Wedding of the Waters

The ceremony was theater, but the railroad behind it changed Memphis. A Memphis convention in 1845 sparked the idea, a company was chartered in 1846, and the Memphis and Charleston became the last link joining the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi. Travel time from Memphis to New York fell to seventy-nine hours. It was the only rail connection between the eastern and western South, and that made it a prime target in the Civil War, which demolished much of the line. After the war it passed to the Southern Railway in 1894, and its route still carries freight today.

What the plaque says

Wedding of the Waters A great celebration marking completion of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad occurred near here on May 1-4, 1858. These festivities attracted 25,000 spectators and included a symbolic "wedding of the waters" at the Court Street Wharf, with firemen from cities along the Memphis & Charleston route pumping Atlantic Ocean water, drawn from Charleston Bay, into the Mississippi River. One contemporary account hailed the celebration as "the greatest demonstration of popular joy" ever witnessed in the Mississippi Valley. Numerous Memphians, including Col. John T. Trezevant, Robert C. Brinkley, and W. B. Greenlaw, were important investors in and promoters of this railroad, which was highly successful.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 2.1 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.
• Elmwood Cemetery — 2.7 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.
• Graceland — 2.8 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 3.6 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

• Forrest's Artillery Positions -Aug. 21, 1964- — 1.9 mi
• Willie Mitchell's Royal Studios — 1.9 mi
• Zion Cemetery — 1.9 mi
• Thomas F. Cassels — 2.0 mi