From an account by Colonel C.E. Woods, the Louisville & Nashville station agent through 1884 in Sidney, Illinois:
Dressed as a plain surveyor, bespattered with muddy water, a stranger registered at the old Gilcher House Hotel of Danville, KY, and was assigned a drafty attic bedroom with a miniscule dormer window, a shuck straw mattress, and a lone tallow-dip candle. Although it was the late 1860s, the usual creature comforts had already far surpassed these meager accommodations. Reasonably, the unkown guest demanded a decent room for the night. This infuriated the clerk, who sized up the stranger, and exclaimed, "That room is plenty good for the looks of you!"
Thereupon, the infuriated "surveyor" wrote across the page of the hotel register:
"Surveyors: Locate the road just far enough away from Danville so its citizens can barely hear the whistles blow."
(Signed) E.D. Standiford, President of the Louisville & Nashville R.R. Co.
Some sixty years later, in the mid-1930s, Danville L&N passengers still had to hire taxis, which drove them three miles to the nearest depot served by the road.
