Buckner's Trestle

The 1870 wreck was drawn for Harper's Weekly and reported in the New York Times. The engine, a baggage car, a mail car and the first passenger car crossed before rotten ties gave way and the rest fell into a ravine. Twenty passengers died and sixty were hurt, among the dead two infants and two Black brakemen killed at their posts. Colonel Sam Tate, president of the Mississippi Central, was in the rear car and survived. The trestle, about a hundred feet long and fifty feet high, is gone, and a rail trail now crosses the site.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 1.8 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Rowan Oak — 1.9 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• Oxford Square — 2.5 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — 14 mi
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.

More markers nearby

• Confederate Soldiers Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• Ventress Hall — 1.9 mi
• Jacob Thompson's "Home Place" — 1.9 mi
• Hilgard Cut — 2.0 mi