Watching the snow fall outside my window tonight, I decided it was time to turn up the speakers and listen to this timeless recording.

Have a Merry Christmas!

RURAL RETREAT, Va. — At long last, the famed Rural Retreat Depot is ready for a party.

Surviving decades of disuse and decay, and even once a plan to be lifted up and moved out of town, the 19th Century structure is now finally open.

And, ooh, it looks and smells so nice.

“We are about all done,” said Jerry Hurt, the president of the non-profit Rural Retreat Depot Foundation, Inc. “The building itself is about 90 percent done.”

Though the antique structure never moved from its site at the center of this Wythe County town, the depot has witnessed a six-year, $500,000 journey.

“The difficult part was the funding,” said Hurt, 67. “It was a 150-year-old building, getting ready to fall down.”

Yet the renovation and refurbishing that had its costs kept low thanks to “sweat equity,” said 70-year-old Frank Akers, a member of the Rural Retreat Depot Foundation.

For Akers, the connection to this depot is personal: One of his grandfathers served as the station agent in the early 1900s. “So Frank had more blood in this building than anybody else,” Hurt said with a smile.

Most of the siding on the outside of the building was saved, Hurt said, while the interior had heating and air-conditioning added.

The heating-cooling system changed the architecture, Hurt said, but the structure remains on the historic landmarks register with a “modified” status.

The interior of the 7,000-square-foot building also features a ramp, allowing it to be universally accessible.

Akers says the renovation now offers a space for meetings, weddings and the summertime farmers market in Rural Retreat.

Both Akers and Hurt also say plans are under way to add museum exhibits to the depot.

“Hopefully, by next year, we’ll have an attendant here, and we’ll be able to open most days,” Akers said. “The current debate right now is, ‘When can we be open?’ — and staffing.”

Built in 1856 and rebuilt in 1866, this train station is where famed photographer O. Winston Link made some of his best-known images, as well as an album capturing steam train sounds in 1957.

Akers, in turn, has noted the history of the town with illustrated panels on the depot walls, celebrating Link’s connection to the depot as well as Rural Retreat’s claim to fame as a “cabbage capitol” and for being the final resting of Dr. Charles Taylor Pepper, the man for whom the soft drink Dr Pepper was named.

On Oct. 14, 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m., the station is hosting its grand opening and ribbon cutting at the center of Rural Retreat.

That includes a visit by Conway Link, a son of O. Winston Link, with a talk on how his father’s famous photographs were produced at the depot as well as recreating the elder Link’s sound recordings that combined church bells and a locomotive’s whistle.