Richmond Depot: Daniel Burnham's Neoclassical Gateway to the Midwest

Richmond, Indiana, sits near the Ohio border, and along its railroad corridor stands a building that belongs to a different scale of American ambition. The Pennsylvania Railroad depot here was designed by Daniel Hudson Burnham, the Chicago architect responsible for the nineteen oh three Plan of Chicago and the chief organizer of the eighteen ninety-three World's Columbian Exposition. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the most powerful rail corporation in the country, routinely hired the most consequential architects of its era, and Burnham was the most consequential of all.

The Richmond depot was completed in nineteen oh two in the Neoclassical style Burnham favored: clean horizontal lines, a low-hipped roof, broad eaves, and a restrained limestone facade that communicated confidence rather than decoration. The building sits within what is now called the Richmond Railroad Station Historic District, four city blocks of Italianate, Classical Revival, and Chicago School commercial buildings that developed between eighteen fifty-three and nineteen fifteen.

The first train passed through Richmond on March eighteenth, eighteen fifty-three. By the height of the rail era, more than twenty-five passenger trains a day stopped at the Richmond station. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran one of the great rail arteries of the nation here, connecting Pittsburgh to Indianapolis and beyond. Richmond, as a junction point on the eastern edge of Indiana, was exactly the kind of mid-size city the Pennsylvania served by the hundreds.

The station closed on October first, nineteen seventy-nine, as passenger rail in the United States collapsed under the weight of highway competition and airline expansion. What remained was the building: one of the least-altered surviving examples of Burnham's depot work in Indiana, sitting in a neighborhood the railroad built and then slowly left behind.

The depot has been preserved and rehabilitated, with plans that have periodically moved forward to restore it to active use. The surrounding historic district retains enough of its original character to suggest what a railroad town's commercial core looked like when the train was still the reason the city existed.