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 bluesmen among the plantations of the Mississippi Delta. Before the late 1800s, much of the Delta was covered by swamps, thick forests, and canebrakes, and early plantations and lumber companies depended on waterways despite flooding, shifting water levels, and costly dredging. Railways introduced in the 1870s and spread across the Delta by the early 1890s allowed cotton production to flourish and served many plantations by small lines. One of these was the Kimball Lake Branch, known locally as the "Peavine Branch," originally two narrow-gauge lines operated 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 slang name for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley line leading to Cleveland and beyond. Patton made the branch famous through his 1929 Paramount Records recording "Pea Vine Blues." The name "peavine" was commonly used for railways with indirect routes resembling pea vines, and Paramount promoted Patton's record with a drawing of an actual pea plant. "Pea Vine Blues" was one of many blues songs about railways, which served both as a metaphor for escape and as a primary means by which African Americans left the South during the Great Migration. Its meaning was clear to Delta residents, and Patton's song 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, the Japanese blues record company P-Vine Special took its name from this tradition, and in 1992 it reissued all of Patton's recordings on CD.