Next weekend, the city of Mendota will block off its downtown for the 50th annual Sweet Corn Festival. It’s much like any farm town celebration: a parade, a beer garden, coronation of a Sweet Corn Queen, and as much free hot buttered corn-on-the-cob as you can eat.
And, in addition to the standard fare, town fathers will dedicate the Union Depot Railroad Museum, honoring the city’s railroad heritage. Located in Mendota’s recently refurbished Amtrak station, it includes hundreds of artifacts, including an HO scale replica of the town as it looked in the 1930s.
But the museum’s most impressive exhibit, a 1923 steam locomotive and caboose, still sits just over 30 miles away in Ottawa, the subject of a legal battle between the LaSalle County Historical Society and one of its former presidents.
Engine 4978 was built in 1923 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Eddystone, Pa. Although assigned to Mendota for some time, it spent most of its active service life running coal in southern Illinois. It was donated to the LaSalle County Historical Society in 1965 by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, a forerunner of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.
“We only existed on paper back then,” said Suzanne Bruner of Ottawa, current LCHS president and one of its founders. “We had no building of any sort and were storing what items we had in the homes of board members.”
One of those board members was Edmund B. Thornton.
Thornton’s family owned the Ottawa Silica Co. and through its charitable foundation had been deeply involved in community-based philanthropy for years. The foundation leased a small parcel of property to the society for $1 a year and parked the train there, where it has remained for 32 years. Thornton served several terms as president of the historical society, including one in which he accepted the locomotive and caboose on behalf of the organization.
In the years since, the LaSalle County Historical Society acquired an old warehouse along the Illinois & Michigan Canal and converted it into a museum. Although the locomotive still was considered a valuable asset, it became a satellite administered more often than not by the Thornton Foundation, whose offices were directly across the street.
It was repeatedly vandalized, and it became necessary to erect a fence around the display. The Thornton Foundation estimates about 700 people a year, mostly on tours from area schools, visit the site. The LCHS claims the number is closer to 300. So when Mendota museum backers began their search for a locomotive for their museum and expressed an interest in the one in Ottawa, it seemed like a perfect fit, a win-win situation for everyone involved.
“To be able to get a steam locomotive at all is something. To get a locomotive that was assigned to a roundhouse in your community is almost unheard of,” said Bill Greenwood, chairman of the Mendota Museum Historical Society. Greenwood, a retired chief operating officer of the Burlington Northern with residences in Mendota and Texas, began his railroad career as a telegrapher in Mendota in 1956.
At a February 1996 meeting of the LCHS, according to a lawsuit LCHS has filed in connection with the dispute, its board agreed to relocate the train to Mendota’s new railroad museum. While the society would retain ownership, the Mendota group would pay the costs of moving and maintaining the train. Greenwood estimated those costs at about $48,000, a third of that sum for insurance.
“We thought it was an excellent move all the way around,” Bruner said. “When we told Edmund about it, his only concern was that we restore his land to the way it was. That would have involved removing the concrete pad the train sat on and the fence around it and resodding the area.”
After the decision, things progressed smoothly, according to Bruner. Mendota continued restoring its crumbling train station, hired an engineering firm to move the locomotive and laid a new section of asphalt and track on which to display it.
But Thornton claims he was never notified of the board’s decision.
“There was no formal communique at all between the historical society and the foundation, with respect to their decision to move the train. I was never really quite certain what their plans were, whether the society had passed any board action to move the train or donate it to Mendota,” he said.
“He continues to say that, and I continue to remind him of meetings he and I had, and show him copies of correspondence that he received as far back as 1995,” Greenwood said. “It was not a surprise at all. The proposal was originally made to him when he was a board member of the LaSalle County Historical Society, and he has been continually kept up to date.”
In April of this year, the Edmund B. Thornton Foundation, the successor to the Ottawa Silica Foundation, canceled the lease and gave the group until Oct. 7 to remove the engine and caboose from its property, or ownership of both would transfer to the foundation. What came next baffled LaSalle Historical Society members and Mendota museum backers alike.
On May 20, an attorney for the Thornton Foundation notified the LCHS that it would be prohibited from entering abutting foundation property to reclaim the engine.
While the society has access to the train itself and the property it sits on, it would need to lay temporary track across a 700-foot stretch of Thornton property not included in the lease to remove the train. Consideration was given to trucking the engine out, but those plans were thwarted when the city of Ottawa informed the Mendota museum members that there would be no waiver of weight restrictions on city streets to facilitate the move. The society, ordered to move the engine or lose it, is left with no legal way to prevent the loss.
“I would characterize it as a very straightforward business transaction between a property owner and a tenant,” Thornton explained. “I’m not blocking them from removing their property. How they do it is their decision.”
But when asked exactly how LCHS could move the train under current restrictions, Thornton had no answer.
“That’s not my problem.” he said. “I’m not here to speculate, or give any comfort or solace to their dilemma. We’re going to give them every opportunity to show some ingenuity to remove the engine. But we’re not going to voluntarily give them any more access than they already have.”
On July 11, the LaSalle County Historical Society filed a suit for mandatory injunction against the Thornton Foundation, asking for access to the adjoining property so the train can be removed.
“The foundation and the citizens of Ottawa have vested interests in this historic locomotive display, and I intend to defend those interests to the full extent of the law,” Thornton said in a statement released shortly after the suit was filed.
Both sides seem to have compelling reasons the train should stay or go. The Thornton Foundation has paid for the train’s upkeep since it arrived, including a $50,000 rehab in the mid-’80s. More than a thousand people have signed petitions to keep the train in Ottawa. It has, according to Thornton, become a part of the cultural fabric of the city of Ottawa.
But Mendota’s case is also strong. Ninety miles southwest of Chicago, the town owes its very existence to the railroad. In the early 1850s, the tiny Aurora Branch Railroad extended its route west and connected with the Illinois Central Railroad 15 miles north of the Illinois river port of Peru. The area became known as the Junction and later as Mendota, a Native American word meaning “crossing of the trails.”
The new town soon became a vibrant way-station on the line between Galena and Cairo. By 1886 a massive depot had been constructed, replete with hotel and restaurant facilities. At the time it was considered the best equipped depot between Chicago and Omaha.
“Our site is at a working Amtrak station,” Greenwood said. “There are six Amtrak trains a day that pass through, and up to 1,500 passengers would be able to see the locomotive” sitting on tracks by the station.
That includes riders of Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, a Chicago-to-Los Angeles Superliner that was routed through the town last year, when the Burlington Northern merged with the Santa Fe.
“We have an enthusiastic volunteer organization with over 90 members here,” Greenwood continued. “There are still railroad men living here in Mendota who worked on that engine. I think, in essence, it would be coming home.”
The LaSalle County Historical Society’s lawsuit is scheduled to be heard on Aug. 18. While a lawyer for the LCHS says he thinks they will prevail, the clock is still ticking on that October deadline.
Thornton, resolute in his desire to keep the engine in Ottawa, is no less sure of himself than his opponents. When asked how he thought the court’s decision would fall, he was equally noncommittal.
“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve stopped them or not.”
