Themed Photo Gallery and Information: Vicksburg
History
Vicksburg is the only city in, and county seat of Warren County, Mississippi, United States. It is located 234 miles (377 km) northwest of New Orleans at the confluence of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and 40 miles (64 km) due west of Jackson, the state capital. It is located on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from the state of Louisiana.
The city has increased in population since 1900, when 14,834 people lived here. The population was 26,407 at the 2000 census. In 2010, it was designated as the principal city of a Micropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) with a total population of 49,644. This MSA includes all of Warren County.
The area which is now Vicksburg was long occupied by the Natchez Native Americans as part of their historical territory along the Mississippi. The Natchez spoke a language isolate not related to the Muskogean languages of the other major tribes in the area. Before the Natchez, other indigenous cultures had occupied this strategic area for thousands of years.
The first Europeans who settled the area were French colonists, who built Fort-Saint-Pierre in 1719 on the high bluffs overlooking the Yazoo River at present-day Redwood. They conducted fur trading with the Natchez and others and started plantations. On 29 November 1729, the Natchez attacked the fort and plantations in and around the present-day city of Natchez. They killed several hundred settlers, including the Jesuit missionary Father Paul Du Poisson. As was the custom, they took a number of women and children as captives, adopting them into their families.
The Natchez War was a disaster for French Louisiana, and the colonial population of the Natchez District never recovered. But, aided by the Choctaw, traditional enemies of the Natchez, the French defeated and scattered the Natchez and their allies, the Yazoo.
The Choctaw Nation took over the area by right of conquest and inhabited it for several decades. Under pressure from the US government, in 1801 the Choctaw agreed to cede nearly 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km2) of land to the US under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Adams. The treaty was the first of a series that eventually led to the removal in 1830 of most of the Choctaw to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Some Choctaw remained in Mississippi, citing article XIV of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek; they became citizens of the state and the United States. They struggled to maintain their culture against the pressure of the binary slave society, which classified people as only white or black.
In 1790, the Spanish founded a military outpost on the site, which they called Fort Nogales (nogales meaning “walnut trees”). When the Americans took possession in 1798 following the American Revolutionary War and a treaty with Spain, they changed the name to Walnut Hills. The small village was incorporated in 1825 as Vicksburg, named after Newitt Vick, a Methodist minister who had established a Protestant mission on the site.
In 1835, during the Murrell Excitement, a mob from Vicksburg attempted to expel the gamblers from the city, because the citizens were tired of the rougher element treating the city residents with nothing but contempt. They captured and hanged five gamblers who had shot and killed a local doctor. The historian Joshua D. Rothman calls this event “the deadliest outbreak of extralegal violence in the slave states between the Southampton Insurrection and the Civil War.”
During the American Civil War, the city finally surrendered during the Siege of Vicksburg, after which the Union Army gained control of the entire Mississippi River. The 47-day siege was intended to starve the city into submission. Its location atop a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River proved otherwise impregnable to assault by federal troops. The surrender of Vicksburg by Confederate General John C. Pemberton on July 4, 1863, together with the defeat of General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg the day before, has historically marked the turning point in the Civil War in the Union’s favor.
From the surrender of Vicksburg until the end of the war in 1865, the area was under Union military occupation. Some accounts say that the residents of Vicksburg did not celebrate the national holiday of 4th of July again until 1945, after United States victory in World War II, but this is inaccurate. Large Fourth of July celebrations were being held by 1907, and informal celebrations took place before that.
Because of the city’s location on the Mississippi River, in the 19th century it built an extensive trade from the prodigious steamboat traffic. It shipped out cotton coming to it from surrounding counties and was a major trading city.
In 1876 a Mississippi River flood cut off the large meander flowing past Vicksburg, leaving limited access to the new channel. The city’s economy suffered greatly. 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 the first few years after the Civil War, white Confederate veterans developed the Ku Klux Klan, beginning in Tennessee; it had chapters throughout the South and attacked freedmen and their supporters. It was suppressed about 1870. By the mid-1870s, new white paramilitary groups had arisen in the Deep South, including the Red Shirts in Mississippi, as whites struggled to regain political and social power over the black majority. Elections were marked by violence and fraud as white Democrats worked to suppress black Republican voting.
In August 1874 a black sheriff, Peter Cosby, was elected in Vicksburg. Letters by a white planter, Batchelor, detail the preparations of whites for what he described as a “race war,” including acquisition of the newest guns, Winchester 16 mm. On December 7, 1874, white men disrupted a black Republican meeting celebrating Cosby’s victory and held him in custody before running him out of town. He advised blacks from rural areas to return home; along the way, some were attacked by armed whites. During the next several days, armed white mobs swept through black areas, killing other men at home or out in the fields. Sources differ as to total fatalities, with 29–50 blacks and 2 whites reported dead at the time. Twenty-first-century historian Emilye Crosby estimates that 300 blacks were killed in the city and the surrounding area of Claiborne County, Mississippi. The Red Shirts were active in Vicksburg and other Mississippi areas, and black pleas to the federal government for protection were not met.
At the request of Republican Governor Adelbert Ames, who had left the state during the violence, President Ulysses S. Grant sent Federal troops to Vicksburg in January 1875. In addition, a congressional committee investigated what was called the Vicksburg Riot at the time (and reported as the Vicksburg Massacre by northern newspapers.) They took testimony from both black and white residents, as reported by the New York Times, but no one was ever prosecuted for the deaths. The Red Shirts and other white insurgents suppressed Republican voting by both whites and blacks; smaller-scale riots were staged in the state up to the 1875 elections, at which time white Democrats regained control of a majority of seats in the state legislature.
Under new constitutions, amendments and laws passed from 1890 (Mississippi) to 1908 in the remaining southern states, white Democrats disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by creating barriers to voter registration, such as poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. They passed laws imposing Jim Crow and racial segregation of public facilities.
On March 12, 1894, the popular soft drink Coca-Cola was bottled for the first time in Vicksburg by Joseph A. Biedenharn, a local confectioner. Today, surviving 19th-century Biedenharn soda bottles are prized by collectors of Coca-Cola memorabilia. The original candy store has been renovated and is used as the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum.
The near exclusion of most blacks from the political system lasted for decades until after Congressional passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Lynchings of blacks and other forms of white racial terrorism against them continued to occur in Vicksburg after the start of the 20th century. In May 1903, for instance, two black men charged with murdering a planter were taken from jail by a mob of 200 farmers and lynched before they went to trial. From 1877 to 1950 in Warren County, 14 African Americans were lynched by whites, most in the decades near the turn of the century.
The United States Army Corps of Engineers diverted the Yazoo River in 1903 into the old, shallowing channel to revive the waterfront of Vicksburg. The port city was able to receive steamboats again, but much freight and passenger traffic had moved to railroads, which had become more competitive.
Railroad access to the west across the river continued to be by transfer steamers and ferry barges until a combination railroad-highway bridge was built in 1929. Vicksburg has the only crossing over the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and Memphis. It is the only highway crossing of the river between Greenville and Natchez.
After 1973, Interstate 20 bridged the river. Freight rail traffic still crosses via the old bridge. North-South transportation links are by the Mississippi River and U.S. Highway 61.
During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, in which hundreds of thousands of acres were inundated, Vicksburg served as the primary gathering point for refugees. Relief parties put up temporary housing, as the flood submerged a large percentage of the Mississippi Delta.
Because of the overwhelming damage from the flood, the US Army Corps of Engineers established the Waterways Experiment Station as the primary hydraulics laboratory, to develop protection of important croplands and cities. Now known as the Engineer Research and Development Center, it applies military engineering, information technology, environmental engineering, hydraulic engineering, and geotechnical engineering to problems of flood control and river navigation.
In December 1953, a severe tornado swept across Vicksburg, causing 38 deaths and destroying nearly 1,000 buildings.
Particularly after World War II, in which many blacks served, returning veterans began to be active in the civil rights movement, wanting to have full citizenship after fighting in the war. In Mississippi, activists in the Vicksburg Movement became prominent during the 1960s.
Source : Wikipedia
Mississippi Blues Trail Marker : Willie Dixon
The marker is located at the intersection of South Street and Willie Dixon Way.
Full text:
Willie Dixon, often called “the poet laureate of the blues,” was born in Vicksburg on July 1, 1915. As a songwriter, producer, arranger, and bass player, Dixon shaped the sound of Chicago blues in the 1950s and ’60s with songs such as “Seventh Son,” “Little Red Rooster,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “My Babe,” and “Wang Dang Doodle.” Dixon traced many of his works back to poems and songs he heard or wrote as a youth in Vicksburg.
Willie Dixon, born at 1631 Crawford Street, about ¾ mile east of this site, defined the blues as “the facts of life.” Dixon developed his ear for language and music in Vicksburg by listening to his mother Daisy’s poetry, singing spirituals at Spring Hill Baptist Church, and savoring the blues of pianist Little Brother Montgomery. He learned harmony singing from Theo Phelps, leader of the Union Jubilee Singers, and sang with the quintet on a weekly WQBC radio program broadcast from the Vicksburg Hotel in the 1930s. Dixon also brokered his songs to other WQBC performers. As a teenager, he often left town in search of work during the Depression, loading freight, chopping wood, or shoveling coal, among other jobs, and was once arrested for hoboing in Clarksdale, Mississippi. In 1936, he moved to Chicago and pursued a brief boxing career. But he continued to sing and write songs, and learned to play a homemade one-string bass.
Dixon recorded with the Big Three Trio and other combos before securing a production job with Chess Records in the early 1950s. He emerged as the studio mastermind behind the classic Chicago blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, and many others. Dixon played string bass on numerous sessions, including the first hits by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. He also produced the debut releases of Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, and Magic Sam on the Cobra and Artistic labels.
Dixon’s impact reached far beyond the African American blues market. He played a key role in promoting and booking blues in Europe in the 1960s, and covers of his songs by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and others sold millions of copies. He subsequently toured and recorded several albums with his band, the Chicago Blues All Stars. His achievements earned him induction into both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame.
In 1981, Dixon established the Blues Heaven Foundation to assist blues musicians and sponsor blues education programs. After his death in Burbank, California, on January 29, 1992, his widow, Marie, and the Dixon family carried on his mission, and in 1997 they fulfilled a Dixon dream by purchasing the former Chess Records building in Chicago to house Blues Heaven. Dixon is buried in Alsip, Illinois.
Vicksburg honored its native son by renaming this street Willie Dixon Way in 2002.
Source : http://msbluestrail.org/
Mississippi Blues Trail Marker : The Red Tops
The marker is located at 710 Clay Street.
Full text :
Between 1953 and 1974 the Vicksburg-based Red Tops entertained legions of dancers with their distinctive mix of blues, jazz, and pop. Under the strict direction of drummer and manager Walter Osborne, the group developed a devoted fan base across Mississippi and neighboring states. Most of the ten original members had played with an earlier Vicksburg band, the Rebops. Vocalist Rufus McKay’s rendition of “Danny Boy” was a crowd favorite.
The Red Tops were the most popular band in Mississippi during an era when nightlife centered on the dance floor and couples and hopeful singles donned their finest clothes for evenings out on the town. The group, part of a long line of dance bands in Vicksburg, started during World War II as the Rebops. On weekends the Rebops played on Morrissey’s Showboat, a barge moored on DeSoto Island on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River, where alcohol laws were less strict than in Mississippi. Under the leadership of drummer Walter Osborne, the Rebops reorganized as the Red Tops. Their first performance was at the Sequoia Hills Club in Bovina, just east of Vicksburg, on June 20, 1953. The majority of the Red Tops’ performances over the course of their history were for white audiences at venues including country clubs, restaurants, ballrooms, high schools, and colleges across Mississippi as well as in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In Vicksburg these included the Vicksburg Auditorium, site of an annual New Year’s Eve dance; the Hotel Vicksburg; and the “BB Club,” housed at this location in the elaborate quarters of the B’nai B’rith Literary Association.
The group also performed regularly for African American audiences at clubs including the Blue Room in Vicksburg, Stevens Rose Room in Jackson, Ruby’s Night Spot in Leland, the Harlem Inn in Winstonville, the Plaza Hotel in Greenwood, and various Elks lodges. They were joined on occasion by blues harmonica great Sonny Boy Williamson II or the Knights, a local doo-wop group that included future blues recording artist Terry Evans. Saxophonist/bassist Anderson “Andy” Hardwick, the youngest of the Red Tops, spent many summers touring with various national artists, including Lowell Fulson, B.B. King, Otis Redding, Fats Domino, and James Brown. In the early ‘60s Hardwick and vocalist Rufus McKay left the Red Tops and formed the Fabulous Corvettes, a band whose repertoire was more blues and R&B-oriented than the Red Tops’.
Most Red Tops performances were on weekends, as all of the members had full-time day jobs. Unlike most bands, the Red Tops operated very strictly as a business, with detailed ledgers, annual audits, and bookings often scheduled a year in advance. Their matching uniforms were tailor-made, members were subject to regular inspections and rules of conduct, and rehearsals were held every Monday evening at the YMCA on Jackson Street. The Red Tops stopped performing regularly in the mid-‘70s but reunited on a number of special occasions. Multi-instrumentalist Andy Hardwick continued performing regularly as a jazz pianist, while Rufus McKay moved to Las Vegas and sang with Stanley Morgan’s Ink Spots and other vocal groups before returning to Vicksburg in 2000.
Source : http://msbluestrail.org/
Mississippi Blues Trail Marker : The Blue Room
The marker is located at 601 Clay Street.
Full text :
One of the most storied night spots in the South, the Blue Room, which stood across the street at 602 Clay Street, was operated for more than thirty years by flamboyant owner Tom Wince. Ray Charles, Fats Domino, B. B. King, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, and Little Milton were among the many stars who played here. In the 1940s and ’50s Wince was the most important blues promoter in Mississippi, booking bands through a network of nightclubs and halls across the state and in Louisiana.
The Blue Room, a multi-purpose complex that included a ballroom, restaurant, gambling casino, guest rooms, and living quarters for owner Tom Wince, Jr., and some of his family, began as a one-room operation selling beer and Coca-Colas in 1937. Wince was born on July 11, 1910 (or 1909 according to Social Security files), in Oak Ridge, northeast of Vicksburg, the son of white plantation owner Tom Harris and Rosie Brown, an African American who lived on the plantation. When Brown married Tom Wince, Sr., her son became known as Tom Wince, Jr. The Winces sharecropped until the 1920s, when they moved to Vicksburg.
Wince, Jr., a hotel bellhop with a fourth grade education, became a wealthy man, a big spender known as “Fancy Tom” for his elegant attire. He had seven wives and fourteen children, most of whom worked at the Blue Room. An avid sports fan, he befriended Joe Louis and other famed athletes, as well the headliners of African American blues and jazz. Wince earned his own status as a celebrity, yet he was also remembered for his friendly greetings to anyone who entered his club, no matter what their stature in life. Wince, who had pockets specially tailored in his pants to hold his pistol, prided himself in providing a safe, courteous atmosphere for top-notch entertainment. B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, T-Bone Walker, and Muddy Waters were among his favorite artists, according to his son, Billy Wince, Sr. Among others who appeared at the Blue Room’s upstairs ballroom, the Skyline, were Ruth Brown, Lionel Hampton, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Jackie Brenston, Erskine Hawkins, Cootie Williams, Joe Liggins, Roy Brown, Andy Kirk, Lucky Millinder, Charles Brown, and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Even when segregation was in force, whites attended when certain acts, especially Louis Armstrong, were booked here. Vicksburg’s Red Tops were a regular attraction. Jivin’ Jones’ group from Vicksburg and the Sounds of Soul and Booker Wolf ‘s band from Jackson also appeared. Teens had their own nights in the Blue Spot room, while a gambling casino and guest rooms were in the back, and next door was the Blue Room Circle restaurant. Wince, who owned several smaller local businesses, also booked acts into many other venues, including Ruby’s Nite Spot in Leland and New Club Desire in Canton.
Urban renewal brought an end to the Blue Room in 1972, but by 1974 Wince had opened the Barrel Club at 1021 Walnut Street. The Barrel Club was famed for its prayer room; religion was another of Wince’s keen interests. Also a 33rd degree Mason and a ruler in the Black Elks (IBPOEW), Wince died on September 15, 1978. His tombstone in City Cemetery is adorned with a large star similar to the one above the entrance to the Blue Room.
Source : http://msbluestrail.org/
Mississippi Blues Trail Marker : Marcus Bottom
The marker is located at Halls Ferry Road and Bowmar Avenue.
Full text :
The historic African American community of Marcus Bottom was an important center of early blues, jazz, and gospel music activity. Pianist Eurreal “Little Brother” Montgomery, one of the premier blues artists of the 1920s and ‘30s, performed here and in other areas of Vicksburg. His song “Vicksburg Blues” became a blues standard and has been recorded by many other performers. Famed blues composer Willie Dixon, a Vicksburg native, was particularly inspired by Montgomery’s music.
Vicksburg was uniquely positioned to play an important role in blues and jazz history. A lively river port midway between New Orleans and Memphis, Vicksburg was not only the most populous city in Mississippi in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but also home to the state’s largest African American community. A wide range of musical traditions mingled here as professional traveling bands, itinerant guitarists from Delta cotton plantations, barrelhouse piano players, and others worked the clubs and cafes in Marcus Bottom and in areas of town closer to the river. Vicksburg was at one time a base for Delta blues pioneer Charley Patton, fellow guitarists Bo Carter and Honeyboy Edwards, and a plethora of pianists led by Little Brother Montgomery, along with many noted early musicians who were born here, including Willie Dixon, Milt Hinton, Johnny Young, Walter Barnes, and Thomas Pinkston.
In the 1920s Little Brother Montgomery (c. 1906-1985) performed at the South Side Park Dance Hall, just east of Halls Ferry Road on Lane Street, as well as at Zach Lewis’s and Bell’s Café, both on Washington Street. Montgomery’s music left a strong impression on the young Willie Dixon, and when Dixon became a powerful figure on the Chicago blues scene decades later, he hired Montgomery for recording sessions and club dates. Among the pianists Montgomery recalled playing in Vicksburg were Earnest “44” Johnson, also known as “Flunky,” Sam “Cracking Kid” Johnson, Tommy Jackson, Walter Lewis, and a pair who were skilled musicians despite their impairments: Nub-Fingered Son Cook and Stiff Arm Eddie Scott.
Jazz legends Earl “Fatha” Hines, King Oliver, Bennie Moten, and Louis Armstrong also played at the South Side Park Dance Hall, according to music historian Earnest McBride, who lived near the club. While the Blue Room and the Cotton Club elsewhere in town later booked the big name acts, the musical tradition continued in Marcus Bottom with local performers (including Willie Johnson, Billy Jones, and Leon Dixon) or blues on the jukeboxes at the Playboy Club, the El Morocco, Delia’s Do Drop Inn, the Open House, Big Will’s, the Red Dot Inn, and the Melody Lounge. Various members of Vicksburg’s popular Red Tops band, including trumpeter Willard Tyler, grew up nearby. In 1954 folklorist Frederic Ramsey, Jr., came to Marcus Bottom in search of traditional African American music and recorded string band musicians Tom Johnson and John Copeland for a Folkways Records series called Music of the South. Former resident C. K. Chiplin chronicled the local community before and during the civil rights era in his 1996 book Roads From the Bottom: A Survival Journal for America’s Black Community.
Source : http://msbluestrail.org/
Mississippi Blues Trail Marker : 61 Highway
The marker is located at the corner of Washington and Jackson Street, one block from the Biedenhard Coca Cola Museum.
Full text :
Highway 61 occupies an important place in the blues, serving both as a popular lyrical symbol for travel and the actual route by which many artists moved northward. The original route of U. S. Highway 61 that was mapped out in the 1920s ran from downtown New Orleans to Grand Portage, Minnesota, on the Canadian border and connected cities including Memphis, St. Louis, and St. Paul. Within Mississippi the highway was initially mostly gravel and ran approximately four hundred miles through the downtown areas of many communities. Today’s route, which largely bypasses city centers, is considerably straighter and about eighty miles shorter.
The blues likely emerged in the late 1890s and the early 1900s, around the same time as the introduction of the automobile. Cars were initially somewhat of a novelty and luxury product – there were reportedly only twenty in Mississippi in 1900 – but this situation changed dramatically following the Ford Motor Company’s introduction of the Model T in 1908 and the moving assembly line in 1913; by 1920 there were eight million registered cars on the road. This growth was accompanied by widespread demands by commercial interests and citizens’ groups to build roads for the promotion of economic development, national defense, and tourism.
In 1916, when World War I raised concerns about interstate transportation of goods, the federal government initiated aid to states for road building, and the Federal Highway Act of 1921 mandated a national highway system. U.S. Highway 61 was one of nine numbered highways that ran through Mississippi that were officially designated in November of 1926, and construction on the initial road continued until the early ‘40s. By this time at least seven blues singers had recorded songs about Highway 61; later artists who cut songs on the theme included Vicksburg’s Johnny Young and Bob Dylan, who recorded the influential 1965 album “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Among the African American singers and musicians who have lived in communities along the southern stretch of Highway 61 in Mississippi are Willie Dixon, Louisiana Red, Artie “Blues Boy” White, Percy Strother, Greg Osgood & Cee Blaque, Little Joe Blue, Milt Hinton, and the Red Tops from Vicksburg; Muddy Waters and Johnny Dyer from Rolling Fork; J. D. Short from Port Gibson; Hezekiah & the Houserockers, Papa Lightfoot, William “Cat Iron” Carradine, Jimmy Anderson, Elmo Williams, and the Ealey brothers from Natchez; and Scott Dunbar, Polka Dot Slim, Robert Cage, Lester Young, and William Grant Still from Woodville.
Source : http://msbluestrail.org/
Photo Gallery
The Biedenhard Coca Cola Museum, Washington Street.
Attic Antique Gallery (store with awning) with very interesting antiques (61 Highway marker just to the left).
The Red Tops record in the antique store
Vicksburg Riverfront Murals at Catfish Row Art Park
American Queen Steamboat – the world’s larest steamboat on a MIssissippi River Cruise (Memphis to New Orleans).
Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad Station (now ‘The Old Deport Museum).