The "Wooo Wooo---Wooo Wooo----Wooo
Wooo" of the powerful train engines’ whistles, a familiar
sound In Poplar Bluff for so many years, is now just an occasional
nostalgic sound.
Going down to the station to watch the trains come in was once
an exciting pastime for many children. 
Often
Dad would take the kids to get an ice cream cone at the dairy ice
cream store and then to watch the trains and wave to the trainmen
while Mom cleared away the dinner dishes and had a short breather
from her busy day.
Poplar Bluff was a railroad town. Trains traveled back and forth
all day and night playing as they did a significant part in the
growth and economic development of this county and city. Fifty to
75 years ago there was passenger service with sandwiches or snacks
vended and a classy dining car. A trip to St. Louis or Little Rock,
Ark., for a day in the city was always available. Huge freight cars
carried everything you can name. Travel was easy.
However, travel and moving freight wasn’t always glamorous.
It started in Butler County before all the swamps were cleared.
Building railroads was hazardous here and riding them wasn’t
always too safe, but they had to get the timber out of the forests
and into suitable places to start it on the way to its destination.
The people who lived in the smaller towns and in the rural areas
had to get somewhere to buy groceries and other necessities and
the railroads made this possible.
But great highways, coast to coast, buses, trucks and the airlines
brought those magnificent engines to their knees. We still have
important freight trains, but fewer by far, and we have Amtrak north
and south once daily in the very early hours of the morning.
The Butler County Railroad provided up-to-date service for passengers
and freight in this immediate area for 45 years. Opening for public
transportation in 1905, the trains carried passengers to and from
Poplar Bluff to Broseley, Qulin (then called Melville) , Fagus and
on south to Piggott, Ark. 
The
train served other towns along this route, some no longer in existence.
Trains were the fastest means of transporation and often the only
way to get from town to town in this once swampy part of the southeast
Missouri area.
Old issues of the Daily American Republic report crowds
gathering at the depot to see the Poplar Bluff baseball team off
to Qulin or Piggott for a game. Many fans accompanied them on the
train trips. These reports indicate that Qulin was a major baseball
rival of the Poplar Bluff team.
The railroad started at Lowell Junction which was at the present
junction of Route B (old Highway 60) and State Highway 51 about
one mile west of Fisk, and ran south to Piggott. It ran west into
Poplar Bluff on the Cairo-Arkansas-Texas tracks. This railroad ,
called C.A.T., ran from Cape Girardeau through Poplar Bluff and
on to Texas. The Butler County railroad depot stood at B and Bartlett
streets in east Poplar Bluff.
The railroad was owned and operated by the Brooklyn Cooperage Co.,
of Missouri, a subsidiary of the American Sugar Refining Co., in
New York. They sold the railroad to the St. Louis San Francisco
(Frisco) company in 1927. Service from then until 1950 was limited.
Finally the railroad was absorbed into the Frisco Railroad and the
33 mile line from Poplar Bluff to Piggott abandoned in 1951.
Lowell Melville Palmer of New York, president of the Brooklyn Cooperage
Co., came to this area in 1897 to buy timberland for the purpose
of using the trees to manufacture staves and other wood products.
According to research done by the late James Mottram of Poplar Bluff,
the American Sugar Co., to ship sugar needed thousands of wooden
barrels a years. Eastern timberlands were depleted and southeast
Missouri presented great forests for the company to harvest.
William M. Barron came to Poplar Bluff from St. Louis after accepting
a job as legal advisor to the cooperage company. He later became
president and general manager of the company. He and Palmer named
the towns along the railroad and other places such as Palmer Slough,
Lowell Junction where the railroad began----perhaps even Melville
which later became Qulin, since Melville was Palmer’s middle
name. Barron Road in Poplar Bluff, once the main highway out of
Poplar Bluff north, was named for Barron and Broseley for his wife’s
hometown in England.
The cooperage company employed 300-500 men at one time. They left
Poplar Bluff when the timber played out in about 1926, moving to
Sumter, S. C. and taking many Poplar Bluff employees with them.
The railroad was originally built to bring out the logs, but became
one that Mr. Mottram wrote “equaled or exceeded in many cases
services on many of the mainline railroads of the day.” Mr.
Mottram researched the railroad and cooperage company history for
a book he planned to write, but unfortunately he died in 1994 before
completing the book.
Poplar Bluff also had two mainline railroads, the Frisco and the
Missouri Pacific .The latter was originally the St. Louis, Iron
Mountain, Southern Railroad and in 1872 was the first railroad completed
through Poplar Bluff.
A frame depot was built c.1873. It was replaced in 1890 with a
structure that burned shortly after completion. The railroad then
utilized old boxcars for baggage and express facilities and operated
a ticket office in the Crown Hotel that stood at 504 South Broadway.
The present station was built in 1910. The wide ornate concrete
steps from Main Street to the station also were built in 1910. The
elaborate staircase was built at a cost of $3000. Though the station’s
address is on Main Street, it is situated below and east of the
street and the steps give access directly from the station to the
street.
The rail line runs north and south out of Poplar Bluff to St..
Louis and Little Rock Ark. Due to rail connections, Poplar Bluff
became a center for the shipment of wood related products and wheat,
cotton and corn grown in the area.
The St. Louis, Iron Mountain, Southern Railroad merged with the
Missouri Pacific in . 1917. The railroad built a roundhouse on the
property joining the depot and all servicing of the trains on this
route was done here. This brought a large number of railroad employees
into the town as well as furnishing employment to others who already
lived here.
In 1986 the Missouri Pacific Railroad was renamed Union Pacific
Railroad. Today the station is used as a freight depot and as a
crew changing point. Amtrak uses the station for their stops, but
all the other great passenger cars have ceased to operate.
The second mainline in Poplar Bluff was the Frisco line. In 1901
the Southern Missouri and Arkansas Railroad built a line through
Poplar Bluff and in the same year sold it to the St. Louis-San Francisco
railroad, commonly known as the Frisco. This service ran from Hoxie,
Ark., through Poplar Bluff to Cape Girardeau, opening up connections
for smaller communities to major cities such as Memphis, St. Louis,
Chicago and Kansas City.
The first Frisco depot was built at 303 Moran Street . It was a
brick building, badly damaged in the tornado of 1927. It was razed
and the present building built on the same site in 1928. The new
depot was of Spanish design, believed to have been chosen to draw
attention to the railroad’s then new service to Florida. The
Spanish Mission style also was used in building depots in Springfield,
Pensacola, Fla., and Fayetteville, Ark.
Following World War II, passenger service decreased significantly
and the Frisco ended operation in Poplar Bluff by 1965. The building
was acquired by the city and now houses the Moark Regional Railroad
Museum.
Over the years, numerous short railway lines were built to carry
logs from the forests to the mills of the owner of the line. The
lines disappeared along with the great timber era in the early 1900s,
but every rail line, large or small, helped to build this city from
a tiny village in 1850 to a thriving community within its first
50 years.
The whistle of the engines may be seldom, and nostalgic to but
a few, but the impact the railroads had on the devolpment of Poplar
Bluff will echo forever.
