Allene was once an important stop for rail passengers on the Manistee & Repton Railroad in Monroe County

In the long ago heyday of Monroe County’s railroads, Allene was once an important stop for rail passengers on the old Manistee & Repton Railroad. Today, Allene is all but forgotten, and there is almost no trace left of this once bustling railroad stop.

Allene can be found on local maps published between 1914 and 1929 and if you lay those maps over modern maps, you’ll see that this old railroad stop was located very near the south end of the present-day runway at the Monroe County Aeroplex at Ollie. About as close as you can get to this old railroad stop today, without going onto private property, is to travel the dirt portion of Adrian Avenue at Sugar Hill.

On Friday morning, I spent a few minutes on Adrian Avenue to see if I could see any remnants of the old Allene community. About the only thing that I really expected to find was maybe an earthen berm that would indicate where the old railbed once ran. At a bend on Adrian Avenue that gives you a view of the runway’s south end, there is nothing of note to see except a large planted field of about 30 acres.

One thing that made Allene an important rail stop was that it was where passengers took the “Excel Branch” of the Manistee & Repton Railroad to go to Excel. From Allene to Excel by train was a distance of about three miles. Sources indicate that the Excel Branch shut down in the late 1930s.

A close look at old maps of the railroad and timetables for local trains reveals that Allene was the rail stop between the depots at Conoly and Tekoa. Other stops along the line included Snider and Lufkin, which were between Allene and the terminus at Manistee. Manistee was once a bustling sawmill town of around 50 houses, but today it is nothing more than a ghost town.

One is left to wonder how Allene got its name. Allene was once a somewhat popular name for girls, and my guess is that the railroad stop was named after a woman associated with the railroad, perhaps the depot agent’s wife or daughter. The Town of Beatrice is a good example of this in that it was named after Beatrice Seymour, the granddaughter of the general superintendent of construction for the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.

The earliest reference to a woman named Allene that I could find in the archives of The Monroe Journal was in the Oct. 9, 1930 edition of the newspaper. In that week’s paper, Allene Bailey of Frisco City was listed among seven students from Monroe County who were enrolled in the State Teachers College at Troy. In the years that followed, innumerable other Allenes were mentioned in the pages of The Journal.

In the end, if anyone in the reading audience knows anything more about the old Allene community, please let me know. It would be especially interesting to know how the community got its name.