Much like uncovering a clip of Jackson’s public access TV show Star Struck on Youtube, construction crews working at the Point in Fondren recently uncovered a piece of forgotten history.
Late last month, workers with Hemphill Construction uncovered a section of the city’s long-forgotten trolley line.
The Point, which is where Old Canton Road and North State Street meet, was a turnaround hub for the trolley, said Fondren Renaissance Foundation Executive Director Jim Wilkirson.
“I had always heard about the trolley line. It’s cool when all of a sudden there’s history – a part of it that was uncovered,” he said. “It makes you think about who rode it, where they were going.
“The story’s neat until you see the actual piece, then you think more about it.”
Hemphill was working on a major sidewalk improvement project that is slated to wrap up at the end of the month.
A trolley service ran in the capital city for more than 60 years, during the period following the Civil War. The first trolley service began in 1871 and continued until it was discontinued in 1935, according to the 2011 post on Preservation in Mississippi Blog.
The excerpt was originally found in the book “Travelling by Trolley in Mississippi: Stories about Streetcars,” by Frank Brooks.
According to a map also published on the Web site, the trolley line ran along State Street from Rankin Street to the point, where it then went north and turned onto Lorenz Boulevard and Mitchell Avenue.
“It was kind of a railroad worker neighborhood. The trolley gave them access to downtown,” said Jennifer Baughn, chief architectural historian with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
At the time, the neighborhood was made up mostly of small working-class houses, which were home to workers of the Illinois Central Railroad.
“You look on an aerial map and you can see the remains of a roundhouse – where they pulled the cars in and worked on them,” she said.
On the opposite site of North State was the Mississippi State Insane Hospital, which is the site of the University of Mississippi Medical Center today.
The trolley service continued until 1935, when the city switched to bus transit. That was the same year the asylum closed and was relocated to the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, Vaughn said.
“It was cheaper to operate buses than to lay down track,” she said. “The trolleys had always been privately run, usually by the electric company.”
Once they stopped making money, the utility companies gave them up.
“The city tried to operate them for a while but switched to buses,” she said. “They could change a route more easily as needed.”
Wilkirson said the line will be covered up as part of the streetscape work and will not be removed.
Crews are continuing work on the Fondren Streetscape Project, which includes updating sidewalks and pedestrian features throughout the Fondren Business District.
No historic marker is going up as part of the project, but Wilkirson said he would like to see one there and at other historic points of interest throughout the Fondren community.
He said the foundation could turn its attention to that project once the sidewalk enhancements are finished.
“We’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” he said. “We haven’t focused on that because we needed to do the sidewalks.”
