“Two Union Station benches were recently auctioned,” says Alex Heckman, Vice President of Museum Operations for Carillon Historical Park.
“Our president & CEO, Brady Kress, wanted to buy them, but someone beat him to the punch. He was disappointed — until he got a surprise call from the winning bidder. To his surprise, he had purchased them with the intent of donating them to the park.”
Now, one of those benches serves as a resting place for visitors, just as it once did in a bustling station that, according to the Dayton Daily News on July 7, 1900, “in style, architecture, and admittedly elegant artistic work … surpasses any station in the country.”
The old Union Station
Dayton’s old Union Station wasn’t a station at all. Opened in 1856 on the site of a former graveyard at Sixth and Ludlow, the brick passenger depot — shaped like an airplane hangar — was mockingly referred to as the “old car shed.” A door was pulled shut each Sunday to close it off.
“The old depot was built when Dayton was little more than a village,” reported the Dayton Daily News in its July 23, 1900, edition, “when the lightning express made the run to Cincinnati in three hours … when you made your will before starting for New York, sat up on the train all night, changed cars about twelve times en route, ate cold lunch from a basket, and regarded your safe arrival at your destination as a special dispensation of providence.”
As Dayton grew, so did the need for a better station. After years of disputes between the city and the railroads, plans for a new Union Station finally moved forward.
The new Union Station
When the new Union Station opened on July 21, 1900, throngs of Daytonians paid 10 cents — about $4 in 2025 — to tour the grand $300,000 facility. That’s over $11 million in today’s dollars.
Designed by Elzner & Anderson of Cincinnati, the 50-by-215-foot Italian Renaissance-style building featured Corinthian columns, winding staircases, wrought-iron grille work, art-marble arches, a vaulted ceiling, a fireplace, moss-colored enamel tiles, gilded ornamentation — and an iconic seven-story clock tower.
“It looked like something out of Rome,” said Andy Reed, a longtime Union Station employee, in the May 22, 1982, edition of The Journal Herald. “It was a beautiful station. Everything in that old depot was marble.
During its first 30 years, as many as 66 passenger trains pulled through Dayton each day. In 1931, the city added an elevated train platform to ease street congestion. Over the decades, passengers from Shirley Temple and Alan Turing to U.S. Presidents Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan passed through Union Station.
But as trains gave way to cars and planes, the station fell into decline. In 1964, the grand clock tower fell to make way for a Sixth Street extension. On Oct. 1, 1979, the last passenger train left the station. The once-glorious station was eventually dismantled — its chandeliers gone, its walls broken, its rooms dark, dusty, and covered in broken glass.
“They used to have chandeliers in there, like candles in a cluster, and they were enclosed in glass, and they all hung down,” Reed recalled in 1982. “And they tore all that down … People then, all they were thinking of was modern. That was just your modern improvement.”
A piece preserved
The iconic wooden benches of Union Station remained until the very end. Now, one of them lives on at Carillon Historical Park.
It may just be a bench from 1900—but it represents much more. It evokes a time when Dayton was a rising city on the move. And that same spirit can still be felt today—especially this weekend, at Rail Festival.
Leo DeLuca, a native Daytonian, manages communications for Carillon Historical Park. His writing has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and The New York Times, among other publications.
What: Carillon Park Rail Festival
Where: Carillon Historical Park, 1000 Carillon Blvd.
When: Saturday, 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
Admission: $14/adult (18–59) • $12/senior (60+) • $10/child (3–17) • Children 2 and under and Dayton History members are admitted free
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