The Story of The Depot: Turning Greenfield’s Grain Elevator into a Popular Restaurant
You’ve heard us talk about folks turning old barns and farmhouses into restaurants, wedding venues, and retail shops—but what about an old grain elevator? That’s what several guys in Greenfield decided to do when they bought an historic grain elevator and turned it into a popular restaurant called The Depot.
“I can say The Depot changed my life because I didn’t know as much about farm history until I built this place,” says Thomas Moore, one of the co-owners of The Depot. Moore is a graduate of Eastern Hancock High School and grew up near Charlottesville.
The grain elevator in downtown Greenfield has a lot of Indiana’s farm history attached to it.
“The building was started in 1904 and opened in 1906,” according to Moore. “It was the central area here to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which brought grain through the center of the state of Indiana.”
Beginning in 1931, the grain elevator was owned and operated by Hancock County Farm Bureau Co-Op over the next 63 years.
Beginning in 1945, renovations to the elevator began to take place due to the double-tracking system being installed by the Pennsylvania Railroad that ran through Greenfield. Because of this installment, 12 feet of the elevator would need to be removed in order to make room for the construction of an additional unloading site and to accommodate any updates that were being made to the railroad system.
In 1946, additional construction began at the elevator by adding a 50-ton scale, the basement started being dugout, and the first story of the elevator was being built. In addition, the 112-foot tall towers were added to the elevator. These were used to accommodate larger vehicles and added storage capacity that was previously lost during the double-tracking of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
After the co-op shut down operations at grain elevator in 1994, a local Hancock County farmer later purchased the building through a private sale and stored grain on-site through 2003.
In 2020, Moore and his financial partners were given the chance to buy the property, which had been dormant for nearly 20 years.
“It’s a funny story, because we were buying a property across the street and we were approached by the owner of the building who was actually selling me the other property and asked me to buy,” says Moore. “The city was looking to demolish the whole property, and so we made a good offer—$30,000 seems pretty cheap, but it took about two years to put the adventure together and made one heck of a restaurant out of it.”
Moore says he almost gave up on remodeling and repurposing the building into a restaurant when he received a surprise visit from a local retired farmer.
“One night when I was here, I was coming to my wit’s end and I was running out of money, time, and energy,” says Moore. “That’s when an 80-year-old gentleman came in with his wife and asked to speak to me. He said he worked in here as a young man hauling feed and that he was really proud of how hard a local guy was trying to make something that he was so passionate about. It just got very emotional, and from that point, I made a promise to that man that I would never quit and never give up. To this day, I hold that promise and continue making this place, hopefully, a proud place for that gentleman and many others.”
The restaurant opened in September 2021 and now brings in visitors from around the world. Moore says the restaurant is also a site of wonder throughout the National FFA Convention and Expo in late October. As Indianapolis hosts tens of thousands of students from around the country, many FFA chapters from across the U.S. make it a point to stop in Greenfield to visit the farm history and significance of The Depot to its local community.
For more information about The Depot, visit TheDepot1906.com.
CLICK BELOW to hear Thomas Moore, co-owner of The Depot in downtown Greenfield, chat with Hoosier Ag Today’s C.J. Miller and share more of the story of how he helped turn a historic piece of Indiana’s farm history into one of the most popular restaurants in east-central Indiana.
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