By Rita Shirley LeBleu
It may come as a surprise that the Railroad Museum’s claim to fame is not the restored 1923 Mission Revival architecture, original floors and ticket window. It is not the quantity or quality of the displays, although that is an impressive characteristic of the Museum, and why visitors come from all over the United States as well as New Zealand, Australia, France, Canada, United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Poland, Scotland, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, China, Iceland and Switzerland.
The DeQuincy Railroad Museum’s claim to fame is the origin of its displays. Almost everything in the museum was donated by the people of DeQuincy and surrounding areas who worked for the railroad or whose family members worked for the railroad.
Over the last two years, 15,594 individuals have visited the museum. One of the most recent was a four-year-old from Sulphur who pushed his way in ahead of his parents and excitedly started moving from train to train. His favorite? A Thomas the Train that almost didn’t make the 1980s cull.
When Allen Walker, a former railroad employee who helped in the museum from time to time was asked to recall his favorite visitor story, he said there were so many visitors that no one particular visit stands out. What he did recall was that he often learned more from the visitors than the visitors learned from him.
A couple of visits stand out among the DeQuincy News team.
Jeffra DeViney, publisher, said she will never forget the day she met a Berkeley University professor who came to DeQuincy just to visit the Museum.
“It was a Saturday, the Museum was closed, and he was devastated, beside himself,” she said.
DeViney found a way to give him a private tour. After he left, he followed up by sending her a letter saying the DeQuincy Railroad Museum had the most privately donated artifacts generously given by local citizens than any museum he had visited across America.
The late Fred Fluitt opened the Museum on a Monday in 2012 for a couple from Missouri. Their pet, Kimmikki, is what made the visit memorable. It was a skunk. The pet glands had been removed and the visitor explained why skunks make a better pet than dogs or cats.
“You don’t have to walk them; they’ll find a place to use the bathroom and that’s where they use it from then on, no training required. They require a bath about once a month. They don’t bark and they sleep more than a cat,” Betty Ames told the DeQuincy News.
Vance Perkins, DeQuincy News contributing writer, said his favorite visitor story is that of a former Louisiana Correctional & Industrial School inmate now living in New Orleans. He was on the crew that performed the labor of turning the dilapidated KCS Depot into the Railroad Museum.
“He fell in love with the Museum,” Perkins said. “In fact, he had the opportunity to be transferred from LCIS, and turned it down so that he could see the restoration completed.”
Diane Ingle contacted the DeQuincy News because the recent articles about the Museum helped bring to mind a story about her father, Fennel Guillott, the last agent at the KCS Depot. When Diane’s Mazilly French cousins visited the Museum, Guillott sat at what was his desk and is now part of the exhibit.
