A trip to Vicksburg

DON'T FIRE!! At least not while Beth and Stephen are playing a game of yelling "Hello!" into the ends of these cannon. Not much risk of them firing, actually, as this picture was taken at Vicksburg National Military Park in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a couple hours drive from Monticello. We made a trip here yesterday, in part because Hope and Kenny wanted to revisit this site (we've taken a number of our visitors here, but mostly before Beth and Stephen were born, when Kenny was small) and in part to do some shopping... More on that later... The picture below is of Beth and Stephen inside the dome of the Illinois memorial:

The picture below is of the Wisconsin memorial at Vicksburg:

Just about every state that participated in the Union and Confederate armies in this critical Civil War battle have put up elaborate memorials to their soldiers, living and dead. The heat and humidity kept us from spending too much time at Vicksburg on this trip, but we did swing down to the partial reconstruction of an actual Civil War ironclad naval vessel lost by the Union in the area during the war. Much of the wooden framing you see in the picture below is modern to help the visitor image the outlines of the gunboat. There some restored and preserved wood beams shown, and much of the iron from the boilers and other mechanisms is there (I don't know if the cannons were originals, though):

Below is a poetic, religious inscription on the relatively modest Arkansas monument:

The Union states definitely outspent their southern rivals in monument building--probably because Vicksburg was a key Union victory (it fell almost exactly the same time of the Battle of Gettysburg, around the Fourth of July in 1863).

As I alluded to earlier, we also did some shopping. Not just any shopping, mind you--we took advantage of some back to school specials to buy a powerful new desktop computer for under $600, and a nice new laser printer for only $60. I'm actually writing this blog on the new computer while we're transferring files from our old computer. This technology is amazing to me--we just bought our most powerful and capable personal computer EVER, and it also happens to be the cheapest one yet!!

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Anonymous said…
i've been there :) bill
10:33 PM
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