Harrison

History:

Harrison was a stop on the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad’s Mt. Carmel branch near Harrison Street and Mannheim Road in Hillside. Early records referred to the stop as Jernstrom’s Gardens.1 Of the stops on the branch itself, this was the only one that did not serve a cemetery.

By the early 1920s, the stop had been renamed Harrison and consisted of a 4 ft. 7 in. tall frame platform that was 151 ft. long and 8 ft. wide.2 Around the same time, the railroad switched from only publishing arrival/departure times for important locations on public time tables and began listing every stop. After Bellwood, Oak Ridge and Mt. Carmel were listed, yet Harrison was not. On at least one company map depicting a tentative route for the Chicago Westchester and Western Railroad—the planned CA&E southern bypass route—“Harrison St.” is listed as a stop on the Mt. Carmel branch.3 indicating that even though it didn’t appear on the time table, it still existed at this time. This may suggest that Harrison (like Concordia and Waldheim Cemeteries) was a special service stop, not receiving regularly scheduled passenger service but instead only in use for chartered funeral trains.

Whatever the station’s status, the initial portion of the bypass route opened between Bellwood Ave. and Westchester on October 1, 1926, and the CA&E ended the daily shuttle over the Mt. Carmel branch on October 31 due to the close proximity of the two services.4 Passenger service on the branch continued as part of the express service from downtown Chicago on Sundays, on Decoration [Memorial] Day and for chartered funeral trains as late as 1931. The last recorded funeral charter occurred in July 1934,5 at which point the stop was definitely no longer in service.