LANDMARKS / COUNTY HISTORICAL SITES : Depot Preserves Town’s Railroad Origins

Fillmore might not exist but for the Southern Pacific railroad.

When the tracks came through the Santa Clara Valley in 1887, there was no town in the remote cattle- and sheep-ranching area.

The site was chosen as a midway stop between Saugus and Ventura. The station was built and named after Southern Pacific’s West Coast superintendent, Jerome A. Fillmore, and the town followed in 1888.

Before the Santa Susana line was completed in 1904, Fillmore was on the main route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and four passenger trains a day roared into the station. Shortly after the turn of the century, Fillmore passengers paid 80 cents to ride to Ventura and $1.70 to Los Angeles. During the rainy season, riding the rails was popular.

“When the roads were slick, you couldn’t go any other way,” said longtime resident Jim Haines.

Haines recalls as a youngster climbing aboard the coaches that stopped beyond the station on longer trains. He and his companions would ride up to Central Avenue then leap off as the cars picked up speed.

“We used to hope they wouldn’t have two engines on those days,” he said.

The last passenger train pulled out in 1935, but the freight business continued, at one time occupying four full-time employees.

The station’s original freight scale, its weights intact, still stands in the building, surrounded by the collection of the Fillmore Historical Museum.

The depot is separated from the main track by the width of Main Street. The building was moved from its original location on the south side of the street when the station closed in 1974.

“They wouldn’t lease it to us. They would have bulldozed it,” said Dorothy Haase, museum curator.

The museum’s founder, the late Elizabeth Moore Jarrett, bought the depot for $1 plus sales tax on condition that it be removed from the property. Then she persuaded the city of Fillmore to give up plans for a parking lot on the present site.

The collector obtained passenger benches from the former Piru depot.

“She heard they were tearing it down,” Haase said. “She went right over there, but that was all she could salvage.”

To complete the setting, Jarrett added a rail car and a short length of track at her own expense.

Also at the depot is a pair of Sespe brownstone Ionic columns that stood in front of the former Fillmore State Bank on Central Avenue. They were donated for an exhibit in the museum, but since they weigh 1,500 pounds apiece, they couldn’t be used inside. They form a portal to the wooden depot, Fillmore’s oldest standing building.

HISTORY: The Fillmore Depot was built in 1887, when Southern Pacific completed its line from Saugus to Ventura. Since the last rail car was sidetracked in 1974, the building has housed the Fillmore Historical Museum.

LOCATION: The depot stands at 447 Main St., across from City Park.

HOURS: The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 1 to 4:30 p.m.