Though occupied, the house today is nearly ruined, sagging under a tangle of vines. The campaign to “Save Hag’s Boxcar” is a recognition of the role of the house and the railroad in Mr. Haggard’s career, as well as a nod to the collective ingenuity of Depression-era craftsmen like his father.
The tanker trains loaded with crude oil still rattle down the tracks at the end of the alleyway where Merle Haggard, a living legend of country music, grew up in a boxcar that his father transformed into the family home.
“The walls were thick: cool in the summer and warm in winter,” Lillian Haggard Rea, the musician’s 93-year-old sister, recalled of the boxcar that their father, James Haggard, a carpenter with the Santa Fe railroad, converted by hand during the Depression. It was, she said, “just a wonderful home to live in.”
Like much of the music associated with the Bakersfield Sound, an unvarnished form of country that thrived in honky-tonks here in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Haggard’s is rooted in the making-do values of the Dust Bowl. His parents migrated from Oklahoma in 1935 and, like thousands of Okies, they sought refuge in Oildale, a ragtag collection of camps and settlements on the outskirts of Bakersfield.
Preservationists are raising money to buy, restore and move the boxcar to the Kern County Museum in nearby Bakersfield, which is just under a two-hour drive from Los Angeles. The boxcar is in many ways both Mr. Haggard’s three-dimensional autobiography and the story of Oildale, population 32,000 and long separated from Bakersfield “by the Kern River and a certain state of mind,” Gerald W. Haslam, an Oildale native, wrote in an essay.
[…]
