Flora Train Depot

Flora grew up around the railroad that built this depot. The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, a subsidiary of the Illinois Central, was being built in the early 1880s, and the depot was built about 1883, at the same time as the line. Flora became a trade center and cotton shipping point; in 1918 it shipped 9,983 bales. The economy sank in the Depression and revived when an Army ordnance plant was built nearby in World War II. The railroad closed its offices in the depot in 1971, and the depot is now owned by the Town of Flora.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blue Front Cafe — 7.5 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Tougaloo College — 13 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 13 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 15 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Pocahontas Mounds — 5.2 mi
• Skip James — 7.6 mi
• Jack Owens — 8.1 mi
• St. Joseph Catholic School — 11 mi