Vicksburg Park Hopes To Buy 8 Parcels
By Deborah Fitts
July '02
VICKSBURG, Miss.

Officials at Vicksburg National Military Park hope that about $1 million they have available for land acquisition will be sufficient to buy eight parcels they are eyeing adjoining two areas of the park.

Four of the parcels are located near the headquarters of Union Gen. U.S. Grant, in the park's northeast quadrant. Park historian Terry Winschel said the properties involved are undeveloped and may total 40 acres. The other four, totaling less than an acre altogether, are near the Vicksburg National Cemetery, where Winschel said their purchase would help "enhance the solemnity and dignity of that burial ground."

Winschel noted that the 1800-acre park is authorized to add as much as 118 additional acres before it hits a ceiling imposed by Congress.

Spurred by the success in recent years of riverboat gambling in Vicksburg, Winschel said, the park "has rapidly become an island of green in an urban sea" of residential, commercial and light-industrial development. "We're trying to consolidate our boundary" while the few open spots remain.

Winschel noted that Mississippi's U.S. Senator Thad Cochran was instrumental in obtaining the funds for the park. At presstime, the National Park Service's regional land-acquisition office was preparing to seek bids for appraisals of all eight properties. All are contiguous to the park or within 100 yards of it.

Land values around the battlefield have "skyrocketed" due to development, Winschel said. "We're going to see how far we can stretch the money and maximize its benefit to the park." If the money is well spent, he added, Congress may be disposed to give more.

In other news at Vicksburg, park officials are beginning the lengthy bureaucratic process that will allow them to clear 800 acres of dense forest that Winschel said has long deprived visitors of understanding the action that took place there in the summer of 1863.

"It will be night and day," Winschel said of the forest removal. "Right now all you see is a wall of green no matter which direction you look." The park's narrow vistas are "few and far between." As a result, “you gain no appreciation of the natural formidability of Vicksburg, and the challenge the Union soldiers faced."

Winschel also noted that there are "several hundred" monuments and markers in the woods that "visitors never see" because of the heavy growth. The trees, between Union and Confederate avenues, were planted in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

From the end of the war until the turn of the century, the land was farmed, according to Winschel, but farming petered out and by the 1930s soil erosion was threatening roads, bridges and park monuments. The best remedy for soil stabilization in those days was to plant trees, Winschel explained, and so the CCC was called in and the trees were planted by hand.

Now it's known that an adequate grass cover will prevent erosion, enabling the park to once again restore the wartime landscape. The process of securing the necessary historic and environmental compliances is cumbersome, however, and Winschel predicted that it could take years.

As a first step, officials are gathering documents and "scores” of photographs of the battlefield in the 1890s. "We have the documentation well in hand of what the park looked like in the '90s, when the veterans said it was very much the way it appeared in the 1860s," Winschel said.

Prior to and during the 47-day Union siege of the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, the area was leveled by the soldiers of both sides in order to build fortifications and provide fields of fire and "a clear, unmolested view of one another," Winschel said.

Trees standing along the park's boundary will be left as a buffer from modern-day intrusions. Winschel said he has been lobbying for the tree removal throughout his 25-year tenure at the park. "It's taken me a while to convince management," he said, but he noted that Superintendent Bill Nichols "is solidly behind it."

At presstime the park was also shortly to award a contract for the gilding of inscriptions on the 23 granite monuments to Mississippi units. The etched wording on the 5-foot-high slabs of polished granite has always been difficult to read, Winschel explained. The work will be paid for by $22,000 in funds donated by local United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans groups, plus the pennies of "several thousand" schoolchildren who recycled aluminum cans.

And finally, the museum of the Confederate gunboat Cairo is expected to re-open at the park by late June, and the Cairo itself should be ready for viewing by late July. The vessel, salvaged in 1964, was closed to the public in November to allow for construction of a shelter to replace one that was inadequate. The support system for the new canopy was being installed at presstime.

Winschel noted that in late April a diver involved with the salvage operation donated to the park several hundred photographs detailing the effort to raise the vessel. "We were so thrilled to get these," Winschel said. "This is a wonderful visual record of the salvage."