Only two streetcars survived 1950s transition
Only two locally made streetcars survived intact when transit leaders rushed to scrap the Twin Cities rail transit system in the 1950s.
One became a popular attraction in Minneapolis. But its cousin has also become a crowd pleaser 1,800 miles away, thanks largely to a Minnesota man’s devotion to his motorman grandfather.
More than 110 years after it rolled off the factory line in St. Paul, Car 1267 carries passengers several times a week at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, Maine. Riders can even peer up from their seats and see old ads for long-gone restaurants and shops in downtown Minneapolis.
The story of its unlikely salvation was shaped by three generations of Minnesotans and several historical coincidences, including a Minneapolis native’s fortuitous job in Maine as hundreds of streetcars were being junked to make way for buses.
“If we were to respond purely to our emotional feeling, we would keep all these old servants,” said Fred
Ossanna, president of the Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company, at the car’s send-off in 1953. “But progress commands that we make a change.”
Two years before Ossanna’s speech, Doug Anderson’s parents put him on a train from Seattle to Minneapolis to meet his grandfather. Anderson vividly remembers emerging from the since-demolished Great Northern Depot in downtown Minneapolis and seeing an array of yellow streetcars on Hennepin Avenue.
“I was totally blown away because here were all these things I’d never seen before,” said Anderson, who now lives in Rochester. “We didn’t have streetcars in Seattle at that time.”
His grandfather Ole Peder Sather was a Norwegian immigrant who had retired after more than three decades operating streetcars in the Twin Cities. Looking for a reason to get out of the house, Sather took his grandson on a rail tour of Twin Cities landmarks.
“We went all over. And I thought that was just fascinating,” Anderson said. “Especially when we all of a sudden left the streets and were going through the woods.”
Anderson did not realize at the time that hundreds of buses were already on order from General Motors — none had arrived. The conversion was fully underway several years later, however, and the leftover streetcars were being sold for scrap.
That’s when Dwight “Ben” Minnich, a leader at the New England Electric Railway Historical Society (later the Seashore Trolley Museum), sent a letter to Ossanna asking for one of the old cars. Minnich, the son of a prominent University of Minnesota professor, had grown up in Minneapolis riding streetcars to school, according to his widow, Ida Mae Minnich.
The system’s general manager Barney Larrick wrote back saying he could have a car, but he better get to Minnesota quick because “we will be scrapping, selling and junking these streetcars every day.” And he warned that they would need lots of permits to haul it back home on a trailer — though they ultimately packed it on a train.
“[Y]ou are going to have nothing but trouble,” Larrick wrote.
They chose one of the oldest cars still running in the system, Car 1267, which had been built at St. Paul’s Snelling Shops — at what is today Allianz Field — in 1907. It was kept in service at the University of Minnesota, which preferred the older “gate”-style cars for its intercampus line since people boarded through a back gate where a conductor oversaw a special fare collection system.
The momentous nature of the handoff was apparently not lost on Ossanna, who had years earlier taken the helm of the private transit agency and later went to prison for fraud related to the sale of old streetcar materials. He remarked how much the country had changed since 1907, from an agricultural society to an urbanized powerhouse with automobiles, airplanes and even the atomic bomb.
“Our Twin Cities were in swaddling clothes when [Car 1267] first made its appearance, and the routes used for transportation were definitely limited,” Ossanna said. “It has been a faithful old car and we are happy to know that it will rest in the Valhalla which you provide for the distinguished relics of the past.”