FREEVILLE CELEBRATES ITS PAST
New Park Recalls A Once Vital Rail Hub By Gene Endres
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wenty-four trains each day used to pass through the small village of Freeville as late as during the 1920s. Today, not a single piece of original track remains. But the village is freshly aware of this segment of its history, thanks to a handsome small park with historical panels that describe aspects of the railroads
Dav i d F o g e l , f o r m e r m ay o r o f F r e e v i l l e wa s t h e dr iving force behind the c r e at i o n o f t h e n e w pa r k . ( P h o t o : G e n e E n d r e s) 8 T
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that once served Freeville. It is located at the corner of Railroad and Factory Streets, just east of the intersection of Main Street and Route 38. David Fogel, who retired as mayor of Freeville last November, says that the whole project began when it became necessary to remove the last remaining relic of the railroad era. “We had to demolish a local landmark that stood at the site for more than a hundred years—an octagonal concrete structure that had once supported a circular wooden water tower next to one of the two Lehigh Valley Railroad branch lines that used to cross in Freeville.” Fogel was featured more than 30 years ago in the Ithaca Times for a detailed model he built of Ithaca’s West End as it looked before the construction of the Inlet flood control channel and the “Octopus” intersection. That model took eight years to build and was on display on the second floor of the Alternatives Credit Union for several years, though it’s now in storage. “Around the time that I became mayor of [Freeville] in 2014,” he says, “I built a scale model of a history-themed pocket park for the Village-owned parcel on the old railroad right-of-way. [It] was designed to commem27
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Th e n e w S tat i o n Pa r k c e l e b r at e s F r e e v i l l e’s h i s t o ry a s a r a i l r o a d h u b . ( P h o t o : G e n e E n d r e s)
