This park "includes 1,325 historic monuments and markers, 20 miles of historic trenches and earthworks, a 16-mile tour road, a 12.5-mile walking trail, two antebellum homes, 144 em-placed cannons, restored gunboat USS Cairo (sunk on December 12, 1862, on the Yazoo River, recovered successfully in 1964), and the Grant's Canal site, where the Union army attempted to build a canal to let their ships bypass Confederate artillery fire. The Cairo, also known as the "Hardluck Ironclad," was the first U.S. ship in history to be sunk by a torpedo/mine. It was raised in 1964." (Pictures below)
"The Illinois State Memorial has 47 steps, one for every day Vicksburg was besieged." (Pictured at the left). (This information is taken from Wikipedia)
All of the monuments are made of marble. They are stunning, and some as you can see, are very large. This is the inside of the Illinios.
After breakfast we drove to the park and began the driving tour. We had only a few hours to spend so didn't do a lot of walking. We would definitely like to go back and take a longer time in the future. There are so many monuments and markers throughout the park that it's impossible to stop and read each one.
The front end of the driving tour is primarily Northern state monuments and the half way point is the ship The Cairo. The higher elevated areas were secured by the South and those monuments were on that half of the tour.
This is the ship The Cairo. It was sunk by a mine field 'planted' by the Rebels. It has been partially reconstructed to show where guns were placed and how it was fortified to withstand gun power. Unfortunately, the hull was broken open and it sunk in just a few minutes in less than 40' of water. The structure covering it is quite impressive and there is a museum and gift shop there also.
Many artifacts were recovered from the ship where it was raised. If you blow up this picture and look at number 4, you will be looking at a Lea and Perrins Worchestershire bottle! Bob found that pretty cool. The label is gone of course but the bottle is virtually the same shape as it is today.
This area starts the examples of the Southern monuments. According to other information I gathered, the Yankees have many more elaborate monuments than the Rebs. The reason for this is the north had much more money after the war whereas it took the southern states many years to recover from the decimation.
This tunnel was pretty cool. The Yankees dug it out under the road and trenched their way up the hill to the Rebal position in order to dig a mine and start blowing holes in the defenses. The first picture is the tunnel under the road. The second picture is the Rebel position looking down on the tunnel (see the road? look to the right...) and the trenches and continued to bombard the Yankees as they trenched up the hill.
Here are a couple of single monuments to individuals from the south.
This monument is from Missouri for the South. The placard read that the iron work was added many years after the original monument was placed and dedicated due to the cost.
This part of our trip was very interesting and like I said earlier, we will return to take more time in the future if we are lucky! From Vicksburg we drove straight to McKinney TX to visit with sister, Sherri.
No comments:
Post a Comment