After arriving in Mississippi on Tuesday, we spent a rainy Wednesday in the state’s capital of Jackson. Our first stop was the Old State Capitol which is now a museum. The building is beautiful, and has been restored a few times over its 185-year history…most recently after damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The exhibits inside related to the building itself and to the state government and were really well-done – very informative and understandable.

From there, we went to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. As with the similar museums we’ve visited, there was an abundance of information across the eight galleries with a mix of national civil rights-related events and those specific to Mississippi.

After our museum visits, the rain had ended (but the clouds stuck around!), so we found our way to the Natchez Trace Parkway; it’s a 444-mile road that goes through three states. It’s the most significant highway of what was then the “southwest”, having been used by Native Americans, Lewis & Clark, Presidents, and Generals. It has been part of the National Park System since 1938, and is similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway with a number of monuments and overlooks to see. We stopped at a couple of the nearby highlights – a massive reservoir and the Boyd Site which contains burial mounds from approx. 800 AD (that’s about 1200 years ago!).

Thursday took us to nearby Vicksburg, probably best known for the Civil War battle that took place there for 47 days in 1863 until the confederacy surrendered. The city’s location near the Mississippi River made it vital to the war effort. Abraham Lincoln said “Vicksburg is the key! The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”

There is a 16-mile driving tour through the battlefield, and while we’ve been to several Civil War battlefields, Vicksburg is unique in a few ways:

• The topography. It is incredibly hilly throughout the area, not a big open, flat space like Gettysburg and Manassas.
• The ‘labeling’ that has been done. Throughout the site, there are blue signs (Union) and red signs (Confederate) indicating which division or battalion had been positioned in each area. Apparently, they brought back Civil War veterans around 1900 and asked them to identify where they had served, so the battlefield could be marked.
• The number of monuments and markers – over 1300 of them – to memorialize fallen soldiers.

When the national military park was established in 1899, each state that was involved in the war was invited to erect a monument to the soldiers who fought there. They are each unique and serve as a wonderful memorial and reminder of this critical battle. Here’s a small sampling…

Our adopted home state of Illinois had a particularly impressive memorial…

The military park also includes a museum for the gunboat USS Cairo which was one of the first ironclad warships. It sank in the Yazoo River just north of Vicksburg in 1862, and was discovered in 1956. It was salvaged , and the boat’s remains are displayed at the museum. Really interesting exhibit and restoration!

We are by no means Civil Wars buffs, but we spent about three hours total at the visitors center, driving through, stopping to see various memorials, and at the USS Cairo museum. It was fascinating, and absolutely the most interesting of the battlefields we have visited.

We decided to explore downtown Vicksburg a bit, and went to see the Old Courthouse Museum. We didn’t go inside, but the outside of the building was impressive! And so was the current courthouse, across the street. Definitely of another era with its art deco style!

We went down near the river, and spotted a Mississippi River Cruise Ship docked there.

And we found the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum. Biedenharn owned a candy store and was the first person to bottle Coca-Cola to send it to more rural areas – in 1894! We had to go inside…two years ago, we visited the place where Pepsi-Cola was formulated in New Bern, NC, so it seemed only fair (especially since I prefer Diet Coke over Diet Pepsi!)

Friday was another rainy day, so we spent the morning indoors at a laundromat in Vicksburg, and the afternoon indoors at the gym. Time to pack up and head out tomorrow…next stop, Arkansas!