Avery grew up along the St. Joe River during construction of the Milwaukee Road’s extension to the Pacific Northwest. The railroad put this frame depot into service by 1909, and the town became a stopping point on a route between Chicago and the Seattle–Tacoma area. Look at the length of the building and the different treatment of its siding. One end accommodated passengers and offices. The other held freight. The plan makes it possible to picture a train stopping here to handle two different kinds of business at the same platform.
Avery mattered even to trains that carried few passengers for the town itself. It was the western end of an electrified stretch of main line that crossed the mountains to Harlowton, Montana. That made Avery an important point for locomotive changes. Overhead wire, electric locomotives and the facilities required to service them made this a much larger operation than the modest station might suggest. The preserved depot gives visitors a place to start reading the story of the old line through the Bitterroot Mountains.
The building also has a connection to the Great Fire of 1910. The railroad helped evacuate people during the fires, and the depot was listed in the National Register as one of a group of sites associated with the disaster. In later decades timber provided a different kind of work. Potlatch Forests established a log landing in Avery in 1944 to load timber onto railroad cars. Freight kept moving after long-distance passenger service ended. The depot remained in railroad use until 1980, when the line shut down.
The museum preserves memorabilia of the Milwaukee Road years. A railroad passenger car is also displayed in town. Compare the car with the depot’s long horizontal shape, then take a look at the river valley around them. Avery’s setting explains how one community could be a passenger stop, a timber shipping point and a place where a railroad equipped for mountain grades changed the way it powered its trains.
Visitor information
Researched November 2026.
Sources
More railroad museums in Idaho
- Nampa Train Depot Museum — Nampa: Depot and local history museum
- Northern Pacific Depot Railroad Museum — Wallace: Depot and railroad history museum
- Pacific and Idaho Northern Railway Depot Museum — New Meadows: Depot and community history museum
- Washington, Idaho & Montana Railway Depot Museum — Potlatch: Depot and railroad history museum
- All 5 railroad museums and sites in Idaho
Keep exploring
- All heritage sites — museums, stations and landmarks
- Mountain West — the trains you can ride in the region