Tunnel Hill’s next mission to restore old railroad depot

Mitch Talley, Whitfield County director of communications

Trains rumble past the old building every day, seemingly oblivious to the role it’s played in their history for more than 150 years.

Tunnel Hill leaders are anxious to change that perception about the Tunnel Hill Depot, built circa 1850. The road to saving the structure has been a long and bumpy one, but city leaders are optimistic about the future.

“For my lifetime, this was a feed mill,” City Manager Blake Griffin recalls. “That’s why you see the big concrete platforms where the silos sat. I couldn’t have even told you there was a depot inside there back then because the depot had become offices and everything else was built around it. This was big business in Tunnel Hill; my grandfather retired from that company. When I was a kid, it was Red Hat Feed Mill. Then it became Con-Agra for many, many years, and then they sold it to Pilgrim’s Pride. Then Pilgrim’s Pride finally closed it.”

The feed mill’s lease agreement with the railroad stated that if it ever left the property, it would have to leave the property as it found it.

“In other words, the only thing standing on this property would have to be that original depot building,” Griffin said.

But after finding out the cost of tearing down the buildings that had been constructed around the depot over the past 50 or 60 years, Pilgrim’s Pride talked the railroad into allowing it to sublease the property, as it was, to a recycling company, sometime around 2003.

That agreement worked out fine for awhile, but then the recycling company went out of business, leaving an eight-foot-tall stack of trash that it had planned to recycle covering virtually the entire property.

Fortunately for Tunnel Hill, Griffin said the owner was a gracious man and while he didn’t agree to remove the trash, he did offer to give the city seven acres of adjoining property if it would agree to clean up the site itself.

“We went to Whitfield County and told them about the offer,” Griffin said. “We have a lot of service agreements with Whitfield County; our biggest revolves around the LOST (Local Option Sales Tax) taxes. As our share, we usually get a half-mile of paving, but we asked the county that year if they would forego their usual paving agreement with us and instead use their equipment and take the trash to the dump. They agreed and got just about all of it removed before the money ran out. What was left, we just eventually over time got out of there. Our whole concern at first was making it look as presentable as possible.”

With that obstacle removed, however, another soon popped up.

“One day we came down here and CSX was in here, tearing down the silos and buildings,” Griffin said. “I told the mayor, ‘This is not good news.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘They’re not just tearing it down for the heck of it. They’re tearing it down because they’re about to lease it to somebody that doesn’t want that.’ So we came down here and started talking to the guys working on the demolition.”

Sure enough, demo crews said the railroad was working on an agreement with a company that was going to have heavy truck traffic — all coming right through a peaceful old Southern town.

“It turned out that the vice president of community relations for the railroad was married to a woman from Ringgold, so he knew this area well,” Griffin said. “He drove up here, and we stood out there on the railroad tracks one day. He had a guy with him and he looked at him and said, ‘I need you to back me up on this because when I look around here, I see this nice little museum y’all have built, a parking lot, the beautiful Clisby Austin House, you’ve got your historic railroad tunnel, and what a wonderful looking old church over there, and the old downtown area.’”

The VP said that the business the railroad was talking to planned to run 5,000 trucks out of the property each month, going right through the residential neighborhood.

“He told us, ‘When I look around here, this just ain’t the place for that kind of business,’” Griffin said. “He said, ‘This is a neighborhood; we don’t need businesses like this in this neighborhood.’ The other guy said he agreed.”

It wasn’t too long until CSX decided to deed the depot property to the city. “Where we caught a break was they had already torn all (the adjoining structures) down,” Griffin said. “Those old buildings would have still been there if they hadn’t, and we’d have had to tear it down.”

The county also cleaned up the seven acres donated by the recycling company as the feed mill had dumped scrap concrete for years on it.

“Then we had to plow that land up and plant grass on it,” Griffin said. “It’s been a real work to get the property to this point. Now it’s time to decide what we’re going to do with that building.”

What’s next?

City leaders want it to be a place where events are held.

“You can certainly have meetings in there, you could have receptions. It’d be big enough to have a wedding in there, have some concerts on the grounds, maybe some senior events,” Griffin said.

The city plans to apply for a grant from the federal government.

“We don’t know what it will take to renovate the building,” Griffin said, “but we’re gonna get the ball rolling this summer and this fall. We’re working with Kevin McAuliff down at the (Northwest Georgia Regional Commission), and he’s going to help with a grant. He’s a good grant writer.”

The city is just glad to have the building safe and secure in its ownership, at least protected from being torn down, and yet another piece of the puzzle that makes Tunnel Hill an interesting place for tourists to visit.

“We’re so proud of our little town,” Griffin said. “We do all we can with what we’ve got. I’m not a great historian and I don’t study this stuff that much, but it’s ingrained in me because this is where I’m from. I love seeing (the old depot site) transformed into what it is right now, and I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like in five more years.”

He admits it may take some time what with the city’s limited budget, “but we’ll get that depot done one way or the other, and it’s gonna make everybody proud!”

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