Marion Station Railroad Museum & Gift Shoppe

The museum's hometown owes its name and its heyday to the railroad. The Somerset County community once called Coulbourne Creek was renamed Marion — after the daughter of John C. Horsey, who paid for the right-of-way and the station house — when the Pennsylvania Railroad arm known as the Eastern Shore Railroad pushed toward Crisfield in 1866. The rails brought a boom: Marion Station became the world's leader in strawberry production, locally hailed as the "strawberry capital of the world," with large trains calling at the depot every day to haul out loaded ice-refrigerated cars of berries for the big cities, while Main Street filled in with a movie house, grocery, blacksmith shop, pharmacy, school, and churches. Decline came in the 1950s when the strawberry trains stopped, and the line was officially abandoned on April 1, 1976 with the creation of Conrail, its steel rails later lifted. The train station still stands in town, and a revitalization project begun in 1997 restored the building.