The siding hasn’t been painted in years. Decades maybe. The windows are broken or boarded over with plywood. The rails have long been removed, though if you look carefully you can still see where they once lay, running southward toward Durham. It’s hard to believe this was once a booming area. Built in the late 1880s or early 1890s—no one seems to know, exactly—the station once saw hundreds of mules brought into town each year, where they were sold to tobacco farmers at what was considered the largest mule market in the world.

The old Seaboard Air Lines depot on Elm St.

The Durham and Northern Railway was originally constructed to connect the town of Henderson with the growing city to the south. The line and depot were taken over by Seaboard Air Line Railroad in the 1890s and served the area’s tobacco and cotton farms well into the next century.

By the 1970s traffic had dwindled to almost nothing, and the little station was cut off from the railroad’s southern terminus by the completion of Falls Dam in 1981. Today the gathering storm clouds provide a fitting epitaph. Not quite gone. Not quite forgotten.