Built by the Great Northern Railway in 1927, the Whitefish Depot became a local landmark and a familiar sight to hundreds of thousands of rail travelers passing through Whitefish. Its chalet-style architecture and surrounding gardens gave it a distinctive Whitefish identity. The railroad replaced a much smaller depot at the north end of Central Avenue with a 36-by-150-foot, three-story structure, with one story for the depot and two for offices, at a cost of about $60,000, and Butler Construction Co. of Seattle won the contract. In the late 1980s, after the railroad, then Burlington Northern, decided to scrap the building, the Stumptown Historical Society bought it for $1 and raised $800,000 to renovate it, with much of the work done by Whitefish volunteers. The Society maintains the depot with rental fees from Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Amtrak, and a few office tenants, and in 2002 it had the building repainted in historically correct colors in a project that cost three-quarters as much as the entire 1927 construction cost. More than 50,000 people pass through the depot each year.