Of Greetings and Goodbyes
Last year, my girlfriend took a class where she was involved in a project that digitized old postcards from Glassboro and compared the locations in them to their current day counterparts. One of these postcards was of the old West Jersey Train Depot located at 354 Oakwood Ave, Glassboro, NJ. So I went with her on an excursion to experience the newly renovated building and try to recreate the image on the postcard. We took pictures of the building from the train tracks, matching the angles of the postcard, both wondering if what we were doing was technically trespassing. That was the last I thought about the train station until this semester when I enrolled in that same class and Jesse had to leave for Florida.
Jesse was accepted into the Disney College Program and while this was a tremendous opportunity for her, it meant I would have to say goodbye to her for 4 months. We knew it would be hard on both of us, but there was never a doubt in our minds we’d get through it. So, when I was given the option to research a historical site for the Glassboro Memory Mapping project, I had to choose the train station because it reminded me of her.
As it turns out, the train station used to be a much busier place than I could have imagined. After the railroad tracks were laid connecting Glassboro to Woodbury, trains came into Glassboro to transport the highly popular glass products from the prospering glassworks. Then a station was built in 1863 and the trains that would stop at this train depot soon became an immensely popular form of transportation. Over the course of the next century, the trains would carry an extraordinary amount of passengers in and out of Glassboro. Some days in the 1920s and ’30s would see over 100 trains passing through Glassboro. Passengers would flood the train station to buy tickets and ride to the town’s surrounding areas. Students of the Glassboro Normal School would arrive at this station and have to walk a mere 4 minutes to get to what is now Bunce Hall at Rowan University.
Eventually, in 1971, due to the rise of the automobile and other forms of public transportation, passenger service of the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Line in Glassboro would be discontinued, but the sheer quantity of people coming and going through the West Jersey Train Depot got me wondering, how many cases of greetings and goodbyes occurred here? How many people would stand on the platform and wave goodbye to their friends and family members with tears in their eyes? How many others would stand on that same platform and be there to embrace their friends and family members as they would finally be reunited? I thought it was so interesting that this one place could have such extreme conflicting emotions associated with it, and with the amount of traffic going through the train station I knew there had to be some stories worth telling.
This led me to Maureen St. John, a member of the Glassboro Historical Society, which I’ll get to a little bit later. I interviewed Maureen to learn if she had any personal experiences with the train station. She told me she arrived in Glassboro in the mid-seventies, just as the train passenger service in the area was coming to a close, but was kind enough to tell me about the stories her late husband, Donald St. John told her of the historic site.
Maureen told me Donald St. John grew up right across the street from the train station. She told how when her husband was a young boy, he wanted to be just like his older brother who had a job at the gas station. So he was determined to get a job himself. The only problem was that for some reason, nobody wanted to hire an 8-year-old.
Maureen explained, “But there was a little newspaper stand and candy stand at the train station and they “hired” him to sweep the floors, stack the papers, and just keep things neat. And I think they mostly paid him in candy but then they would give him a little bit of change and he might make a dollar a week, but he was thrilled with that. He told me he thought he was so cool cause he would walk around and jingle the change in his pocket, and he was the only kid who could do that because he was the only one who had a job! But he was thrilled to do that and he just loved, he played and loved hanging out around the train station all the time.”
She also told me how the mail used to come through the trains as well. Large bags of correspondence would hook onto the side of the building. Maureen told me that the person who would come to pick up the mail would hold up Donald so he could be the one that took the bags off the hooks. “He thought that was the coolest thing, and it stayed with him for life that he was able to do that,” she explained to me. This made me wonder how many well-wishes those bags of mail held over the years. Throughout Jesse’s stay in Florida, she insisted we send letters back and forth to each other and it was just really interesting for me to think about how if we lived back then, little 8-year-old Donald St. John would be the one taking our letters down from the mail hooks.
Soon though, the popular train station would become less and less popular. No longer would people take the trains to embark on new adventures (like Donald St. John’s brothers and sisters did when they took the train to the city to start their careers), and no longer would people stand by the platform to wave them off or be there to receive them. Instead, the citizens of Glassboro would say goodbye to the building that was the heart of their town in 1971, when passenger trains stopped coming in and out of the area.
Luckily for Donald, this was around the same time Maureen came into his life. Maureen told me how she and he would take walks in the field that used to be across the tracks from the depot, “My husband, who was at that time my boyfriend, and I, we used to walk our dog right in that area. So it was just a fun time. We were young and falling in love and it was just a fun time for us”. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the time I spent with Jesse by those same train tracks. Seeing how this one place I used to not even give a second thought to helped grow the relationships of two sets of very separate people in very separate times had a strong emotional resonance in me. It was clear that this location was very special to Maureen and Donald and if it weren’t for the efforts of the community, the building might not be standing today.
After the station closed in 1971, it was left abandoned for over 30 years with no one looking after it. Years of decay and neglect saw the once bustling train station waste away into an abandoned, graffiti-ridden eyesore to the town. The original walls were rotting from the outside and some of the vintage wavy glass windows were broken into by vandals “It was very sad”, recalled Maureen. “Everyone in the neighborhood thought it was just going to fall apart or be torn down. It got to the point where it looked so bad they wanted it to be torn down”, but thanks to a few government grants, Glassboro was able to buy the building from the railroading company Conrail in 2002, and in 2013, a complete restoration of the building was underway to return the building to the state it was in when 100 trains would come by in a single day. The restoration was completed in 2015 and the building now serves as an important event space, museum, and the headquarters of the Glassboro Historical Society. The West Jersey Train Depot had returned to Glassboro like many passengers of the trains it used to service.
As happy as this might have been, 2015 was also a very somber year for Maureen St. John as her longtime husband, Donald, sadly passed away at the age of 67. To honor him and his life, Maureen had a memorial dedicated to her husband placed at the train station. “I had a flagpole put up there in his memory and I love that because it’s right by my house and every day I ride by and I see the flag waving, and to me, its a wave for him, and I wave back”, she said while smiling and laughing. It was so nice to see that even when talking about the passing of her husband, Maureen still smiled whenever she mentioned him. “Since I have my husbands memorial there, It’s my way of saying goodbye in a positive way because of the happiness of the memory there. So it’s definitely sad that we have to say goodbye, but I’m holding onto those memories and that’s a positive thing.” This amazed me. Even 40 years after it served its last passenger, this train station still has people saying goodbye and being reunited. It still carries such a powerful emotional weight to it. I had to see it again. I had to return to where my girlfriend had asked me to help her take a few pictures for a class project; to where I walked with her like Maureen and Donald St. John did when they walked their dog.
So I chose a nice Tuesday afternoon to walk on down and re-experience the train station with all this newfound information in my head. Lo and behold the flagpole I had heard so much about was the first thing I noticed, and the American flag greeted me with a wave. I smiled and waved back. I stood on the train tracks like I did with Jesse and felt the same worry that I was trespassing that I felt the first time. The building was closed but I still peered in the wavy glass windows and saw historic Glassboro artifacts inside. I walked up to the base of the flagpole with a pocket full of change and saw, written in stone, the words “Flag Pole Dedicated in Memory of Donald M. St. John”.
I sat on a bench in front of the building, just reflecting on everything. I remembered the stories of young Donald and Maureen, the degradation and restoration of the building whose awnings I sat under, the sound of the freight trains passing through at 1 o’clock in the morning, and the countless cases of greetings and goodbyes connected to this location, mine included. I sat there for a good thirty minutes watching Glassboro life, a life I’m now a part of, go on before I decide to head back to my dorm in Whitney. I gave Donald St. John one more wave and that night when the train came rolling through, I thought of my best friend, I thought of Donald and Maureen St. John, and I thought of greetings and goodbyes.
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This page references:
- Glassboro Train Depot From Tracks
- Donald St. John Memorial Flagpole 2
- Donald St. John Memorial Flag Pole and West Jersey Train Depot
- West Jersey Train Depot from Train Tracks 2
- Vandalized Train Depot
- Railfanning Glassboro NJ, October 2018
- Flag waving outside West Jersey train Depot
- HD: Conrail #3026 passing Historic Glassboro, NJ RR Station
- Donald St. John Memorial Marker
- West Jersey Depot Sign
