The First Railroad in West Tennessee The LaGrange & Memphis Railroad

The line that reached LaGrange was the first leg of a bigger bet. The LaGrange and Memphis, chartered in 1838, became part of the Memphis and Charleston, chartered in 1846 and finished in 1857: 311 miles from Memphis to Stevenson, Alabama, joining the Mississippi to the Atlantic seaboard. In the Civil War it was the only east-west railroad through the Confederacy, which is why Union forces took Huntsville in April 1862 to cut it. J. P. Morgan's Southern Railway absorbed it in 1894.

What the plaque says

The First Railroad in West Tennessee The LaGrange & Memphis Railroad Organized in 1835, the LaGrange and Memphis Railroad operated the first train from Memphis 4 1/2 miles on March 29, 1842, on the present roadbed of the Southern Railway. The depot which was destroyed by fire February 1, 1853 was located here. The LaGrange and Memphis Railroad and the depot were acquired by the Memphis and Charleston Railroad about 1846. The Southern Railway succeeded the Memphis and Charleston.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sun Studio — steps away
  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.
• Beale Street — 0.6 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.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.0 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 — 1.0 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

• Nathan Bedford Forrest — steps away
• George W. Lee 1894-1976 — steps away
• Luke Edward Wright — 0.3 mi
• Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Airman — 0.3 mi