Bringing the immigrant experience in Duluth to life has been a labor of love, Kim Schandel said.
"Hearing the personal stories of families and learning about their parents, wherever they were from, it was just so rewarding, meaningful, all of those things," Schandel said on Thursday afternoon as she stood in the Immigrant Waiting Room in the lower floor of the Depot in downtown Duluth.
It's called the Immigrant Waiting Room today, and it was the Immigrant Waiting Room -- although twice as big -- when the Depot was built in 1892, Schandel said.
Schandel has spent the past seven months restoring the room with funding from a Minnesota Legacy Grant and other sources. A reception in the Depot's Great Hall late on Thursday afternoon inaugurated the exhibit.
It was a down-to-the-wire endeavor. Schandel and her husband, Railroad Museum curator Tim Schandel, were there until 2 a.m. Thursday, building the display case that houses a Swedish-made Svea bicycle that belonged to Anton Nelson.
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Nelson -- formerly Nilsson -- was a Swedish immigrant who made the trip by ship back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean four times, each time bringing the bike, Schandel said. He arrived in Duluth in 1907, and since he never learned to drive, the immigrant carpenter used the bike to make it to jobs.
The bike itself was manufactured in 1892, a year that kept coming up as Schandel did her research, she said. That was the year Ellis Island opened and the year the "Pledge of Allegiance" -- which would be recited by generations of new citizens -- was written. In Duluth, Central High School was built as well as the Depot.
The construction accommodated Duluth's great population boom, a story chronicled in one of Schandel's exhibits. From 1880 to 1890, the town grew from 3,483 to 33,115, a rate of more than 850 percent. The growth was inspired because President Abraham Lincoln had granted the Northern Pacific Railroad land for proposed tracks with 60 miles on each side from Duluth to Puget Sound, Schandel said.
Northern Pacific aggressively recruited in Europe to bring immigrants to its land, and they all came through Duluth. "There were periods of a couple thousand immigrants in a two-day period that arrived in Duluth," Schandel said.
That's why the Depot was built with the Immigrant Waiting Room. Upstairs, there were barbers, shoeshine boys, restaurants and land agents selling land along the Northern Pacific line. There were bunks for immigrants to sleep in if they arrived in the evening, and -- adjacent to the waiting room -- a shower room. For many of the immigrants, it would be their first chance to clean up since leaving Europe, Schandel said.
She has transformed the shower room into a viewing room, where a 20-minute documentary on Ellis Island is shown continuously.
Although the exhibit tells the big story, there's room for the stories of individual families.
Among them is the story of George Andrews, whose daughter, Patricia Patronas, is a volunteer at the Depot.
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Since she's from a restaurant family it perhaps wasn't surprising that Patronas was in the Depot's kitchen as the ceremony opening the exhibit approached. She's proud of her father's story, she said, and glad it's being preserved for future generations.
Like so many immigrants, Andrews' name was changed from the Greek original. He was born in 1888 and walked from the mountains to Athens when he was about 10, Patronas said. He eventually saved enough money to take a steamer to New York, and later to Minneapolis. Finally he and his three brothers arrived in Duluth.
"It reminded them of their home in Greece because they had the water right in front of them," Patronas said.
