Thursday, April 13, 2017

Jefferson General Store | 0 Comments - Click Here :

    Jeff Young - While the original Jefferson general store was lost to fire ca. 1929, a number of photographs exist of the front, including a nicely orthographic one from which to take measurements.

Jefferson store. Late 1800s.  Park County Archives

Jefferson store. Early 1900s.  Park County Archives

Jefferson store. Water tank is in background. 1926  Park County Archives


    Documentary evidence of the remaining sides is harder to obtain.  One long-distance photo exists of the 1929 Denver Water Board Special, which gives some clues to the North side, but the South and rear will have to remain conjectural.

Denver Water Board Special in Jefferson.  January 1929.  Denver Water Board

    We can surmise that the back included a loading dock of some sort, given its proximity to  the siding.  The Fairplay Flume reports on the 27 March, 1908 that “Merchant Lilley is unloading a 40,000-pound car of stock salt,” an operation large enough that we can assume a high volume of railroad shipments.
Further evidence appears on Feb 4, 1905, when the Flume reports on the sale of the store: “A fair estimate of the amount of money changing hands through this transfer is $10,000,” which is quite a sum in the early 20th Century.

    A few changes were made to the trim details in order to ease construction in HO scale.  Also shown in the following drawings are some Grandt Line and Tichy Train Group windows and doors which, with some modifications, can be made to closely match the prototype.





    Doors and window modifications.  Each pairing shows the original on the left (red rectangles indicate areas to be removed; yellow rectangles areas to be modified) and the results on the right.


    In the end I couldn’t make my peace with having a 6-pane transom over the front doors and a 5-pane over the rear, so I scratch-built my rear freight door and transom.

Alternate detail for scratch-building rear transom window.

Work in progress.

    A PDF containing high resolution versions of the elevation drawings can be found in the files section.  Happy modelling!

Jeff Young