Mathiston: A Railroad Town on the Old Trace
Mississippi
The ground beneath Mathiston has a long memory. Choctaw Chief David Folsom is said to have kept a trading post in the area in the early eighteen hundreds, near the Old Natchez Trace. The modern town came later.
In the late eighteen eighties, a railroad pushed an east-west line through Webster County, and a merchant named William Mathis is said to have donated land for a depot. The railroad named the new stop Mathiston in his honor. Mathis organized a community meal and a lot sale around the new depot, and the town grew quickly enough that the town was incorporated soon after.
