West Feliciana Railroad

The line's job was to carry cotton about 26 miles from Woodville, Mississippi, to the landing at Bayou Sara, which made it a mixed gift to the port it fed. Panic, rough terrain, land disputes and contractor trouble slowed the work, and the first full run came in 1842. Federal engineers later recorded the right-of-way at Woodville as Historic American Engineering Record MS-1, with 19 photographs and 11 pages of data. A separate West Feliciana Railway was folded into the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas line, which joined the Illinois Central system in 1892.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 2.0 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 5.0 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 8.5 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 18 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Sara — steps away
• Old Burying Ground — 0.2 mi
• Courthouse — 0.3 mi
• British West Florida — 0.3 mi