Glen Avon Station
Glen Avon Station (right) and Glen Avon Presbyterian Church, ca. 1896. [Image: UMD Martin Library]
2102 Woodland Ave. | Architect Unknown | Built: 1892 | Extant
The early 1890s development of the Glen Avon, Hunter’s Park, and Woodland Park neighborhoods, all centered along Woodland Avenue, also spurred the growth of Duluth’s street railway system. Developers of these “streetcar suburbs,” including Ronald Hunter, formed the Motor Line Improvement Company and built a single-track electric streetcar line starting where Woodland begins at Fourth Street and Twentieth Avenue East and ending at Forest Hill Cemetery before it was extended to Austin Street in Woodland Park. Once complete, the improvement company turned over the rail line’s operations to the Duluth Street Railway Company. The Woodland Car Line sprang into operation on April 20, 1891, and it quickly became local residents’ primary mode of transportation, serving the neighborhoods for over forty years. In 1895 the streetcar company constructed the Glen Avon Waiting Station near the intersection of Woodland Avenue and Lewis Street, next to the 1892 Glen Avon Presbyterian Church. The two-story Victorian building—sometimes described as a “Queen Anne Cottage”—features a steeply sloped chateau-like roof with wide eaves supported by brackets and covered porches with wide, arched openings on either side of its central entrance. The Woodland line operated until 1939, when the last of Duluth’s streetcars ceased to run. Glen Avon Station was afterward converted into a private home and remains one today. (Another waiting station stood in Woodland Park along Woodland Avenue between Austin and Red Wing Streets, where the line terminated; the site serves as a parking lot for a grocery store today.)
