Katy Station in Columbia originally served as a depot for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas, or MKT Railroad beginning in 1909. It was reopened as a restaurant in 1976, and the Columbia-branch tracks were officially abandoned a year later.
The station was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and eventually became the home of Shiloh Bar and Grill. Potential demolition plans have led to the creation of a new group called “Save Katy Station,” which is working to save the building.
Joel Rhodes is a member of the group, and the Executive Director of the State Historical Society of Missouri. He came through KBIA for a conversation about the history of not only the station, but also the railroad system it represents.
He spoke with KBIA’s Robin Crouch. Here’s an excerpt from their conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Robin Crouch:
Can you talk a little bit about how this railroad system started and how it kind of spread culture or created different towns and environments along its path?
Joel Rhodes:
Yeah, it's a fascinating story because railroads really change our conceptions of space and time and distance and place. And this is certainly true in Missouri, rivers dictated where Missouri's towns are, but railroads determined their growth. And for most towns outside of Kansas City or St. Louis, the degree to which they were able to attract a railroad and maintain connections to the railroad determined their fate. Those that took advantage of railroads prospered and thrived. Those that didn't withered on the vine. And for a railroad town, that became a status symbol. It was a form of identity. Really, if you think about a station like the Katy Depot station, railroad stations and depots were to the 19th and 20th centuries what cathedrals were to the 13th century. They were works of art. It was a recognition that some outside entity had validated you.
"Railroad stations and depots were to the nineteenth and twentieth century what cathedrals were to the thirteenth century."
Crouch:
It's really clear to me that the depot was a super important cultural hub for Columbia for a while. Now that it's not in its old function, it now is Shiloh Bar and Grill, it makes me wonder about how we think about preserving history.
Rhodes:
I'm convinced that most people are looking for an authentic sense of place: where you fit in this grand fabric, where your thread weaves into this magnificent tapestry of our shared collective history. And with the built environment, with historic buildings, that's generally one of the things that people can identify and hold on to and grasp. It's authentic. It's real. That's where history happened. With the Katy Depot in particular, you can know all of the dates and the facts about the history of the Katy Railroad and the history of railroading. But when you go there, you can envision in your mind the sights, the sounds and the smells, what it would have been like. By the early parts of the twentieth century, on any given night, there were over 60 trains crisscrossing the state of Missouri. With the bridges across the Mississippi and across the Missouri River, somebody in Columbia could travel anywhere in the country. Just get on the train at the Katy station, and you could go to California, you could go to Texas, you could get to the East Coast. I mean, it really expanded Americans' ability to travel and experience the rest of the country.
