The "Peavine" branch of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad met the Memphis to Vicksburg mainline at this site. From the late 1890s through the 1930s, it provided reliable transportation for blues musicians among the plantations of the Mississippi Delta. Before the late 1800s, much of the Delta was covered by swamps, thick forests, and canebrakes, and although early plantations and lumber companies used waterways to move goods, flooding, seasonal water changes, and costly dredging made transport difficult. Railways introduced in the 1870s and spread across the Delta by the early 1890s provided a solution and helped cotton production flourish. One such line was the Kimball Lake Branch, locally called the Peavine Branch, originally two narrow-gauge lines run by local entrepreneurs, including a lumber company in Boyle, before the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Company took it over in the late 1890s. The line ran from Dockery Plantation, where Charley Patton lived, ten miles west to Boyle, where it connected with the "Yellow Dog," the local name for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley line leading to Cleveland and beyond. Patton made the branch famous with his 1929 recording "Pea Vine Blues." The term "peavine" commonly referred to railways following indirect routes like pea vines, and Paramount Records used a drawing of an actual pea plant to promote Patton's record. "Pea Vine Blues" was one of many blues songs about railways, which served as both a metaphor for escape and a principal means by which African Americans left the South during the Great Migration. Its meaning was clear to Delta residents but obscure to others, and it inspired later recordings on the peavine theme by John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Charlie Musselwhite, Rory Block, and others. In 1975, a leading Japanese blues record company named itself P-Vine Special, and in 1992 it reissued all of Patton's recordings on CD.