Adaline gave a very accurate description of Afton Junction. This is great. Click picture for larger image.
Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries
The University of Iowa has pictures of many other railroads in Iowa as well.
One thing that I really enjoy about reading this journal is the glimpses it gives us into the personalities of Adaline and her family members. It is one thing to read through a list of names and dates, seeing who your ancestors were. It is quite another to read about a husband playing a joke on his wife! That was funny. Chauncey knew she couldn’t see without her glasses so he introduced a man to her as someone else! I was glad to see that she had a sense of humor about it, too.
And the fact that he did this in the Ladies Room? Although indoor plumbing was around in some places (see The History of Plumbing if you are really interested), this was not that kind of a Ladies Room. It seems that some places, including most train stations, had separate waiting areas for women so they did not have to sit with the swearing and tobacco chewing men. Although it isn’t the depot in Lincoln, I did find an example of a typical waiting room from a depot in Springfield, Illinois.
Ano
ther view of Chauncey Burch is described in the on-line book, Bellwood, Nebraska- The First 100 Years. In it, one man remembered “Chauncey Burch, dressed in a cut-away coat, a checkered vest and striped pants, chasing his chickens, with his flowing beard streaming back over his shoulders.” There are many other families in the above mentioned book in addition to the Burches. It is a great place to look for family information, if they ever lived in that area.
I like reading about all the different modes of travel that Adaline and Chauncey use while on their trip. In Lincoln they used the street car system to get around town. Here is a map of that system to help give you a visual as to where they went. It takes a while to load but I like “seeing” their route. The train depot is on the middle left, and the route of their street car is in yellow and goes right across the middle of the map. You can see that they ended up a block away from their destination, just as she described! Just to compare, this is Lincoln today. The little area right around where it says Lincoln, is the area from the first map.
A Burch Tree 