Pigeon Roost Road

The roost this road led to belonged to the passenger pigeon, a bird that may have numbered three to five billion before commercial hunting, helped by railroads and the telegraph, collapsed it between 1870 and 1890. Martha, thought to be the last of them, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. The road itself was one of the plank toll roads built into Mississippi about the same time. Its sister road to Hernando advertised in 1851 for 50 to 100 enslaved men to build it, and the railroad's arrival in 1856 cut into its revenue.

What the plaque says

Pigeon Roost Road Leading to a large roost of the now-extinct messenger pigeon, this road followed partly the present routes of Lauderdale and Marshall Avenues, and of Lamar Boulevard. Before settlement days it was a dry-weather trail used by the Chickasaw Indians. It was improved into a plank road about 1855, and frequently so called.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elmwood Cemetery — 0.5 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.
• Sun Studio — 0.9 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.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 1.1 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Beale Street — 1.6 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.

More markers nearby

• St. John's United Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• Elmwood Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Russwood Park — 0.7 mi
• Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Airman — 0.7 mi