Clio Logo

Cape Charles Museum and Welcome Center

You are vieweing item 3 of 11 in this tour.

This is a contributing entry for Cape Charles Museum and Welcome Center and only appears as part of that tour.Learn More.
Beside the main museum building to the west, stands the Bloxom Station, a reconstructed railroad passenger station. The Station houses the majority of the archival and artifact collections held by the Cape Charles Museum. The Museum's collection consists of thousands of photographs, documents, and objects that tell the stories and help preserve the history of Cape Charles.

Bloxom Station

Bloxom Station

Bloxom Station

Bloxom Station

This building is the reconstructed railroad passenger station that once served Bloxom, Virginia, a town about 44 miles north of here. Built in the early 1900s, the station conforms to the architecture used in Pennsylvania Railroad passenger stations of the time: four doors, oversize arched roof brackets, a dormer, and overhanging roof to provide shade in summer and facilitate solar heating in winter. A bay on the rear gave a view of trains coming along the tracks from either direction.

The station went out of service in the 1950s and 30 years later was scheduled for demolition. In the nick of time, Tom and Jan Noonan, known locally for rescue and restoration of historic buildings, acquired the station and carefully dismantled it, saving key structural elements in the hopes that one day it could be recon-structed. In 1999 the Noonans donated the pieces to the Cape Charles Historical Society for that purpose.

Reconstruction was completed in 2006 with the help of two T-21 grants from VDOT. Of the original materials the roof brackets and beams, rafters, windows, and some flooring were used, and thanks to information provided by the Noonans and work of local architect Leon Parham, the building is very close to the original. The interior has been kept as two open spaces to enable adaptive reuse as an archive storage and work area.

Cape Charles Historical Society Museum and Welcome Center. Accessed September 28th 2020. https://capecharlesmuseum.org/.

Image Sources(Click to expand)

Cape Charles Historical Society and Museum

Cape Charles Historical Society and Museum