Retired and Lovin' It: CIVIL WAR ERA of VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI

Monday, June 30, 2014

CIVIL WAR ERA of VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI

We finished setting up home and relaxing after our drive from Pensacola. Then we began sight seeing on Wednesday. We visited the Welcome Center and took pictures of the Mississippi River, the I-20 bridge and a railroad bridge. Then we drove on downtown and checked out the waterfront area. There are several museums, so we started with the Lower Mississippi River Museum. We find all of this interesting, with the printed materials best. There is a tugboat in dry dock outside which we also walked through.

Mississippi IV in dry dock.
First diesel motor driven tugboat commissioned in 1961,
following the steamboat era.

Picture of it on the River in it's heyday.

Diesel driven propellers, not steamboat paddle wheels.

Then we stopped in an antique shop across the street. That did not take long as it was not the best that we have been in.
On to the Yazoo Mississippi Valley RR Station turned Museum, where there were model railroads set up for everyone's pleasure. Most of the other items on display were depicting the Civil War era.

Yazoo Mississippi Valley RR Station

Shows Vicksburg, Mississippi and it's proximity
to the three state's borders.

On to the National Military Park that winds through the hills and valleys for nine miles over the battlefield. The roads were very nice blacktop and well maintained, most with one-way traffic. We drove through going 10-15 mph. Beautiful scenery and monuments. I will show many monuments at the bottom of this Blog.

and the USS Cairo Museum

Skeleton of the paddlewheel

Pistons and other parts of the steam engine.

The Cairo was part of a mine-clearing expedition on the Yazoo River in 1862. It sank in just 36 feet of water with no loss of life. It was recovered from the river in 1960.

Then on to Vicksburg's Historic Cedar Hill Cemetery which includes Soldier's Rest Confederate burial ground.

It is all so beautiful and leaves a lot to the imagination about the siege and defense of Vicksburg during the Civil War. All very interesting and we took many photos.

But in comes the problem!! I downloaded the photos onto the computer when we got back home. All went well until I cut the updating process short by accidentally hitting "cancel" when closing down the computer. I did not realize that this process would throw these photos into the next download of newer photos. Long story short - - I deleted what I thought was duplicates. NOT!! So we were out all of the more than 200 photos taken our first day out!! What do we do? Just let it slide with no photos, or go back another day? We waited until Saturday and went out to take all of the photos that had been taken outdoors, so not all was lost. I went back and dropped those into the Blog.

Below I am going to show a few of the hundreds of monuments from the National Military Battlefield, especially some from Ohio. We are thinking that each state provided their own monuments to honor their military groups, which we assumed from the different styles of markers. Ohio got rather creative on theirs, when other states used the same design for all of theirs. Interesting!!