Buckner's Trestle

About two miles south of Oxford, the Mississippi Central Railroad threw a long wooden trestle across a deep ravine in the late eighteen fifties. It rose roughly fifty feet and ran about a hundred feet across. During the Civil War this line was the spine of Grant's eighteen sixty-two campaign into north Mississippi, and a target for raids by both sides.

But the trestle is remembered for disaster. On February twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy, a southbound mail train started over the span. The engine and the front cars made it. Then the timbers gave way, and the rear cars plunged into the ravine, killing about twenty people and injuring about sixty. Years later a second wreck here injured dozens more. A marker now tells the story of the bridge that could not hold.