Our town, Woodville, was situated right on the main line of the Illinois Central Railroad—usually referred to, in its advertisements, as the Main Line of Mid-America. Roughly parallel to the Mississippi River, which lay twenty miles to the west, it was part and parcel of the Mississippi River Valley and its culture and was often referred to, if not as the “I.C.,” simply “the Railroad,” just as the Mississippi itself was known as “the River” and “the Late Unpleasantness” of the preceding century as “the War.”. . .