Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 10/18/2023
CHESTER — While cooks Colleen O’Brien, Melissa McAuliffe and James Higby prepared beef stew and corn pudding in the vintage 1976 Blue Caboose dining car, “hobos” Matt O’Brien, Chet Brett and David Pierce made a campfire and sat on boulders, talking about the hobo lifestyle during the Oct. 14 Hobo Harvest Dinner, a fundraiser for the historic Chester Railway Station.
The annual dinner salutes the hobo culture that began in the early 1800s and lasted until about 1950, forming around the railroad lines as people were driven for economic reasons to follow the harvest. Rails were the best way to get from Point A to Point B, and it was possible to hop on without being noticed.
While camps began as temporary living for a day or two, by the 1920s a whole culture of hobo life developed, and during the Great Depression the camps began to take on semi-permanence. Hobo code symbols announced to fellow hobos a good place to make camp or to catch a train, or a dangerous neighborhood where authorities were on the alert.
Pierce, who is president of the Chester Foundation, said earlier in the day he also guided 30 members of a model railroad club as they visited the station and a local model railroad display.
The Chester Railway Station, a pre-Civil War wood-frame passenger station constructed in 1862, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2021, along with two of a series of 10 Western Railroad Keystone Arches, constructed in the late 1830s. The Chester Foundation hosts events at the station to raise money for its upkeep. They also rent out a 1919 railroad caboose for overnight camping year-round.
More information on the Chester Railway Station may be found at www.chesterrailwaystation.net.