The B&O Railroad station was crucial to the success of Mountain Lake Park, serving as the arrival point for hundreds of summer residents and visitors who came from farther-east home towns around Memorial Day, often with servants, and were taken by livery service to cottages, boarding houses, or the Mountain Lake Park Hotel. Many spent the entire summer in the Park and took part in the cultural and educational Chautauqua programming for which the town became famous, before the site again bustled as the season waned and people returned to their full-time residences off the mountaintop. The original station had a plan similar to the Oakland B&O station, with a long, low building alongside the tracks, mostly one story except for a middle third with two peaked gable roofs at right angles, a tower-like spire between them on the tracks side, a tall tulip-shaped brick chimney behind the tower, and an overhanging roof supported by simple wood trusses to shelter passengers. Its upper exterior walls were covered with fish-scale shingling, the ground level had horizontal clapboards, the smaller cross-axis roof had gable ends with a flowering tree half-timber motif like decorations on cottages at the Deer Park Hotel, and the station also had stained-glass windows still in place today. The design is likely by the firm of Baldwin and Pennington, then under contract by the B&O Railroad, and although it was probably built about the same time as the Oakland station in 1884 as a less elaborate version with the same Queen Anne detailing, it may be a couple of years older, since the first ticket agent, Abram R. Sperry, entered B&O service in May 1882 as agent at Mountain Lake Park. Sperry held the position until March 1911, when he was transferred to Harpers Ferry; he died in 1924, also served as Mountain Lake Park postmaster, and lived along north N Street. After its closure as a railroad station, the structure was altered several times and served as a warehouse and as a site for several retail businesses.