Local city information for Vicksburg, MS

Vicksburg is a city in Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is the only city in Warren County. It is located 234 miles (377 km) north by west of New Orleans on the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and 40 miles (65 km) due west of Jackson, the state capital. In 1900, 14,834 people lived in Vicksburg; in 1910, 20,814; in 1920, 17,931; and in 1940, 24,460. The population was 26,407 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Warren County.

Vicksburg is the principal city of the Vicksburg Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Warren County.


The area which is now Vicksburg was originally part of Natchez Native American's country. After their defeat in the Natchez War of the 1700s, the area became part of the Choctaw Nation. Under pressure from the US government, the Choctaw Native Americans agreed to cede nearly 2,000,000 acres of land under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Adams in 1801. The treaty was the first of a series of treaties that eventually led to the removal of the Choctaw Nation to Indian Territory in 1830; however, many Choctaws remained in Mississippi citing article XIV of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.

The first Europeans who settled the area were the French, who built Fort-Saint-Pierre in 1719 on the high bluffs overlooking the Yazoo River at present-day Redwood. On 28 November, 1729, the Natchez Native Americans attacked the fort in their country (Natchez, Mississippi), killing several hundred people, including the Jesuit Father Paul Du Poisson, and carrying off most of the women and children. The Natchez War was a disaster for French Louisiana, but with the help of the Choctaw, the Natchez and their allies, the Yazoo were defeated and scattered.

A military outpost established on the site by the Spaniards in 1790 was known as Nogales, but it changed to Walnut Hills (Nogales is Spanish for walnut trees) when the Americans took possession in March of 1798.

A sprawling community developed which officially incorporated in 1825 as Vicksburg, named after Newitt Vick, a Methodist minister and conscientious objector of the Revolution. During the American Civil War, it was site of the Siege of Vicksburg, a significant event in which the Union gained control of the entire Mississippi River. The 47-day siege was intended to starve the city into submission, for its location atop a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River proved impregnable to assault by federal troops. The capture of Vicksburg and the simultaneous defeat of Lee at Gettysburg marked the turning point in the American Civil War.
thumb in Vicksburg, circa 1905]]
Because of the city's location on the Mississippi River, its reputation in the 19th century often rested on the river's prodigious steamboat traffic. Between 1881 and 1894, the Anchor Line, a prominent steamboat company on the Mississippi River from 1859 to 1898, operated a steamboat called the City of Vicksburg. In 1876 a Mississippi River flood cut off the large meander flowing past Vicksburg leaving access to the new channel limited. The United States Army Corps of Engineers diverted the Yazoo River in 1903 into the old, shallowing channel to rejuvenate the waterfront. Railroad access to the west was by transfer steamers and ferry barges until a combination railroad and highway bridge was built in 1929. This is the only Mississippi River rail crossing between Baton Rouge and Memphis and the only highway crossing between Natchez and Greenville. Interstate 20 bridged the River after 1973 and freight rail traffic still crosses by the old bridge. North-South transportation links are by the Mississippi River and U.S. Highway 61.

On March 12, 1894, the popular soft drink Coca-Cola was bottled for the first time in Vicksburg by Joseph Biedenharn, a local confectioner. Today, surviving nineteenth-century Biedenharn soda bottles are prized by collectors of Coca-Cola memorabilia, and his candy store is the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum.

Vicksburg served as the primary refugee gathering point and temporary housing during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 which submerged an area of the Mississippi Delta nearly the size of New England. That flood was the impetus towards establishment of the United States Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station as the primary hydraulics laboratory to develop protection from the river. That establishment, now known as the Engineer Research and Development Center, works in the areas of military engineering, information technology, environmental engineering, hydraulic engineering, and geotechnical engineering.

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