The Canton and Carthage Railroad crossed the ground the Natchez Trace Parkway now occupies near milepost 124 in Madison County, on its way from the lumber mill at Canton to the Leake County seat at Carthage. The line began in 1914 as a logging railroad built by the Merrill Brothers Logging Company and later owned by the Pearl River Valley Lumber Company of Canton. The Canton and Carthage Railroad was incorporated in December 1927 to take it over, running about 36 miles east from Canton through Carthage to McAfee, all of it on the north and west side of the Pearl River.
An abandoned spur leaves the old main line close to the parkway and crosses the Pearl at Ratliff's Ferry. It matches the branch the railroad historian Tony Howe describes running south of the river to the Appolonia mill at Pelahatchie, which was given up in 1935. In 1939 Congress consented to a free highway bridge across the Pearl at or near Ratliffs Ferry in Madison County.
In its later years the railroad ran No. 202, a 2-8-2 Mikado built by the American Locomotive Company in 1928 that had belonged to the Denkmann Lumber Company. After King Lumber Industries closed the Canton mill in 1955, a group of Carthage businessmen bought the line and ran it a few more years, and it was abandoned about 1960.
Getting there
32.6019, -89.8460
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