3/25/2009
I filled the truck with gas at Barney’s Gulf in Duxbury this morning. Barney’s is run by the man whose father and grandfather owned the lumber yard on railroad ave. His father also owned property throughout town most of which has been sold off to developers. The four buildings around the old train station are still in the family as is the Gulf station. He has one sister who lives in Ontario and a brother who died several years ago.
I asked him about one of the buildings that looked like it was having repairs done to the roof. The side of the building has the outlineof an old loading door that I knew was from the time when the railroad ran right next to it. He began to tell me a lot about the land and the buildings. The building that recently housed the fish market is basically a nondescript one story ranch, so I thought. But it is actually the old train station that has had the passenger platform filled in and been re-sided and painted white.
Walter Prince bought the building in 1940 after the rail lines were taken up in 1940 and remodeled it. The steel rails were sold to Japan, ironically just before the war.Their are still two steel rails under one of the buildings that the grandfather had kept. And there is a film from 1938 or 1939 of one of the last trains pulling into the station with the grandfather standing in the loading door of the old grain building.