Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 30, 1982

Claremont was born on train tracks. Like so many of the small communities in the valleys east of Los Angeles, Claremont sprung up in 1887 right alongside the Santa Fe Railway, to take advantage of its brand new transcontinental line connecting Los Angeles to Chicago. The Pacific Land Improvement Company – owned by Santa Fe, naturally – cleared 430 acres of land for the new town. They built a land office and a hotel for all the buyers they expected would soon pour into the area, and snap up lots. 

They also built a Victorian gothic train depot, just south of 1st Street between Harvard and Yale Avenues. It was the site of one of the last Claremont land auctions before the land boom went bust in spring of 1888. That depot witnessed Claremont’s challenging early years, as lot sales dwindled and interest rates skyrocketed. It saw Pomona College move into the vacant Claremont Hotel, and become a respected center of learning for Congregationalist migrants from New England. And it was there for the birth of the citrus industry, which would become a major driver in Claremont’s economy in the early 1900s. In the industry’s early days, Claremont fruit was packed into crates at the small clapboard train depot.

The 1920s were times of huge growth for Claremont. Streets were paved and sewers were added. Scripps College and Claremont University College joined the city’s growing educational options. A new city hall and library sprung up. In 1926 the Santa Fe Railroad added to Claremont’s growth spurt, when they announced a new Claremont Depot to replace the aging station from 1887. Grading and excavations began in January of 1927. Nine months and $40,000 later, the new Claremont Depot was ready for passengers. Santa Fe Railroad and Claremont officials opted for October 12 as opening day, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of both Pomona College, and the Santa Fe Railroad in Claremont (it was also marked 20 years since Claremont incorporated as a city). There was a short dedication ceremony at 4pm, and then the station opened its doors for passengers. 

Spanish colonial revival architecture was at its height in the mid-1920s. It’d been a decade since architects Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow introduced the style to the world at the Panama-California Exposition at San Diego, and SoCal designers embraced red barrel tiles, stucco walls and wrought-iron accents as a modern twist on the adobe missions that had transformed California over a century before. Claremont’s civic center was soon awash with light stucco and red-tiled roofs. The 1920s city hall and library both had ‘em, and in 1936 the post office joined the Spanish colonial club. 

For the new Claremont Depot, Santa Fe Railroad architect William H. Mohr employed all of the canonical Spanish colonial revival tropes, plus some extra goodies for decorative flair. The wooden entrance doors had Santa Fe’s circle/cross emblem carved into them, and they were surrounded by ultra-baroque, churrigueresque trim and Corinthian columns. Inside the waiting room, a thin course of decorative tiles ran around the four walls at door height, and snaked up the sides of the main doors in an unusual pattern. The pitched ceiling panels had elaborate, abstract figures painted on them; tall windows lined with wrought iron (outside) or wood (inside) balconets brought light to the double-height waiting room from the north and south sides. 

To the east of the waiting room used to be the ticketing office, a baggage room with open wood trusses below the ceiling, and a rectangular freight-loading room equipped with sliding wooden doors. Attendants would bring baggage and freight out through those doors to the waiting trains. All of these rooms had windows decorated in wrought iron.

The guy in the middle of the above photo is Howard Fagg, a Kansas transplant who moved to California in 1930 and got a job with the Santa Fe Railroad. Before moving to Claremont in 1947 to work as the telegraph operator for the Claremont Depot, Howard had worked at the station in Glendora, and before that Summit, CA where he and his wife Edith lived in a caboose with a tiny trailer attached to it for a bedroom. It was Howard’s job to communicate with Santa Fe trains heading through the Claremont Depot. He would relay orders from a dispatcher to the train crew, about when and where to stop or switch tracks. An important job that kept the trains running safely and efficiently.

To the right of Howard in that photo is his son, Bob, who would’ve been just 3 or 4 at the time. Bob’s a lifelong Claremont resident who has spent much of the last few decades volunteering for numerous organizations around the city, alongside his wife, the retired photographer Sonja Stump. They’re often called as two of Claremont’s most beloved citizens – if it tells you anything, Bob and Sonja were the Grand Marshals at the city’s 4th of July celebration in 2025.

Like Claremont itself Bob grew up alongside the Santa Fe trains. He’s got fond memories of being at the Claremont Station with his dad. “In the waiting room they had a two-sided bench, it was tall, and I’d go and sort of sit there and hang out,” Bob told me. “At every station, there were always two big pictures of the Santa Fe. I actually got the two that were out of the Upland Station, where my dad ended up retiring from. The Claremont Museum now has those two pictures.”

For 40 years, the Claremont Depot served Santa Fe Railroad passengers and freight moving between Los Angeles and Chicago. While popular passenger lines like the Super Chief and El Capitan typically passed by Claremont in favor of larger cities like Pomona, San Bernardino and Pasadena, Claremont was a flag stop for The Chief line. The train would stop there by request, or if the train crew was notified that a passenger was waiting at the station. Claremont Depot also handled plenty of freight coming in and out of Pomona Valley. 

“When I was a little kid, there was a local that ran from San Bernardino to LA,” Bob told me. “I remember going a couple times on that, when my brother was in Cub Scouts and I rode along.” Bob explained how the Depot was especially active during the beginning and end of the school year for Pomona College, and the other local schools in the Claremont Consortium. Sports season was a busy time, too: “When sports were playing, football, at different towns away from Claremont, sometimes that’s how the students got to the other school. They would have a special, and they would stop the train there to pick up. It was probably the Chief, or the Super Chief, that would take them to Albuquerque, or wherever.”

In the ‘60s, faced with dwindling ridership (thanks, airplanes and cars!), aging infrastructure and the loss of a contract with the US Post Office Department, the Santa Fe Railroad ended the majority of its passenger service. They shut down the Claremont Depot in 1967, and after vandals broke in and set a fire in 1968, the railroad removed all the electrical and plumbing systems, and boarded it up. And so it sat for nearly 25 years. 

There were efforts in the interim to adaptively reuse the Claremont Depot. The developer James B. Salter and Associates bought the property in 1980, including the right-of-way to the land. They proposed adding two wings to the north of the Depot, plus a second story, and turning it into a restaurant, Chili & Chong’s, as part of a larger complex that would include two office buildings and a parking structure. That idea fizzled after the plans were rejected by the city. Former mayor Judy Wright, a tenacious preservation advocate and co-founder of Claremont Heritage, worked with the developers to scale down their ambitions and find a more sensible solution that preserved the integrity of the Depot, but the restaurant never materialized (the office buildings did). 

One positive thing that came out of all the preservationist/developer fracas: the Claremont Depot was added to the National Register in 1982, with a nomination form prepared by Judy Wright. In the below slideshow, you can see her unveiling the plaque at a dedication ceremony. A string quartet performs in front of the Claremont Depot, its doors and windows still boarded up. 

Finally in December of 1989, Claremont decided it was time for those tracks behind the Depot to host passenger trains again. The city bought the Claremont Depot with funds from Proposition A, a ½ cent sales tax that voters had approved in 1982. The idea was to turn it into a local transit center in anticipation of a new commuter rail line that had been proposed by the LA County Transportation Commission, linking LA and San Bernardino. As Claremont’s Mayor Nick Presecan explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1990, commuting to work in Pasadena via train would mean “I could sit and read…I wouldn’t have to sit and cuss at the drivers.” The depot would also be a hub for buses and dial-a-ride services. 

The old Claremont Depot underwent a $2.3 million, top-to-bottom restoration in 1992, designed by Thirtieth Street Architects and completed by the contracting firm T.B. Penick & Sons. Pictures from the restoration show walls ripped down to the studs, decaying, graffiti-laden doors repaired or replaced, reframed windows and a beautifully landscaped plaza to the north. It was a tough job, especially since the train tracks behind the depot were still in regular use. Outside the south doors, crews building the new rail platform would have to interrupt their work multiple times a day to let a freight train rumble through. 

The Claremont Depot reopened in December of 1992 as the Claremont Depot Transit Center, one of the more spectacular-looking stops on the new Metrolink commuter rail system. Hopes were high that the return of passenger rail would give a boost to Claremont’s housing market, and the nearby commercial district. And while ridership on Metrolink exceeded expectations during its first year of operation, the rehabbed Claremont Depot proved to be more spacious than necessary. Most people were buying tickets from the automated kiosks outside, and increasingly online and on mobile devices. There was little need for regular staff.

Claremont tried for years to lease the baggage and freight rooms on the east side to restaurants, and plenty of interested tenants stopped by. But the estimated costs of retrofitting the space to include a kitchen were too high to make sense. So the Claremont Depot remained vacant for another couple decades, even as Metrolink continued to shepherd commuters and tourists.

In 2016 the Claremont Depot began its third life, when it opened as the permanent home of the Claremont Museum of Art. The Museum was incorporated in 2004, but they had to leave their first location in the historic College Heights Lemon Packing House after just two years, after the Great Recession quashed major grants and donations the Museum depended on. From 2010-2016 the Museum held exhibitions and events at various partner sites. A “museum without walls,” as they describe it. 

In late 2015, the opportunity arose to lease the Claremont Depot from the City of Claremont. The Museum raised $150,000 in a month from local art lovers to renovate the waiting room and old ticket office as phase one of an overhaul. J Bohn Associates preserved all the exterior stucco walls and ornamentation, added new lighting, and kept many of the defining elements from the waiting room, including that gorgeous painted ceiling and the balconets. Next to each of the fancy wood doors on the north and south walls is a rotating metal handle called a “sash operator,” which you could spin to open one of the panes in the decorative windows up above. They don’t work anymore, but boy was I tempted to give it a spin anyway. 

Later phases of the renovation beefed up the structure’s seismic resilience and converted the baggage and freight areas into two more galleries, with new drywall covering the old ones to make it easier to hang stuff, while preserving structural elements for potential later restorations. A staffer told me that the cedar planks on the floor of the easternmost gallery are original, but upside down. Apparently the renovation contractor had a suspicion that the side of the wood that hadn’t been trampled on by passengers for 40 years would still be in great condition. When they flipped it over, he was right. 

One proposed renovation was to enclose the outdoor portico on the west side, and change it into a community room for art education (see renderings from J Bohn Associates here). That hasn’t happened yet, and frankly I hope it never does. Those Moorish keyhole arches have so much character; filling them with glass would ruin the airy open vibe. 

The Claremont Museum of Art opened in late November 2016 with an exhibit called (RE)GENERATION: Six Decades of Claremont Artists, featuring many of the terrific painters, sculptors, ceramists, mosaicists and woodworkers that have lived in the area, from the 1930s through the ‘90s. It was a pretty perfect opening show for a building that has stood throughout multiple generations of Claremont history, too. 

Now renamed the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art in honor of philanthropist Randall Lewis, the Museum has continued its outside-the-box approach to showcasing art. When I visited, the galleries were chock-full of handcrafted musical instruments for the Sound Formations exhibit. There were one-of-a-kind violas, a whole wall of odd-shaped guitars by Amps for Christ’s Henry Barnes, boxy cajon drums carved with intricate patterns. 

After I soaked in all of that sound-making machinery, I walked outside to the train tracks, and listened to the beautiful music of a Metrolink train, arriving and departing.

Thanks to Carina Arias and David Shearer of Claremont Heritage for sending over and identifying a trove of historic photos, to Bob Fagg and Sonja Stump for sharing their family history with the Claremont Depot, and to John Bohn for filling in some of the architectural details.

Resources & Recommended Reading

+ Allen, David: “Claremont Museum of Art reopens in an unusual space” (Daily Bulletin, November 17, 2016)

+ “C. of C. Will Enjoy Banquet” (Progress-Bulletin, September 14, 1927 – via Newspapers.com)

+ City of Claremont: “Architectural Design Guidelines” (claremontca.gov, December 2021)

+ City of Claremont: “Claremont Metrolink Station Study” (claremontca.gov, presented December 11, 2017)

+ City of Claremont: “History of Claremont” (claremontca.gov) 

+ City of Claremont: “Metrolink Station” (claremontca.gov)

+ Claremont Heritage: “Preserving Our History” (claremontheritage.org)

+ Claremont Lewis Museum of Art: “Museum Finds a Home at the Claremont Depot (updated)” (clmoa.org, February 5, 2016)

+ Claremont Lewis Museum of Art: “About The Museum” (clmoa.org)

+ Claremont Lewis Museum of Art: “Claremont Museum of Art to Open April 15, 2007 Inside Renovated Citrus Packing House” (clmoa.org, February 26, 2007)

+ Claremont Lewis Museum of Art: “Claremont Visionaries Turn City’s Last-Remaining Citrus Packing House Into a Cultural and Commercial Hub” (clmoa.org, May 27, 2007)

+ DeVall, Cheryl: “Shortfall closes Claremont Museum of Art” (LAist, December 28, 2009)

+ “Edith Fagg Obituary (2007)” (Legacy.com)

+ Felschundneff, Steven: “Claremont Museum of Art announces ‘transformative’ gift” (Claremont Courier, March 25, 2022)

+ “Garden for Claremont Station” (The Bulletin, April 29, 1926 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Gelt, Jessica: “Claremont Museum of Art to open in historic depot on Sunday” (Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2016)

+ “Grade Property for Structure” (Progress-Bulletin, January 15, 1927 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Groundbreaking Ceremony: May 26, 1992” (digital brochure, provided by Claremont Heritage) 

+ Hudson, Berkeley: “The Train Stops Here for More Riders Than Metrolink Expected” (Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1993 – via ProQuest)

+ Hudson, Berkeley & Martha Willman: “Station Starts Off on the Right Track” (Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1992)

+ “Improvements of Santa Fe Costly” (Los Angeles Evening Express, March 29, 1926 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Neiuber, John: “Judy Wright: Ms. Claremont” (Claremont Courier, April 5, 2021)

+ Neiuber, John: “Preservation month: the cultural resources preservation ordinance” (Claremont Courier, May 4, 2024)

+ Peterson, Lee: “Old depot returns to its original purpose” (Daily Bulletin, ca. 1992)

+ “Santa Fe System Timetables: Ticket Agent Edition, January 1 – April 26, 1953” (Rand McNally & Company, January 1, 1953 – via Streamliner Memories)

+ Ward, Mike: “Claremont to Refurbish Old Railway Depot” (Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1990 – via ProQuest)

+ Ward, Mike: “Old Depot, Builder on Collision Track” (Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1982 – via ProQuest)

+ Weikel, Dan: “California Commute: Add ticket machines to list of Metrolink problems” (Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2014)

+ “Work to Start on Claremont Station” (The Bulletin, August 10, 1926 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Wright, Judy, Claremont Historic Resources Center: Claremont Depot’s NRHP nomination form