WITH SPECIAL EXHIBITS “THE RAILROADS OF RON NIXON” AND “GETTING THERE”
The Livingston Depot Museum will reopen for the season on Friday, May 13 at 10 a.m. with both its regular rail and Yellowstone history displays, and two new special exhibits for the year: “The Railroads of Ron Nixon,” and “Getting There: From Livingston to Yellowstone.” The museum is operated by the Livingston Depot Foundation.
“The Railroads of Ron Nixon,” an eye-catching collection of photos of the Northwestern rails, is a traveling special exhibit on loan from the Museum of the Rockies. The images range from a personal glance at an engineer in a cab to classic historic scenes along the Northern Pacific, Milwaukee Road, and Great Northern.
Nixon grew up in the early 1900s in a Northern Pacific family of telegraphers across various Montana locations. His mother was also an avid amateur photographer who not only taught him Morse code but started him young into shooting images starting with a circus train crew.
Nixon began recording his railroad experiences and travels at five, and started as a “boomer,” or telegraph operator, in Livingston at fourteen. By 1930 a Boston Evening Transcript article wrote, “Ron Nixon, an eighteen-year-old Montana youth, has cataloged the numbers of thirteen thousand railway locomotives. More, he can remember considerably over half of them, their types, where and when he saw them, and incidents of all kinds — tragic, humorous, freakish, grotesque, mystifying, thrilling, and colorful — in connection with many of them There are coincidences and episodes by the dozens among the engines the boy has set down in his records, adding, “To young Nixon, a locomotive is a living, breathing, sentient thing, athrill with life like a Kentucky thoroughbred, and as responsive to those that understand it.”
His first published photo, in Railway Age magazine in 1930, was followed by pictures in magazines, newspapers, rail company posters, advertisements, and calendars, and he authored numerous railroad articles throughout his career. From 1925 until his retirement in 1975 as manager and wire chief for the NP’s Relay Division in Missoula, his career and photo portfolio spanned several states and even Canada. He died in 1989 with over 30,000 photos to his credit, and his collection was purchased by the Museum of the Rockies in 1993 and now travels today to sites like the Livingston Depot Museum.
The Depot will also present a talk by MoR photography curator Steve Jackson Thursday, June 16 at 7 pm, with reception to follow.
The additional exhibit, “Getting There: From Livingston to Yellowstone,” will look at the relation between Livingston and the park, the final leg of rail travel for most of the park’s earliest years, in honor of the National Park Service’s centennial celebration in 2016.
The Depot Museum’s popular ongoing main exhibit “Rails Across the Rockies: A Century of People and Places” introduces visitors to the rich history of railroading in Montana with special attention to the Northern Pacific and its central role in the opening of Yellowstone, America’s first national park, through Livingston beginning in the 1880s. In addition to the main and special exhibits, the museum also presents “The Livingston Depot in History and Architecture,” “Film in Montana: Moviemaking under the Big Sky,” and selections from “On Track: The Railroad Photography of Warren McGee.”
The Depot Museum exhibits in 2015 will run from Friday, May 13 through late September. Located at 200 West Park, the Depot is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. There is a nominal admission. Additional information can be obtained by contacting the Depot office at (406) 222-2300 or visiting www.livingstondepot.org.
