Elvis' visit remembered at Troy Museum officially becomes part of city

One of Troy’s landmarks is only now becoming part of the City of Troy, after a long, colorful history as an information point for tourists, a gathering place for the community’s history - and more than 50 years ago, a scenic hub that was a quick stop-off for Elvis Presley.

Beth Schweitzer, one of the volunteers of the Troy Museum, which is housed in one of the buildings at the old train platform, remembers being one of a small group of girls and boys in the spring of 1958. The group anxiously arrived at the Troy train station on Yaak Avenue, after a tip-off from a classmate’s father who worked at the railway station: Elvis was coming into town.

In contrast to most Elvis sightings, there wasn’t a huge crowd to greet him, Schweitzer remembered. It was quiet and still when the train finally stopped. They waited for about 15 minutes. And then the door of the caboose opened. Elvis appeared and waved.

“Where am I?” he asked.

Schweitzer remembers answering with everyone around her: “You’re in Troy.”

Schweitzer’s friend and Libby resident Carol Cady said the 18 mile journey to Troy to see Elvis was well worth any arguments she had later on with her parents.

“He would have just come off the Ed Sullivan show, where it showed how he moved below the waist,” Cady said, adding that Elvis’ hip movements were nothing compared to entertainment now.  “But back then, Elvis was pretty off the charts.”

That brief visit by The King was alluded to after a special meeting on Wednesday night’s Troy City Council meeting. The council voted to annex the 19.68 acres that includes the museum property and the building, finally incorporating the site into the city limits. This was after nearly 30 years of the structure and property legally belonging to Lincoln County, which the county received after a railroad easement defaulted.

Following the meeting, Troy City Council member Dallas Carr recalled how his first memory of the Troy Museum, was also attached to Elvis’s visit.

He was only about three or four at the time, he said, but remembered his older sister holding him as a man stepped out of the caboose and waved and everyone reacting. Carr said he remembered being held in his sister’s arms, the poodle skirts all the girls were wearing, and lots of saddle shoes.

Years later, when Carr asked his sister about that day – fuzzily remembering being told the man on the platform was Elvis -  his sister told him she had been forced to take her baby brother along.

“She was babysitting, and the only way she was allowed to go down to the station to see Elvis was if she took me,” Carr remembered.

Once part of the main railway building on Yaak Ave – believed to be used for baggage or equipment storage by Great Northern Railroad – the structure was moved to its current location on Highway 2 in the mid-70s, an event Schweitzer remembers as being tricky, as the building had to be moved by truck and trailer down the road, as she and her family looked on. Clippings found in the museum say the 26-foot-by-36-foot structure had been abandoned with the change of the railroad terminal from Troy. The structure was sold by Martin McCann for $225 and was uprooted and moved to its present location at the entrance of the Timber Beast disc golf course.

Step inside the building, and an assortment of Troy’s history of households, small businesses and government offices that occupied the town are everywhere. A long bench from the Troy depot runs the length of the main room that has a glass case of intriguing mementos inside. A detailed accounts ledger from one resident, to Troy’s police records from nearly a century ago, are just a short distance from the old Troy Post Office boxes and a barber chair.

As garages and attics are cleaned out, revealing daily-life treasures from the past, the old railroad building has become the most sensible place to house these items that are now valuable reminders of life in a small railroad, mining and timber town over the last century.

For Schweitzer – who has fond memories of being a Elvis-crazed teenager on the platform of the depot – caring for a portion of that historical hub has been an investment in time and energy, a legacy she inherited from her mother, and one of the museum’s founding members, Peggy Maness.

In the mid-90s, Schweitzer remembers driving a pick-up to Sandpoint, Idaho to pick up an old U.S. Postal Service box unit. It was at an antique store, and Schweitzer said she was told it may have come from Lincoln County and would be suitable for a museum.

When she arrived, Schweitzer looked at the back of the unit, and saw all the names attached to the boxes. There, in the upper right-hand corner, was the name of her father, Roy Maness, along with many other surnames she had grown up knowing like family in Troy.

Two decades later, the postal boxes are still one of Schweitzer’s favorite items in the museum, she said, while walking around the room on a busy Thursday afternoon.

Ella Ackley, who volunteered at the museum for 11 years, said her favorite pieces are the old jail book with a hand-written docket of offenders.

“About 90 percent of those were drunken disturbances,” Ackley said. “I also love the old pictures and reading all the old stories in there.”

As an information center, the museum is also an excellent source for tourists who want a snapshot of the history of a small town, to give them a reference point as they pass through.

“About half of the people who come through are looking for directions,” Ackley said. “The other half of people want a one-minute timeframe of Troy’s history. I just tell them this was a booming, booming town until 1927 (when the local mill burned down and the railroad moved its freight division). Then three years later –poof – it was all gone.”

Former Troy Museum docent Kimberly Finley, who worked one summer at the museum, said it was the small details of everyday life in Troy that fascinated her.

“It is a history of working class people,” Finley said, adding that an item she loved most was a ledger book with scribbling on what was bought in a Troy household decades ago. “I just think ‘who is this and why did they write this down?’

It is these small, everyday details – sometimes more than the larger events in history - that connect us as humans through history, Finley said: “We still have to take the garbage out; we still have to go get the bread and milk.”

 Schweitzer said Elvis ended up stepping off the train and spending about half an hour with the group of kids, asking them about Troy and what it was like to live in a small town.

“We never, ever expected him to step off the train,” Schweitzer said. “We told him all about school and our town. I think we were hoping he would want to come back....then he got back on the train and disappeared.”

She had one small, but valuable item to remember Elvis by: a piece of paper, pulled out last minute before he got back on the train, and quickly handed up to him for his signature.

That piece of paper is buried somewhere in her belongings, though when she finds it, Schweitzer said she wasn’t so keen on letting Elvis leave the building – even to go to the Troy Museum. 

“When I find it, I think it is something I would keep.”