VICKSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK
Battlefield — 3201 Clay Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi
Status: Historic site · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/vicksburg-national-military-park-vicksburg-mississippi/

Battlefield in Vicksburg; research record.

Vicksburg National Military Park is a battlefield in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Battlefield in Vicksburg; research record. The National Park Service interprets the 47-day siege and Union and Confederate campaigns for Vicksburg. Local lore holds that Visit Vicksburg recounts soldier apparitions, gunpowder odors and cannon smoke.

Vicksburg was the key Lincoln wanted in his pocket. 'See what a lot of land these fellows hold, of which Vicksburg is the key,' he told his generals — the Gibraltar of the Confederacy on the Mississippi bluffs, closing the river to the North and holding the South's halves together. Grant spent eighteen months maneuvering for it; when the May assaults failed, he settled into the siege — forty-seven days of trenches, mines, and starvation rations while the city ate mule meat and lived in caves dug into the bluffs.
The siege was the war's engineering marvel — thirteen Union approaches digging toward the Confederate works, the June 25 mine under the Third Louisiana Redan blowing a crater the infantry fought over for twenty-six hours with clubbed muskets. At Milliken's Bend, untested United States Colored Troops held the supply depot against the Confederate attempt to break the siege — the battle that proved what the Army had argued about Black soldiers.
It ended on July 4, 1863 — Pemberton surrendering under the stunted oak, the garrison paroled, the river open 'unvexed to the sea' as Lincoln put it. Paired with Gettysburg the same week, it was the turn of the war. The park preserves the whole anatomy — the Confederate lines and Union approaches facing each other across the ravines, the Cairo ironclad raised from the Yazoo, the national cemetery holding 17,000 Union dead.
Vicksburg is the archive's siege file — the 47-day encirclement that took the Gibraltar of the Confederacy on July 4, 1863, splitting the South and turning the war, on the best-preserved siege landscape in America.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Vicksburg National Military Park is the archive's key file — the 1863 siege where Grant took the city Lincoln called 'the key,' the surrender that gave the Union the Mississippi on the same weekend as Gettysburg.
A siege that split the South keeps its trenches — the file's suggestion being that Vicksburg's hold is the forty-seven days: the parallel lines still readable in the ground, the caves, the crater, and the surrender oak where the river turned.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] haunting: Visit Vicksburg recounts soldier apparitions, gunpowder odors and cannon smoke. Old military ground in Vicksburg, Mississippi carries its dead the way it carries its walls — permanently. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. Sources including 'Must-Visit Vicksburg Spots for Spooky Season' keep the claim in circulation. The reports keep the place on every haunted list it qualifies for.
  source: Must-Visit Vicksburg Spots for Spooky Season (https://www.visitvicksburg.com/blog/must-visit-vicksburg-spots-for-spooky-season/)

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· The National Park Service interprets the 47-day siege and Union and Confederate campaigns for Vicksburg. A fort with documented casualties writes its own foundation — the lore comes after. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'History & Culture — Vicksburg National Military Park'. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.

SOURCES — 2 cited
· Must-Visit Vicksburg Spots for Spooky Season — Visit Vicksburg
  https://www.visitvicksburg.com/blog/must-visit-vicksburg-spots-for-spooky-season/
· History & Culture — Vicksburg National Military Park — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/vick/learn/historyculture/index.htm

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