Mendon Station Park is an ambitious plan along the Lehigh Valley Trail in the Hamlet of Mendon. It once included plans for several replica buildings, as well as a small rail siding to host equipment. For many years, The Mendon Foundation also hosted an annual festival at the park, which was beloved, which has been replaced with the annual Black Diamond Express Races.
To date, Mendon Station Park is home to a picnic pavilion, informational kiosk, water fountain, several gardens (including a flagpole garden) that are growing each year, and a historical baggage cart display that was completed in 2020.
There is also a small piece of track installed, in the hope that we may furnish it with a rail car at some point in the future.
Back in 2012, – Nate McNabb of Troop 10, Honeoye Falls, completed his Eagle Project, which was a display pavilion for a baggage cart situated just north of Route 251 on the Lehigh Valley Trail at Mendon Station Park in the Hamlet of Mendon.
Then, in 2013, Jacob Shanks, also of Troop 10, completed his Eagle Project, which was the refurbished baggage cart that was destined to sit in Nate McNabb’s pavilion. This cart had been sitting behind the old Foggy Bottom / Cibi Deliziosi building for years, almost rotted away. Jacob and his father, Jim Shanks, traveled to Albany to do an engineering takeoff that enabled them to faithfully reproduce the cart. Jacob brought it all together, but the wheels were not suitable for long-term display in a way where the cart could be securely locked down, so the cart sat in the Shanks family barn where it sat for the past seven years. This project was the final project of Warren Wallace’s to be finished by an Eagle Scout.
During the sleepy months of winter and spring 2020, former Mendon Foundation President John Farrell worked with the parents of those two Scouts – as well as Jacob Shanks himself – to give the projects their long-last due. John and the Mendon Foundation acquired a new set of wheels and had them painted. John reached out to Nate’s father, former Mendon Town Supervisor and Landscape Architect Ian McNabb, who happily agreed to install ornamental brackets on the pavilion.
