Casey Jones

Casey Jones built his own train whistle, as engineers of his day did, and his sounded like a whippoorwill. Along his run from Jackson, Tennessee, to Water Valley, Black Mississippians heard it race past and folded the whistle into blues harmonica, while the rhythm of the pistons underlay blues guitar. By 1900 he drove the Cannonball between Canton and Memphis, the most prestigious assignment an Illinois Central engineer could get. He died just north of Vaughan that April. The marker stands on Blackmur Street in Water Valley, where he once worked.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — steps away
  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.
• Enid Lake — 16 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.
• Rowan Oak — 16 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.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• James Ford — steps away
• Hubert Creekmore — steps away
• Theora Hamblett — 9.3 mi
• Battle of Coffeeville — 12 mi