churches.
The railroad brought businessmen from the Twin Cities who rented rooms in the West Concord hotel where home-cooked meals filled their stomachs and one-armed bandits provided entertainment.

The slot machines were removed in the early 1920s at about the same time that the sale, manufacture, and transport of drinking alcohol was banned through the Volstead Act. The temperance movement had protested against alcohol for quite some time, saying that it ruined heads of households and families. Gambling allegedly also caused moral decay.

Entertainers riding north to Minneapolis and St. Paul from points East had enough time to perform in the opera house or the theater. The biggest name among them was Gene Autry, a Western actor and country singer whose biggest hits were “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’’ in 1949 and “Back in the Saddle Again’’ in the early 1950s.

The train also took men who received draft notices or volunteered for service for physicals in the Twin Cities. A wave of patriotism motivated many who hadn’t lived outside the county to fight two world wars. Those who returned from service were often reluctant to share their memories. Those who didn’t return are honored with framed photographs hanging on the walls of the American Legion building on Main Street.

The railroad tracks that linked West Concord to the outside were abandoned in the 1970s. For the most part the right-of-way became productive farmland. Some thought the land could be transformed into tourist-drawing bike and walking trails.

The tracks that touched our farm became habitat for Hungarian partridges and pheasants, raccoons, rabbits, weeds, and saplings. There is little place for those things at a time when fencelines and wildlife habitat are disappearing.

Rural America was a much different place when a traveler could spend 25 cents for a train ride.

Mychal Wilmes is the retired managing editor of Agri News. He lives in West Concord, Minnesota, with his wife, Kathy.