Pauls Valley Santa Fe Depot

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway built through Pauls Valley in 1887, completing its connection between Kansas and the Gulf Coast and bringing growth and prosperity to the Chickasaw Nation farming settlement of Smith Paul's Valley. The town's depot saw passenger trains from its opening in the first years of the 1900s until 1933, then again from 1948 to 1979 on the Texas Chief route, later renamed the Lone Star. After the Santa Fe discontinued that service in 1979 the building fell into disuse, and by 1985 the railroad had obtained a permit to raze it. Adrienne Grimmet, then president of the Pauls Valley Historical Society, led the campaign that saved the structure: the city purchased the depot in 1989 and turned it over to the historical society, with restoration work beginning in 1991 powered by donated time, skills, and materials. The depot was added to the National Register of Historic Places following a successful mid-1980s nomination, after an earlier joint 1984 nomination was rejected. When Amtrak's Heartland Flyer began running between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth in 1999, the city built an adjacent waiting room with federal TEA-21 funding, opened in June 2002 with a facade designed to echo the old Santa Fe building.