McComb City Railroad Depot Museum

McComb exists because of the railroad: the town was founded in 1872 after Henry Simpson McComb of the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern — a predecessor of the Illinois Central — moved the line's maintenance shops north out of New Orleans to keep workers away from that city's bars. The Illinois Central built the present station in 1901, and the rail center later became a flashpoint of the violent 1911 Illinois Central shopmen's strike, when riots brought in the state militia. The depot was restored in 1998 and again in June 2003, and the station house came to serve double duty as home of the McComb Railroad Museum and the waiting room for Amtrak's City of New Orleans, which calls here as a flag stop. On May 30, 2021, arson gutted the building and it was initially feared a total loss, but inspections by an architectural firm and experienced contractors determined that most of the walls in the central and southern sections could be saved, and Pike Construction of Mississippi began rebuilding on January 3, 2022.