10/10/2026
“Here is what people get wrong.
People assume the famous wartime canteens were in the big cities, and that a village like Tuscarawas County was somewhere that you passed through on your way to where things were happening.
Dennison was the thing happening.”
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Dennison exists because a railroad needed water.
The village was laid out in 1864 as a stop almost exactly halfway between Columbus and Pittsburgh, a hundred miles from each. The shops went up that same year. In time it became the freight and passenger terminal and the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Panhandle Division.
At its peak the yard covered forty acres and ran twenty-one passenger trains and twenty-one freight trains a day, with about three thousand people working there. The depot standing on Center Street today went up in 1873.
Then there was a war, and that depot became something else.
On New Year's Eve 1941, a woman named Lucille Nussdorfer watched troop trains going through her town with soldiers aboard who looked lonely and anxious. She started something.
The Servicemen's Canteen opened March 19, 1942 and closed April 8, 1946. Four years and three weeks.
The arithmetic is the whole story. Three thousand nine hundred eighty-seven volunteers, drawn from eight counties, who between them put in six hundred one thousand five hundred twenty hours.
Troop trains stopped for about ten minutes. In those ten minutes the volunteers handed out free sandwiches, cookies and hot coffee, and then the train pulled out.
Here is what people get wrong.
People assume the famous wartime canteens were in the big cities, and that a village in Tuscarawas County was somewhere you passed through on your way to where things happened.
Dennison was the thing happening.
By the museum's count roughly one point three million service members came through, which it puts at about thirteen percent of everyone who served in the American armed forces. Fed for free, in ten-minute stops, by fewer than four thousand volunteers from eight rural counties who were themselves living under rationing.
New York ran a bigger canteen. So did Omaha. Those were the two larger ones in the country, and Dennison was third.
Both of their buildings are gone. Dennison's is the one still standing, and that is why the federal government made it a National Historic Landmark in 2011. The National Park Service called it the most significant remaining example in the nation of a railroad canteen that still reflects its wartime heritage.
And then there is the part where a town gets written off.
By the 1980s the railroad work was gone. That was the entire reason Dennison existed, and the story people tell about places like that is that they failed. Sat still. Did not adapt. A ghost town finishing the job slowly.
Dennison was headed there, and the 1873 depot was headed for a wrecking ball.
Instead the town bought its own depot in 1984. The restoration was carried out partly by students from the local joint vocational school, which is to say high school kids scraping and painting a building their grandparents had worked in. It reopened as a museum in 1989. More than six million dollars has gone into the campus since.
The village that got written off saved the last standing building of its kind in the United States, and nobody did it for them.
One smaller correction, because it is a good one. The nickname was not something the town came up with for a brochure.
Dreamsville, Ohio was a Glenn Miller record, cut in a New York studio on October 20, 1941 with Ray Eberle singing. That is five months before the canteen opened.
So the soldiers already knew the tune. They got off at a town in Ohio where strangers handed them coffee for nothing, and they gave the town the song's name back.
Sergeant Joe Knox wrote in October 1943 about ten minutes of sandwiches and coffee and friendly people, and the extra flavor of kindness that makes anything taste better.
The museum is at 400 Center Street. They still put out free hot coffee and free cookies, every day they are open.
Real photograph, not AI. Photo: Nyttend, Wikimedia Commons.
