As a girl growing up in Madison, Ind., in the 1930s and 1940s, Ramona Bennett was fascinated by the past.
That might have had something to do with Madison, a venerable Ohio River town designed in 1821 by Alexander Ralston, who helped Pierre L'Enfant design Washington, D.C. It's filled with gorgeous old houses bearing names such as the Jeremiah Sullivan House and the Lanier Mansion.
Bennett came to Aberdeen in 1958 to work at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Until she retired in 1988, she scheduled munitions tests for all of the nine proving grounds around the country.
In Aberdeen, which doesn't have flowing L'Enfant-inspired traffic circles as Madison does, Bennett kept her reverence for old things and became chairwoman of the Aberdeen Heritage Trust, a nonprofit group trying to preserve Aberdeen's past.
That brings us to the shed.
For decades, an old Pennsylvania Railroad watchman's shed had been moldering away behind the Aberdeen Room, the city's historical museum. The shed was at least 100 years old, and it might date as far back as the 1850s. Homeless people were sleeping in it. It was falling apart.
Bennett decided to save it, and she persuaded the trust to take on the project. Now, after five years of work, the shed has been restored, complete with potbellied stove and an old wooden chair.
"It's been a long process," Bennett says. "It's been a standing joke when I do the agenda at our monthly meeting. We'd say "How's it coming?' and Judy would say, "Work in progress.' "
Judy is Judy Hinch, an Aberdeen police dispatcher who has been in charge of the project. One day last week, she, Bennett and Ruth Hendricksen, the Aberdeen Trust's co-chairwoman, gathered in Festival Park in downtown Aberdeen to talk about their labor of love. A few feet away, three workers welded the fence that surrounds the shed.
"Every town has old buildings, but not every town has an old watchman's shed," said Hendricksen.
The building sat at West Bel Air Avenue and U.S. 40, next to the Pennsylvania Railroad line. A watchman was posted there around the clock to make sure no one tried to cross the tracks when a train came through.
At first, watchmen got out of the shed and wielded a stop sign to keep buggies and pedestrians away from the tracks. Eventually, the railroad added a mechanical gate, which could be lowered mechanically from inside the shed. The watchman was also responsible for putting mail bags on a hook, where the train snatched them, and for retrieving the bag of Aberdeen mail that was snatched from the train by another hook along the tracks.
At some point in the middle of the past century, the gate system was automated completely. But watchmen still existed when Bennett moved to Aberdeen, and she and Hendricksen agreed that the job didn't disappear until the early 1970s.
The shed looks like ... well, a shed. It's about 6 feet long and 4 feet wide, with enough space for the small stove, the chair and maybe a small table.
"It's not Versailles, but ..." Hendricksen said.
"I just hope everybody's as proud of it as we are," Bennett added.
She said that preservation is particularly important in Aberdeen because a huge 1907 fire - apparently started during a failed hardware store robbery - destroyed many of the town's older buildings.
The shed has been painted gray and reshingled. One restorer managed to scare up old window panes with requisite wavy glass. The city donated an ornate antique iron fence that was rusting away in storage.
The fence now surrounds the shed, giving it an air of respectability it never had during its days by the tracks. The project cost $5,000; the price would have been higher, but several local contractors donated time and supplies.
At first, the trust wanted to exhibit the shed at its original location next to the tracks. But the railroad didn't answer repeated letters and calls. In any case, it seemed likely that in that isolated spot, the building would be vulnerable to vandalism. So the trust decided on Festival Park, where the shed will be safer. It sits just across the street from the Aberdeen police station.
A cheery woman with large dark sunglasses and a golden crab pendant, Bennett takes her history seriously. She knows that two of her ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. But she has also traced her forebears back another thousand years to Scotland.
"We thought we were Scotch-Irish," she said, "but it turns out we were Irish-Scotch."
She isn't entirely clear on the difference.
As the workers dabbed black paint on the fence, the trio began talking about another era of Aberdeen history, one that might not end up on a plaque. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Aberdeen Proving Ground was home to many more young soldiers than it is now, the town was decidedly more honky-tonk.
"They would bring women in on payday in a pink Cadillac," Bennett said. "We had a nightclub where the woman danced topless with a big snake around her neck." Bennett's husband, Freddy, helped lead the fight against that place and eventually closed it down.
"The Bavarian Inn, somebody got stabbed there every weekend," recalled Hinch, who worked as an ambulance attendant back then.
Talk turned to the shed's official dedication ceremony, which was scheduled to take place yesterday.
Aberdeen Mayor Michael Bennett was scheduled to be the keynote speaker. His presence might have had something to do with the fact that he is Ramona Bennett's son.
"He's a good boy," said his mother. "He knows he darn well better be there."
