Casey Jones

Accounts differ on how Jones came to be on that train. In one, from fireman Sim Webb's interview, the pair had covered runs for an ill engineer, Sam Tate, and reached Memphis at 6:25 a.m. on April 29 with time to rest. In another, they arrived at 9 p.m. and were asked to turn around, leaving little rest before No. 1 left at 12:50 a.m., 75 minutes late. Jones had made up almost all of it by Durant. Near Vaughan, Webb saw the caboose lights and jumped, surviving with bruises.

What the plaque says

Casey Jones From a station located on this site the night of Apr. 29. 1900, John Luther Jones, replacing the regularly detailed engineer, took out engine 382, pulling the Illinois Central "Cannonball." Driving into a blocked switch at Vaughn, Miss., early the following morning, he stayed with his engine to save his passengers. He was the only man to die in the wreck.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.7 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 1.1 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.2 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.2 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Josiah T. Settle 1850-1915 — steps away
• Malcolm Rice Patterson — 0.2 mi
• The Sultana Disaster — 0.2 mi
• Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926 — 0.3 mi