10/06/2026
Waccamaw Train Depot for the Atlantic Coastline Railroad, Lake Waccamaw, NC, then 1900 & now.
What would become the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, which operated throughout much of the depot’s history, comprised five smaller railroad companies. The earliest predecessor of the Atlantic Coast Line was the Petersburg Railroad, which was chartered in 1830, and opened in 1833. Then came the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad in 1836. Two other railroad companies, the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, founded in 1840, and the Wilmington and Manchester Railroad, founded in 1853, along with the Northeastern Railroad, also founded in 1853, comprised an interconnected network of separate railroad systems. These five railroads operated independently from one another until after the American Civil War, when a Baltimore investor by the name of William T. Walters began to advertise the consortium of businesses as the “Atlantic Coast Line Fast Mail Passenger Route” in 1871. It was not until the turn of the century, however, that the five companies officially were consolidated into one company: the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, which stretched from Richmond, Virginia., to Jacksonville, Florida, and as far west was Montgomery, Alabama, and at its greatest extent spanned a little over 5,000 miles of track across the southern United States. Several other railroads were added afterwards, but these original five constituted the bulk of the railway system. Two trains would pass by the depot at Lake Waccamaw every day: the eastbound noon train and the westbound afternoon train.
Since its foundation in 1900, the headquarters of the Atlantic Coast Line was stationed in Wilmington, North Carolina, but was moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1960, and in 1967 the company was merged with another railroad, the Seaboard Air Line Railway, to form the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad, which operated from 1967 to 1983. The Seaboard Coast Line Railroad was itself absorbed into the short-lived Seaboard System, which operated from 1983 to 1986, which later combined with the Chessie System to form the railroad company CSX Transportation, which still operates today.
The Lake Waccamaw Depot was one of many stations along the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Coast Line Railroad systems, and was responsible for a variety of tasks. The original depot that had operated throughout much the nineteenth century burned down in the mid-1890s, so another one was designed by Joseph F. Leitner and constructed by Herbert Smith in 1904, and it operated until its closure in 1974. In either late 1974 or 1975, the depot was purchased by the town of Lake Waccamaw to be used as a storage facility for excess materials for the lake’s renowned Fourth of July celebrations. In 1976, however, the Lake Waccamaw Women’s Club purchased the building and preserved it as a museum. It first opened on July 10, 1977 to the public. As a matter-of-fact, the first exhibit room was the ticket sales room reserved for whites only, while the gift shop room was the sales room reserved for minorities. The walkway between the two rooms did not exist during the depot’s operation, but is instead one of the few modifications made to the building
