C.D Poage

Answer 1

Nice answer, Kelli - especially since this was my writing.  I posted this on another web site.  Maybe when you cut and paste someone else's research, you could at least give them the credit for it instead of claiming it as your own.

Dan Burkee

Answer 2

Poage was born Cyrus Dwight Poage in 1872 in Bolivar, Missouri.  He became a railroad telegrapher and station agent, and worked for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the MKT or "Katy" line.  He was a sort of fill-in agent, working in various train stations along the Katy line to fill vacancies.  He was also an amateur artist, and did several works of art in various media including watercolor and oil.  According to a nephew, while working in Chicago, he enrolled in an art class and learned pen & ink drawing, and "At the Old Depot" was the result.  We don't know exactly when the work was produced, but he sold the copyrights to it in 1930, and it was widely reproduced and sold as a poster.  In 1930, Poage was living and working in Sanderson, Texas, a very small town in West Texas just a few miles from the Rio Grande.  He was married once and had a son, but divorced, and his son and wife moved to California.  

During the Depression, some of the Railroads sponsored art contests.  In exchange for free rail travel and maybe a prize, artists produced works which the railroads then used to promote travel by rail.  This work may have been the result of it.

None of the recognized references in the art world have any mention of Poage or any of his works.  By all accounts, he was an amateur artist who dies in obscurity.