Cairo, Illinois

Aug. 27, 2011... on the way to Nashville...  Here is another American city... er... town... er...hamlet... that flabbergasted us...

On the way from Missouri into Tennessee, we tried to take a detour from interstate 57 across the Mississippi and go through a small town to get in to Tennessee via a short stint in Kentucky.  Only the bridge we wanted to take was out, so we ended up going over the Mississippi into Illinois and then heading south through Cairo, Illinois into Kentucky (get your map out!).

Cairo was immediately moving to us... energetically it held mysteries that we could not determine the origin of.  Visually it was a devastated place that obviously had had a hey day...

Entrance to Cairo

Glory Days Gone By

Once the 3rd Busiest Post Office in the U.S.

Once with a population of over 20,000, it now has a little over 2,000 residents...and it looks more like this down street after street:

You can read all about it in one of the most fascinating accounts of history, we have heard of.  Cairo.