Thomas Edison Depot, Where a Boy Became an Inventor

The old Fort Gratiot train depot along the St. Clair River in Port Huron is where Thomas Edison spent some of the most important years of his boyhood. His family moved to Port Huron in eighteen fifty-four when Tom was seven.

By twelve he was selling newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railway trains running between Port Huron and Detroit. He reportedly set up a small chemistry lab in a baggage car, and he began printing his own newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, selling it to passengers. He worked out of this very depot from eighteen fifty-nine to eighteen sixty-three.

Edison later said that his years on those trains sharpened his restless, self-taught curiosity. The depot today is a museum operated by Port Huron Museums, housing original Edison phonographs and artifacts excavated from the site of his childhood home, which burned in eighteen seventy.