Batavia’s Depot Museum celebrates 50 years

In the lower level of the Batavia Depot Museum, you’ll find a living room. It’s not anyone’s in particular, but it will feel familiar – like the one where you watched cartoons as a kid, sprawled on the floor, your parents or grandparents behind you on the couch.

On the TV, you can watch a video on repeat.

The image of the building moving slowly through the streets of Batavia and navigating a space usually used by pedestrians and vehicles may need some context: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Batavia Depot Museum opening in its current location and the video shows how it got there.

To mark the anniversary, the museum is hosting an exhibit about itself. “The Museum a Community Built: Batavia Depot Museum Celebrates 50 Years” is scheduled to run through July 20.

Museum director Kate Garrett said Batavia always has had a sense of its own history.

“I think a lot of that is attributable to the fact that people remember their own stories or think it’s important to remember their own stories,” she said.

The depot once was part of the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad. The railroad was an important part of the history of Batavia and the depot an important landmark.

By the 1970s, the depot was disused, and the community – once it determined to save the depot – needed to figure out what to do with it.

And where to put it.

“There was a real drive to make sure the community was part of the decision-making process for what this was going to be,” museum curator Jessica Mies said.

With Batavia’s interest in its own history, it quickly was decided the depot would become a history museum.

And the best new location for it happened to be on the other bank of the Fox River.

It was a community effort to transport the depot across the river to its current location.

From the museum, visitors can see Depot Pond, the city’s ice skating venue made famous in January 1958 by the Saturday Evening Post.

In the museum’s lower level living room, the video documents the move of the depot across the river. It’s an example of recorded history that is relatively recent – a home video of that day.

Walter Kauth, a leading figure in the drive to preserve the depot and start the museum, was behind the lens. The images capture people on the roadside watching the depot navigate the city’s roads and negotiate trees and power lines.

Garrett said on the opening night of the exhibit, the room was crowded with people all night watching the video and spotting familiar faces.

“The number of people who sat downstairs to watch that video and spotted themselves or a family member or neighbor or teacher, the whole night, that room was buzzing,” she said.

The exhibit also helps bring to life the fact that history does not have to be very far in the past.

Batavians today remember the move, and Kauth’s video now is a historical document that captured many people just doing their jobs that day.

One of Mies’ favorite stories from the exhibit is the city’s electric department had employees mounted on the roof of the depot ensuring it could clear the power lines during the nine block journey.

What was a workday for those employees now is preserved as a historic moment.

Garrett’s favorite story from the exhibit involves a shovel on the wall.

The shovel was used by John Gustafson, another of the community members behind the drive to secure and use the depot. The shovel was used to break ground at the museum’s current site at 155 Houston St.

At the time, the downtown was going through a post-war rough patch. The committee that chose the museum’s location, however, saw potential in the rundown downtown.

“We had a lot of landmark spaces that were underutilized,” Mies said. “Now when you Google Batavia and images, the first couple hits that pop up are this building.”