Amory, Mississippi: Blues from a Railroad Town

Amory was planned. The Kansas City, Memphis & Birmingham Railroad laid out the town in 1887 as a midpoint between those two cities, where locomotives could be serviced, and residents of nearby Cotton Gin Port, about a mile and a half away on the Tombigbee River, moved over to be on the line. Only ruins and an old cemetery remain at the river settlement. The railroad's workers and their families built the community that later produced Amory's blues players. The marker stands on North Main Street, which is Mississippi Route 25.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elvis Presley Birthplace — 22 mi
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Chickasaw Council House — 22 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 23 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 24 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.

More markers nearby

• Chickasaw Cession — 0.8 mi
• Cotton Gin Port — 2.4 mi
• Bienville's Fort — 3.6 mi
• Gaines Trace — 8.1 mi