The Wabash Depot, 10th Street

The Wabash Depot, 10th Street

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2011

I am including this image of Columbia’s bus station because it corresponds to a theme that we have been exploring in the last three posts, that of a singular anonymous figure in the nocturnal landscape.  The landscape in this situation being the sidewalk outside the historic Wabash Depot on Columbia’s North Tenth Street on a snowy night in January 2011.  This building is notoriously difficult to photograph in a way that I’m happy with.  Photographing buildings on angled streets is always tricky…if you make the street level, as it wants to look, then the building is crooked…if you make the building level, then the street looks crooked.  It’s like hanging a door in a very old house…nothing will be true, plumb and level simultaneously.  Once again, our anonymous figure is walking with stride and purpose through the snow towards a destination that must exist just outside of the image, or perhaps further.  For those of you with a local history inclination, this is the second Wabash depot that has existed on this site, constructed in 1909 and listed on the National Register in 1979.  It was originally accompanied by a wooden freight house just to the east of the present building.  The depot itself is a Tudor gothic design, with locally quarried ashlar cut stone and a clay tile roof.  Before the arrival of the MKT line in the early 1900s, the Wabash, earlier known as the Columbia Branch Railroad, was the primary avenue of transportation into Columbia and Boone County, bringing coal, lumber, and passenger traffic directly into the center of a growing rural community.