Expanding the Scope: Community Engagement Session for New Interpretive Center to be held this Evening

VICKSBURG, Miss. – The Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park and Campaign and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) will hold a community engagement session this evening, Wednesday, November 20, at 5:30 p.m. in the orientation theater at the Vicksburg National Military Park Visitor Center to discuss the planned new interpretive center.

Vicksburg project representatives from architecture firm Perkins & Will and exhibit design firm Gallagher & Associates will provide project overviews of the planned interpretive center that will expand the scope of the current Visitor’s Center.

“From these sessions, the public will have opportunities to learn about the partnership project, our goals, and engage with us as we move forward with the development of the new center,” said Megan Bankston, Vicksburg project manager at MDAH.

Feedback and comments are welcome at the public session. 

The project is a collaboration of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Friends of Vicksburg National Military Park & Campaign (FOV), and the National Park Service at the Vicksburg National Military Park.

“The visitor center at the military park now is small and they don’t have the room or the funding, they being the National Park Service, to expand the interpretation beyond the siege,” said Bankston in a previous interview.

The new center would not only tell the story of the Siege of Vicksburg during the summer of 1863 but also the full story of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign leading up to the city’s fall on July 4 of that year, and its impact on white and Black civilians.

“We want to find personal stories, civilian stories – stories that haven’t been told before,” she said. “The soldiers, the sailors, the Navy personnel Grant used during the campaign.”

The projected completion date for the new interpretive center is 2028.

For more information, call 601-576-6850 or email info@mdah.ms.gov.