Doomed Wilderness Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad book Milton Winter For Sale
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Doomed Wilderness Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad book Milton Winter:
$21.59
Doomed Wilderness Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad book Milton Winter. Doomed Wilderness: How Railroads Forever Changed the Lower Mississippi Valley......tells the story of the building of the first railroads into the Mississippi and Louisiana Deltas of the Mississippi River.With over 200 rare photographs, it details the history of the principal rail systems of the region, the Louisville, NewOrleans & Texas, the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley, and the company that eventually absorbed them, the Illinois Central.Railroads first made their appearance in the region in 1832 with the tiny West Feliciana Railroad between Woodville,MS and Bayou Sara LA, said to be the first interstate rail line in America and the possessing oldest corporate charter inthe Illinois Central System. Built to a 4-foot, eight-and-one-half inch gauge, it was a precursor of many other lines builtto that gauge, which by the 1880s came to be known as “standard gauge.” The fiesty little line claimed several other“firsts:” the first published tariff, the first “cattle guard.” Only two other lines—one of them the Baltimore & Ohio wasin service at this time. The West Feliciana was one of the first rail lines built in the entire Lower Mississippi Valley.Eventually the Feliciana Road was gathered into the Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railroad, the Memphis-Vicksburg-Baton Rouge-New Orleans segment of Collis Potter Huntington’s quixotic transcontinental line. Builtthrough a land of swamps and canebreaks, it gave early lumbermen, cotton and rice planters an all-weather way toexport their harvests, also providing an alternative to the steamboats, so full of romance but limited in the times of yearthey could operate as well as the locations they could reach.A chapter is also included on the LNO&T’s sister connecting line, the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern, whichran from Louisville and Fulton, KY, to Newbern, Dyersburg, Covington, TN, and Memphis, and the imposing passengerstations erected in the Bluff City for the CO&SW and Y&MV trains.The Yazoo & Mississippi Valley, often thought of as a mass of rambling lines, rather like a peavine or a bowl ofspaghetti, had its beginning as the IC’s marker laid down to check the activities of C. P. Huntington in territory itconsidered its own. Thus, its first trackage antedated that of the LNO&T by several months. Later, in 1892, when ICpurchased the LNO&T, it folded the much larger line into its nascent Y&MV. The late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies saw the construction of many branches, placing every location in the Mississippi and Louisiana Deltas withinthe reach of a rail line.A vigorous passenger service grew up, with trains called the Planter and Delta Express, and Pullman routes fromthe likes of Yazoo City and Greenwood up to Memphis, Chicago, and New Orleans. Beautiful open-platform observationcars and solarium parlor cars ran on the finest trains, offering a kind of luxury that Mississippians had never had before.A dependable freight service complemented the passenger operations, moving cotton and lumber to both Memphis andNew Orleans, making the former city the hardwood capital of the world.The line’s famous Sunflower District seemed to claim a legend for every mile of track, including the famous crossingat Moorhead “where the Southern crossed the Yellow Dog.” Stations at Dockery, Tutwiler and Parchman stood witnessto the birth of the blues. A map of the Mississippi Blues Trail and the Y&MV are almost the same. It is no accident, andthe exodus of black and white to northern cities in the World War I era and beyond on the trains of the Y&MV forms thestory of one of the greatest peacetime migrations of humanity in world history.The book traces the Y&MV’s days of strength in the early 20th century and then its slow decline as its passengertrains faded into history and even the tracks disappeared from the landscape. The book closely examines the railroad’seffect on the environment, the destruction of the majestic forests, the building of the levees and pollution as well as thesurvival of key segments of the line which to this day provide some of the Canadian National Railway’s most profitabletrackage.This is the first detailed study of the building of railroads and their effects on the Mississippi and Louisiana Deltas.Highly readable and profusely illustrated, with a rich assortment of maps and David Price’s extensive commentary onlocomotives and rolling stock, it will be the standard reference work on these subjects for generations to come.