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Next Stop For The Transformed Boyce Depot
Next Stop For The Transformed Boyce Depot
By John E. Ross
Seems as if Frank Scheer’s been workin’ on the railroad all his live-long days. He’s the engineer of the two-decade campaign to restore the depot in Boyce and create Railway Mail Service archives next door.
For Frank, workin’ on the railroad began with romance, not for locomotives, rolling stock or stations, but for Betsey, a girl in his church. It was 1966. He was a junior in high school in Alexandria, and her dad was an officer in the Strategic Air Command. When her dad was posted to Loring Air Force Base and her family moved to Limestone, Maine, Frank longed to stay in touch.
The quickest way to get a letter to her was to send it by Railway Post Office, Frank said, adding, “That was the best fatherly advice I ever got.”
He wrote a letter, hustled three blocks to the station in Alexandria, banged on the door of the mail car, handed his letter to the postal clerk, and has been infatuated with railway mail ever since.
Posting letters to his erstwhile sweetheart via railway mail became a daily habit. Postal clerks began to recognize him and shout “Here’s that kid again.”
As week after week passed, Frank’s curiosity about what went on inside the mail rail car kept building. Eventually, he wangled a ride and was astounded by what he saw. Railway postal clerks had to place about 20 letters per minute into slots for destination cities. Mail clerks on trains southbound from Alexandria had to memorize codes for every one of Virginia’s 900 to 1,000 post offices.
Frank’s fascination with rail mail grew through his undergraduate years at the University of Virginia. He worked as a tower operator, electrically throwing switches and turning signals that routed trains safely through rail yards. Later during the summers of 1971 and 1973, he was an agent at Chesapeake & Ohio depot at Beaverdam, Va. and other nearby yards.
What he learned in those years and by collecting oral histories during his professional career, ultimately with the U.S. Postal Supply Management Department, fueled his passion to memorialize rail mail history.
In 2003, Frank bought the former Norfolk & Western depot at Boyce. He said the depot is the classic venue for presenting not only the history of rail mail but also how small towns like Boyce and railroads grew up together.
The depot is unusually grand for a rural town the size of Boyce, once a crossroads on the Winchester-Berry’s Ferry Turnpike. The hamlet was no more than a whistle stop when the Shenandoah Valley Railroad, running from Hagerstown to Front Royal and eventually Roanoke, came through crossing the turnpike in 1880.
That the Shenandoah Valley Railroad chose this route is no accident. Vice president of the railroad was Upton Boyce, whose estate, Tulyeres, was just down the tracks near White Post.
The original depot at the crossing was a modest wood building, and the hamlet springing up around it was named Boyceville. Shortly “Boyceville” was shortened to “Boyce” to limit railroad telegraphers’ confusion with Berryville, the next stop up the line.
Norfolk & Western acquired the Shenandoah Valley Railroad in 1890 and embarked on a plan to improve freight and passenger facilities. At the same time agriculture and commerce in and around Boyce was thriving, and the town became incorporated in 1910. Two years later, the Norfolk & Western announced plans to replace the old wooden depot at Boyce
Plans for the new depot were modest at first. Then Peter H. Mayo of the Powhatan estate convinced his friends, Robert Page of Saratoga and Henry and Hattie Gilpin of Scaleby, to press for a larger, more elegant station. He backed their request with an investment of $17,500 or about $570,000 today.
The new 3,450-square foot white stucco depot opened in 1913 and included an agent’s office, waiting rooms, indoor restrooms, and baggage room. Spur tracks for freight and horse loading were laid nearby. As highways improved and passenger service declined, the N&W sold the station to private owners and eliminated service at the end of 1959. It served as Boyce’s Post Office until 1984.
To preserve the station and Boyce’s railway mail heritage, Frank established and leads two foundations: The Boyce Railway Depot Foundation and the Railway Service Library Foundation. The latter will preserve rail mail records, artifacts, a 1931 USPO truck, and a mobile U.S. Post Office in the 40,000-square foot Paul A. Nagle Archives under construction adjacent to the station.
For more information, visit https://boycedepot.com/ and https://railwaymail.org.
