One of Hyattsville’s most notable pieces of architecture is sadly lost to history.

The Hyattsville train station for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was the largest between Baltimore and Washington and considered one of the most ornate. “Hyattsville had one of the grander stations,” notes the recent history “Images of America: US Route 1 Baltimore to Washington, D.C.” by Aaron Marcavitch, executive director of Maryland Milestones/Anacostia Trails Heritage Area.

The station was located in downtown Hyattsville, near the site of Franklins Restaurant, Brewery and General Store , where Route 1 intersects with the rail line and played an integral role in bringing people to the young town’s central business district.

The original rail line from Washington to Baltimore, then called the Washington Branch, was started between 1833 and 1835. The Alexandria Extension, which went from Hyattsville south to Shepherd’s Landing, just across the Potomac River from Alexandria, Va., was completed in 1874.

(Due to a long-running contractual dispute that left the railroad without a line through D.C., the B&O then used car floats — essentially a barge with track on it that is pulled by a tugboat — to cross the Potomac.)

Being at the intersection of the railroad and Route 1 helped make Hyattsville into a town, but the extension to Washington transformed it into one of D.C.’s earliest suburbs, since it allowed for regular travel to the capital.

The train station was built at the height of this era in 1884 based on a design by architect E. Francis Baldwin, then the B&O’s official architect. (A devout Catholic, Baldwin also designed a number of buildings at Catholic University in nearby Brookland, receiving a medal of honor from Pope Leo XII for his work.)

By the 1950s, when the station was torn down, the streetcar and the automobile had long supplanted the railroad in importance, but the building would have been just as grand as when it was built.