Memphis: Frisco Station|Central Station (Location Key)

Central Station in Memphis had ten tracks when it opened in 1914. It was built on the site of the Calhoun Street Station, which in 1905 Minnie refers to as "the Frisco depot" in The Reivers, because the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway ran in and out of Memphis on some of those tracks. Central Station was a busy place in the era before the automobile displaced the train, full of the "streams of people" who repeatedly "jostle" Virgil Snopes and Fonzo Winbush when they get off the train around 1929 to begin their misadventures in the big city (Sanctuary, 189). On his way out of the city later in the novel Horace Benbow buys a cup of coffee in the depot while waiting for the "midnight train"; it lies "like a hot ball" in his stomach throughout the three hours it takes to get back to his house in Jefferson (221) - but that may be attributable to what the city has revealed to him rather than quality of the food served in the Central Station. In "Two Soldiers," while the Grier boy is at the Army Recruiting Station in Memphis, the soldiers fetch his brother, Pete, who is waiting at this station for the train to Little Rock (95).