Why Was The Railroad Industry Boomed In Mississippi?

Ever wondered how the railroad industry boomed in Mississippi? The Mississippi Central Railroad was a main cause of it. It was one of the earliest big railways in Mississippi.The Mississippi Central Railroad really changed and expanded the railroads in Mississippi by evolving how railroads were operated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first railway for self-propelled was planned in the early 1800s by George Stephenson. In 1829, the first locomotive was brought to the United States from England (Francis 1). Mississippi didn’t join the railroad industry until the late 1835, when the West Feliciana Railroad began transporting cotton. The West Feliciana had lines between Bayou Sara, Louisiana and Woodville, Mississippi.

The Mississippi Central Railroad started in the 1890s under the name “Pearl and Leaf Rivers Railroad”, primarily for hauling lumber from forest areas in Mississippi (“Mississippi Central Railroad” 1-2). It operated a few small lines but that changed when the J.J Newman Lumber Company bought the railroad on February 15, 1904, invested $26,000,000 ,and changed the name to the Mississippi Central Railroad. They tied lines with sawmills like the Homochitto Lumber Co., providing a backbone to many logging branches that supplied them. It gave ready and profitable choices for finished lumber (Price and Howe 1). At the time, the Mississippi Central Railroad was one of three Mississippi Centrals, but was the most notable(“Mississippi Central Railroad” 1). They began branching out in 1908 when the first passenger train was enroute from Hattiesburg to Natchez by engineer A.S. Trigg (Price and Howe 1).The Mississippi Central began going through many changes while the railroad industry evolved into a less trade-focused industry by adding new lines and

The Natchez Route connected in Hattiesburg with the Southern Railway. and connected to the Mississippi River at Natchez and you could take a ferry to Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad. They had as many as four cars a day on the Natchez Route. In 1916, the Mississippi Central Railroad had 17 locomotives, 18 passenger cars, and 1,100 freight cars. In 1916 alone, over 300,000,000 board feet of finished lumber was hauled. In the 1920s, the Mississippi Central ran many passenger trains every day , they had two trains a day until the mid 1930s. In May of 1929 the Mississippi Central abandoned the 11.78 mils TallHalla Branch. As of this time the company had 712 freight cars earning revenue (“Mississippi Central Railroad”