The third T&P station (it replaced an 1888 station) to sit on or near this site is the last remaining fragment of the railway’s 66-acre complex. This consisted of a maintenance yard, with a roundhouse, manufacturing and machine shops, and repair shops, which occupied the now-vacant property located east of the current station and were destroyed in an explosion and fire in 1971. The depot also marked the northern terminus of Marshall’s main commercial thoroughfare, N. Washington Avenue. The city, in an effort to strengthen this potential visual axis, lowered the street’s grade in the residential block south of the Ginocchio Hotel, so that passengers arriving at the depot would have an unobstructed view of the courthouse dome eight blocks away.
The station was designed in the Dallas office of the T&P’s chief engineer. Its mildly Prairie Style form and detailing contrasts with the three cross gables that are Mission Revival in character. A brick and concrete covered arcade, which extends around all four sides of the building, served passengers on the north tracks to Texarkana and on the south tracks to Dallas. The depot’s facade faces the intersection of these two lines. The building’s placement to serve both tracks accounts for its awkward geometry relative to the city’s street grid and to the nearby Ginocchio Hotel.