Mineral Point Railroad Museum

The Mineral Point Railroad Museum occupies Wisconsin’s oldest surviving railroad depot, a two-story limestone building constructed in 1856 by Cornish stonemasons John Toay and Philip Allen. The first train arrived from Warren, Illinois, on June 17, 1857, opening a transportation link that helped turn Mineral Point’s lead and zinc mining economy into a regional industry. Inside, the restored depot preserves railroad artifacts spanning more than a century, including Civil War-era documents, historic photographs and maps, uniforms, tools, a telegraph office, the original passenger bench, baggage cart, ticket booth, safe and agent desks. The railroad itself remained part of Mineral Point’s story until the last train left in 1984.

One of the museum’s most unusual connections is to Vincent Price, the actor famous for films including House of Wax, The Fly and House on Haunted Hill. Price’s great-grandfather, George Cobb, was a prominent Mineral Point merchant and Superintendent of the Mineral Point Railroad, and Cobb’s railroad office is preserved inside the museum. Cobb was deeply involved in the town’s commercial growth. In 1854, he built the substantial limestone warehouse that still stands at 23 Commerce Street (now the Commerce Street Brewery Hotel), anticipating the arrival of the railroad and using the building to handle goods such as food, merchandise and mining supplies.

The museum also contains a detailed model of Mineral Point’s railroad yard as it appeared around 1920, including the depot, engine house, turntable and water tank, most of which have disappeared from the actual landscape. Push a button and the steam locomotive moves through the scene while period railroad sounds recreate the activity around the depot.

The building itself nearly disappeared, too. After the railroad era ended, it sat vacant and deteriorated, with flooding and structural problems threatening its survival. A local preservation effort eventually restored the depot, and it reopened as the Mineral Point Railroad Museum in 2004. Today, it offers a compact look at the railroad, mining and commercial history that shaped southwestern Wisconsin, with the added curiosity of standing inside the former workplace of Vincent Price’s great-grandfather.