Meridian Union Station: Hub of the Five-Rail City

At the turn of the twentieth century, Meridian was the largest city in Mississippi, and the reason was trains. Five major rail lines crossed here, and by nineteen oh seven an average of forty trains a day passed through the city. To manage the traffic, a four-railroad consortium built a unified station in nineteen oh six at a cost of two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

The architect designed it in Mission Revival style, with a central tower and arched arcades that gave it the look of a California mission transplanted to the Mississippi hill country. The railroads employed more than six thousand Meridian residents. Though the central tower came down in the late nineteen forties and rail traffic faded, the station still stands downtown on Front Street as an Amtrak stop, one of the finest surviving examples of Mission Revival railroad architecture in the South.