It's difficult for us, in our modern auto-oriented society, to realize how dependent on railroads people in the late nineteenth century were. With no other form of mechanized overland transportation yet available, rail was the only way to quickly and reliably travel long distances. Railroads were often the largest employers in the places that they served, and where competing lines crossed, as the Northern Pacific’s Saint Paul and Duluth and the Great Northern’s Eastern Minnesota did in Hinckley, a busy interchange of passengers and freight developed.
Railroads in this era were more than just transporters of people and goods, they were also how news and information reached even the smallest, most isolated town. Telegraph lines running along railroad rights of way instantly transported news and information across the country and mail was carried (and often sorted) on trains. The depot was where small towns like Hinckley connected to urban America during the late nineteenth century. John R. Stilgoe writes in Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene: “In the years after 1880, railroad depots became the hubs of small-town life; around them developed businesses dependent on train transportation, and in them converged people anxious to learn the latest telegraphic news, to greet travelers from the (interurban) corridor… No longer did the general store, barber shop, and post office focus small-town life; instead the depot, the gateway to the (interurban) corridor, attracted everyone interested in metropolitan excitement” (Stilgoe, John R. Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. New Haven, CT.: Yale UP, 1983, 193).
Hinckley’s railroad era downtown is particularly focused on the rail lines. Because the town grew around the Northern Pacific depot, streets run parallel and perpendicular to the NP tracks and not directly north-south and east-west along the domain and range system of land division. Later corridors of circulation that connected the town to the outside world cut across the railroad era grid, as seen in the modern aerial photo. The Great Northern’s later Eastern Minnesota cuts diagonally through the town running along the southern and eastern edges of the downtown and Interstate Highway 35 is visible in the southeast corner of the photo. The railroad era landscape survives, though the rail lines are no longer the main corridors of circulation of people, goods, ideas, and information through Hinckley. BNSF, Union Pacific, Saint Croix Valley freight trains still run through the town on the former Great Northern line but rarely stop to pick up freight and passenger trains no longer call at Hinckley. The Northern Pacific’s Saint Paul and Duluth line north to Duluth, out of service, is now the seventy-mile Willard Munger trail, the country’s longest paved trail.
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