The Witch's Hat: South Lyon's train depot got its name from its roof

Look at the roof and you’ll understand the nickname. The little depot in South Lyon’s McHattie Park wears a steep, pointed cone of a roof over its rounded front end — and to generations of kids it has looked like nothing so much as a witch’s hat dropped on top of a train station. The name stuck so well that hardly anyone calls it anything else.

The Grand Trunk railroad built it in 1909, after fire took the town’s older depot the year before. South Lyon was a real rail crossroads then, with multiple lines running through, and the Queen Anne station handled passengers until 1955, when the trains quit stopping. That’s usually the end of the story for a small-town depot — the building sits empty, then comes down. South Lyon decided otherwise.

In 1975 the city bought the depot, and in 1976, as a Bicentennial project, crews jacked it up and moved the whole thing off East Lake Street to McHattie Park. By 1981 it had reopened as a museum, its interior kept the way a turn-of-the-century waiting room and ticket office would have looked. Over the years more old buildings joined it on the grounds, until the depot anchored a whole little historic village: a 1926 caboose, a freight house, a one-room schoolhouse, and a small chapel, clustered together at the end of Dorothy Street.

It’s run by the local historical society and opens on weekend afternoons. Stand on the platform under that pointed roof and it’s easy to picture the place doing its old job — the bell, the steam, somebody waiting on the next train to anywhere. The trains are gone, but the witch’s hat is still keeping its corner.