Texas State Railroad 2-8-2 No.30 leads a return excursion west towards Palestine, TX making a brief station stop at the depot at Maydelle.
Visioning the possibilities of a town on the State Railroad, supported by the truck and sawmill industries developing in the adjacent territory, C. D. Jarratt, N. A. (Jack) Slover and J. S. Sherman, in 1910, bought five hundred acres of state-owned land and announced the opening of a town. The name, Maydelle, was given in honor of Governor Campbell’s daughter. Campbell persuaded the Legislature to extend the line to Palestine, where it met the I&GN Railway. The original depot, long gone, was built in 1909. The depot seen here was built for the 1985 Roy Clark-Mel Tillis movie, Uphill All the Way.
