SECOND ACT FOR Soulé
It’s impossible to experience the past … until you’ve been to Meridian, Mississippi. There, inside a pair of otherwise unremarkable buildings occupying one city block, is what is believed to be America’s last intact steam engine factory, complete with foundry and machine shop dating to the late 1800s.
Today, the historic Soulé Steam Feed Works survives as the Mississippi Industrial Heritage Museum in Meridian (though locals still refer to it as, simply, Soulé). The foundry, machine shop, assembly area, pattern shop and blacksmith’s forges exist as if workers had just gone home for the day. Visitors gawk at the 106-foot line shaft that provides power to belt-driven machines built more than a century ago. Work orders handwritten on faded slips of paper hang on a hook by the foreman’s desk.
When Bob Soulé, the third-generation owner of Soulé Steam Feed Works, decided in 2002 to close the doors on the
