Hopkinsville’s century-old L&N Freight Station will be sold in a public auction at noon Friday, setting up a shift in ownership that could determine the fate of the historic property that has been vacant for several years.
The station was built in 1905 and served as a railroad facility until it closed in the mid-to-late 1960s, Christian County Historian William T. Turner told Hoptown Chronicle.
The East Ninth Street property includes approximately 5,600 square feet of office space that has been partially renovated and 9,500 of warehouse space, according to a Bolinger Real Estate and Auction advertisement.
The Hopkinsville Water Environment Authority has owned the station since 2006, originally buying it as a storage facility.
Derrick Watson, HWEA’s general manager, said on Wednesday that the utility no longer needs the facility because other properties — including the Northside Waste Water Plant that was decommissioned in 2012 — provide enough storage space for the utility’s needs.
The best outcome would be for a new owner to invest in the station as a historic property, he said. However, that kind of investment is not in HWEA’s mission, he said.
“I think it’s a great building,” Watson said. “… it has a lot of potential and a lot of charm.”
Watson said he hopes that someone who is involved in restoring old buildings sees that potential. But that kind of investment cannot come from HWEA, he said.
“If somebody gave me $500,000 today, I would not put $500,000 in that old building. I would put $500,000 in our water system or our sewer system. I would do repairs,” he said.
The sale comes at a time of heightened public interest in a related property — the L&N Train Depot across Ninth Street and on the other side of the railroad tracks. A local official recently confirmed that restoration of the depot building would cost more than $2 million, a price that Mayor James R. Knight Jr. has indicated is too steep for city government to fully fund.
A group of local residents interested in the passenger depot being preserved has been meeting with city officials for several months. Their efforts are highlighted on the Facebook page, Save Our Hopkinsville L&N Train Depot!
Like the freight station, the depot’s owner is a local government agency. The deed for the depot was recently transferred from city government to the Local Development Corp., one of the downtown development arms of Community and Development Services.
The passenger depot has been vacant for four years. The last tenant was the Pennyroyal Arts Council, whose employees moved out following a small fire in January 2019. Their offices are now in the Alhambra Theatre.
The L&N Railroad closed its freight station in Hopkinsville around 1966 and the facility was sold to Henderson-Moorefield Lumber Co., whose main office on Seventh Street shared a property boundary with the station.
The L&N station was the second freight facility at that location. The first one was built by the Evansville, Henderson and Nashville Railroad Co. in 1870, said Turner. It was torn down around the turn of the century.
“We don’t have any photos of the first freight station,” he said.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
