Jesup Station, Georgia

Jesup, the seat of Wayne County, was built entirely by railroads. In early eighteen sixty-nine, Willis Clary established the town at the junction of the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad and the Macon and Brunswick Railroad, at what was then known as Station Number Six. The crossroads of two lines made Jesup one of the busiest rail hubs in coastal Georgia.

By eighteen ninety-one, much of the town's population depended on the railroads in some way. The surrounding pine forests sustained a massive turpentine and timber industry, with Black workers scarring trees for resin in camps connected to the rail sidings. Jesup has often been called the town that trains built.

The Amtrak station that stands today on what was once the Atlantic Coast Line route carries a faint echo of that nineteenth-century junction , a single daily train on a corridor that once moved far more.