Home depot

• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 15, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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LINDSAY — David and Sheila Wall have spent their entire married life in a house that wasn’t even supposed to be a house.

It was built about 1895 as the railroad depot for the town of Lindsay, located on La. 964 in East Feliciana Parish, just past the East Baton Rouge Parish line.

In 1945, David Wall’s grandfather, the late David Claypool Johnston, moved the two-story depot to family property some 500 feet from its original location alongside the railroad tracks. Since their marriage in 1982, the Walls have lived in the house, which David Wall’s grandmother, Aileen Wilkinson Johnston, called Arbora for her love of trees. At his grandmother’s death in 1998, David Wall inherited the spacious home, one of four that will be open to the public Sunday at the Zachary Historic Village’s annual Fall Festival of Homes.

The Lindsay depot was an unusually large station for such a small community. “The railroad also had a big setup over here,” David Wall said. “There were places for people to stay when they worked on the railroad. There was the section foreman’s house and several small section houses.”

David Wall’s grandfather, who was called by his initials “D.C.,” was born in 1896, grew up in Slaughter and married the daughter of the Rev. Daniel F. Wilkinson, longtime minister at The Plains Presbyterian Church, some two miles south of Lindsay. In the 1930s, the Johnstons were living at Roseneath in Jackson.

At the time, David Wall’s grandfather was running his own dairy on the Lindsay property and a large dairy for Henry Skipwith, owner of the adjacent property. There was an old icehouse next to the railroad track. “The dairymen from around would bring their milk and put it in the icehouse,” David Wall said. “They had an ice-cooled car on the railroad, and the milk would go to New Orleans for sale.”

The depot originally had a large warehouse, segregated waiting rooms for black and white travelers, a business office and an upstairs apartment for the depot agent. A black pot-bellied stove heated the business office and the waiting rooms.

“The Illinois Central Railroad closed the depot at Lindsay about 1939 and later decided to sell the building at an auction with the stipulation that it was to be moved from the premises,” Aileen Wilkinson Johnston said in an article the late Robert Preston Kennedy, well-known Feliciana historian, wrote for The Zachary Plainsman.

Her husband submitted the only bid for the building and bought it for $85. They purchased a tract of land adjacent to their property and “began the process of transferring the big building to the present site,” Aileen Johnson told Kennedy.

“As best I can understand, they rolled it on logs,” David Wall said. “They used a mule-driven winch to move it along, just a single mule.” His grandmother told Kennedy that the mule pulled the rig in a “circular fashion.”

“My grandmother intended for the depot to be her home,” David Wall said, “but I’m not sure my grandfather did.” Aileen Johnston consulted family members and friends and got out her pencil and pad and began planning ways to make the depot into a place to live.

“We employed different carpenters and laborers in specific tasks of converting the depot into a home, but work stopped many times due to the scarcity of many materials essential in World War II,” she told Kennedy. The Johnstons added a spacious back porch, two bedrooms, a hallway and a bathroom. They moved into the house in 1946.

Across La. 964 was a general store D.C. Johnston also operated. “You had your groceries, and you had your nails,” David Wall said. “They had kerosene and one gas pump in front on the right.”