In 1811, Newitt Vick, a Methodist minister from Virginia, purchased a large

tract of land in the Mississippi area.

thriving

Vick saw the potential for a thriving river port and began to plan a town.

He envisioned a bustling community that would serve as a vital link

between the Mississippi River and the fertile interior of the state.

didn't Tragically, Newadvick didn't live to see his dream realized.

He fell victim to yellow fever in 1819, just as his plans

were beginning to take shape.

However, his family, particularly his son in law, John Lane, carried on his vision.

The town was officially established in 1825 and named

Vicksburg in honor of its founder.

Its location on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River proved to be ideal.

The natural defenses provided by the terrain combined with the easy access

to river trade quickly made Vicksburg an important commercial center.

the As steamboats began to ply the waters of the Mississippi with increasing

frequency, Vicksburg grew rapidly.

Cotton planters from the surrounding region recognized the town's value as

a shipping point, and soon Vicksburg was handling a significant portion

of Mississippi's cotton exports.

The founding of Vicksburg is a testament to the foresight of Newitt Vick and the

determination of those who followed him.

From its humble beginnings, the city would go on to play a crucial role

in American history, particularly during the Civil War, cementing its

place in the nation's narrative.

Welcome to Talk with History.

I'm your host, Scott, here with my wife and historian,

Hello.

Hello.

On this podcast, we give you insights to our history inspired

world travels, YouTube channel journey, and examine history

through deeper conversations with the curious, the explorers, and

the history lovers out there.

So I was checking things out and on Spotify, our Spotify listeners have

actually been dropping us some stars.

So I want to give a little shout out to our Spotify listeners out there.

So thank you for leaving us.

I think it's either three or five stars on Spotify.

And if you're an Apple podcast listener please drop us a review.

It really does help kind of the show grow and Alpo some sort of algorithm, I think.

But most importantly, tell your friends about this podcast, especially if they

plan on visiting places like Vicksburg.

Yeah.

So if you're like me and you're driving somewhere and you're like,

Oh, is there a podcast about that?

So I can know what to see before I get there.

I would have loved one about Vicksburg because we stumbled upon

some really awesome things and it would have been nice to know those

were there even before we had set

Yeah, I was very impressed.

surprised at the different spots that Vicksburg outside

of the battlefield, right?

Because we kind of spent two days there.

I was surprised at how much history there was just in the city itself,

regardless of the actual battlefield, which everybody knows it for.

But there was a lot of history that happened there.

Absolutely.

And we will do a battlefield podcast.

So if you're looking for specific Vicksburg battlefield information,

that's going to be on a separate podcast, but we are going to cover that.

But if you want to listen to this, if you're visiting the.

city.

And you're like, I have more time than just going to the battlefield.

This is what this is for you.

So we get to Vicksburg and Scott is super, super smart.

I have to say he looks up like a downtown area because we get there

kind of late and we have the kids and we want to let them out and play.

So he looks up a playground.

And when we get to downtown Vicksburg, it is Amazing.

They have these murals painted along the river of the history of Vicksburg,

and they have these great play areas that look like old steamboats, where the

kids could play and have a great time.

It was blasting like jazz music.

really cool.

And like the sun was setting, it was beautiful.

And if you watch our video on this, like I flew my drone real quick to

kind of get some cool drone shots.

we got down there and we were just kind of trying to get out of the car because

we didn't want to go to the Airbnb yet.

And so I looked up a playground and kind of thought a lot of times cities will

have playgrounds near their commercial centers or near a touristy area.

And this was right on the waterfront.

Yeah.

It was so cool.

Amazing.

They downtown Vicksburg, it's, they say it's, it's vibrant

and charming and walkable.

It's all of those things, but it was very like uniquely Southern and it was

just a really beautiful place to be.

And I recommend going down there in the evening, in the morning when

it's a little cooler, especially in the summer months, like with us.

Now, what you're going to see the waterfront there is the Yazoo River.

In the time of the Civil War, that was the Mississippi River.

The Mississippi River has changed course, and now it just has an

inlet now to the Mississippi there.

But that used to be the course of the Mississippi River.

So if you want to go out and stand on that riverfront, that

is what the steamboats went down.

That's what the ironclads went down, the timberclads.

But when we got down there to downtown Vicksburg, it walks you through the

history of Vicksburg with these murals and it tells you just some really

unique, fun history about Vicksburg.

Things that I didn't know Teddy Roosevelt and he had come down to Vicksburg He

was like 25 miles north of Vicksburg for a four day bear hunt and a hunter had

went out before him and Scouted a bear.

It was an older bear who was kind of injured and he had tied it to a tree

Waiting for the president to come so the president could easily kill it and when

Roosevelt arrived he couldn't shoot this defenseless injured bear and political

cartoonists drew Roosevelt getting to this poor defenseless bear and he called

it drawing the line in Mississippi toy manufacturers started producing teddy

bears in response to this, like in honor of Roosevelt for not killing the bear.

And so that is something that's such a part of Americana, the teddy

bear, you see teddy bears everywhere and people have owned some sort

of teddy bear in their lifetime,

and I have a feeling too, because I'm pretty sure we've watched what is

it, Antiques Roadshow, and, there was teddy bear figures made before 1902.

I think some of the famous ones we always see on Antiques

Roadshow is the stife ones, right?

So they're probably in the late 1800s, but I think this is where the nickname,

the moniker of Quote unquote teddy bear kind of really had its roots and I

thought that was so neat because these murals did such a good job And so this

again if you go watch the video we'll kind of show you the locations and we'll

show you these murals, but it's teddy roosevelt sitting on a horse with his

whole entourage that's how the press heard about it because he's the president he's

traveling with an entourage And there's this bear just kind of looking up and

teddy roosevelt's kind of looking out at you from the mural and then learning

about Why this was there because it happened right there outside of Vicksburg.

Yeah, and what's really neat about each of these murals is they

have kind of like a historic marker right in front of them that is in

bronze that kind of tells you the whole history of the mural as you look at it.

One another one that I thought was neat, they have about

eight or nine historic markers.

Like actually at that downtown commemorating different ships, different

times in history, some to the Civil War, the first shots fired, the

first ship that was sank during the Civil War, iron clads, timber clads.

But one of the ones I thought that was very interesting was the Sultana.

this was an interesting story, and you told it in a good way on the video.

Yeah.

So what's interesting about the Sultana is it actually sinks in Memphis.

And we know it here in Memphis has a little museum to it, but it's the biggest

maritime disaster in American history.

was like a kind of classic steam paddleboat type ship,

Yes.

Just a side wheel steamboat.

And it sank on the Mississippi river, April 27th, 1865,

killing more than 1500 people.

What's significant about Vicksburg is Vicksburg is where it was loaded up.

The captain was approached by a quartermaster at

Vicksburg with a proposal.

Thousands of recently released Union prisoners of war who were held in

these confederate prison camps had been brought to Vicksburg and they were

awaiting release to the Northern States.

And he was going to pay like a big sum of money, I think like

3 per enlisted, 8 per officer.

to take him up north.

Now this ship is only supposed to hold about 300 people and he ends up

loading on again like 2, 000 people.

So if you imagine a steamboat, it's very top heavy anyway, and when you get

all that weight on it rocks, so if It made it from Vicksburg up to Memphis.

And then at Memphis is where it really starts rocking.

And these boilers get super hot with the rock.

And when it leans to the other side, they explode.

And so these 1500 men go into the water and they die because

they're weak and they haven't been, they're just prisoners of war.

And so it's this big, It's a huge maritime disaster.

All these men are killed, but no one knows about it because another really

famous man was killed the day before.

And that was John Wilkes Booth.

And that filled the headlines of newspapers.

So no one knows about the Sultana, but they had a marker there in

Vicksburg to that loading of those men.

And then we'll do another story about what happened in Memphis and we'll

actually take you to a grave site where most of those men are buried.

Yeah, and there's a whole mural there.

I actually read when I was prepping for the podcast that there are more

men who died in the Sultana accident than who died on the Titanic.

Yeah, that's, the biggest maritime disaster in history.

It's like

it's, it's one of those ones you hear about it, you're like, wait, what?

How?

How is this not something that I knew about?

More people died in that accident than died on, on the Titanic.

And it was buried, essentially, because it was the same day that John

Wilkes Booth was hunted down and shot.

So it was really fascinating.

If you get to Vicksburg, I highly recommend going down to the waterfront

and seeing these murals if you're going to do one or two things.

We're going to talk about a couple more, but there's so many, you can

just kind of spend like probably a good hour easily just kind of walking

and reading and looking at the murals.

It's quite fascinating.

one of the things I didn't realize was how much Jefferson

Davis was from Vicksburg.

He's from the area.

Yeah, I had no idea.

And, There's a mural to him and I was reading it and I'm like, oh, oh my gosh

So Jefferson Davis, not only is he, he he's the confederate president During

the Civil War, but he had his plantation right outside of Vicksburg Just a few

miles outside of Vicksburg and when he receives the news that he's been

elected president of the Confederacy.

Mississippi is one of the first states to secede from the Union.

And so he leaves there to go get sworn in as president.

But I had no idea.

I was like, I'm looking at this mural and it shows him at his plantation

getting the news and he's there with his wife, Rina and his children.

Now we've covered Jefferson Davis before because we did

his home in Richmond, Virginia,

Yeah, we actually got a great comment on that white

house of the Confederacy video, right from, from Richmond.

Someone watched that video.

Cause we go inside and we actually take you in there and we show you.

It's when we started getting better at our videos.

I started getting a little bit better with.

b roll shooting and stuff like that and so we go inside and it was

really cool and we got a really nice comment someone said it was one of

their favorite videos on that topic

yeah, it's a very interesting place.

The White House of the Confederacy.

This is where Jefferson Davis will live.

during his time as president of the Confederacy is in Richmond, Virginia.

He learns of his selection there at Vicksburg.

And there's a mural to that.

But like I said, you can walk along these murals.

They're just fantastic.

They tell you there's so much more history, I'm not going to tell you.

touch here, something about the the most played melodrama in history.

It's from Vicksburg.

There's there's a lot of musicians, especially blues musicians from Vicksburg.

There's just a lot of great history along those murals.

But speaking of Jefferson Davis.

We went to this house, and it's right down the road from the original marker

of Vicksburg, and it's called Achuca.

And it's an antebellum home built in the late 1820s.

And it's where Jefferson Davis will go after he's pardoned

in 1868 by President Johnson.

that was like christmas day like he issued he issued his

pardon on christmas day to basically all of the men who participated

in the rebellion in the civil war

exactly.

it was kind of a forgiveness.

giving and reconciliation moment for President Johnson.

He's the president after Lincoln, and he's trying to have

some healing for the nation.

So he pardons everybody involved in the rebellion.

And Jefferson Davis is held in prison.

We've been there.

If you want to see what Jefferson Davis's cell was.

Monroe in Virginia.

And so we have a whole video on that.

But He comes back to Vicksburg, and he comes back to the home of his brother,

Joseph, who is right along that main road into this Greek style home called Anchuca,

which means a happy place in the Chickasaw language, which is the Native Americans

of the area and he goes up onto the balcony and they say that's where he gives

his last public address to the people.

It's from that balcony.

So I stand in front of it.

I show you now the people of Achuca.

It's, it's open for business.

And they saw that video on Instagram and they would just love to have

more people come out and see it.

It is a very neat place.

It's open for dining.

I think we probably would have done that had we known, you could go

eat dinner there or something like that.

Yeah, they have dinner and they have brunch.

So it's just a great place.

It's, full service and you can really have a good Southern meal in the

same place that Jefferson Davis ate,

And so there's another kind of famous home in Vicksburg, the McRaven house.

they claim it's the most haunted house in Mississippi.

the whole state.

In the whole state, which it's an old state and it's, I

would say there's a lot of traumas that have happened in that state.

So for this house to claim to be the most haunted, to hold onto that

emotional trauma, it's very interesting.

They have had.

Ghost hunters, they're famous ghost hunters.

If you're a ghost hunter enthusiast and to watch some of those shows

They have had some people from those shows go to that house.

So the McRaven house was built in 1797 So it's very old and it was

built by an Andrew Glass At the time the house was called Walnut

Hills and He was a highwayman.

So we talk about the Natchez Trace, which was a famous trail for people

to travel from Natchez, Mississippi up to Nashville and basically will

take you all the way up north into the more populated areas of America at the

time But highwaymen were people who would rob people along those trails

You hear about them in London and in France, and we had

them in America as well.

so he would rob people then come back to his house and

kind of look at his treasures.

Eventually, he's killed by his wife and they say he haunts McRaven house.

Now it's had other things happen there as well.

In 1838 there was a sheriff that owned McRaven house and he had a young bride

who dies in childbirth in the house and other people have owned the house.

They have also died in the house.

And it was used as a confederate hospital during the siege of Vicksburg.

So there were men not only in the house, but out among the yard in

makeshift tents who were dying.

So you get you kind of do you sense the theme here?

There's been a lot of death around this house And so you can kind of guess as to

why people would say this is one of the most haunted houses in all of Mississippi

Yeah.

And those ghost hunters, they claim to have contacted the ghost of Andrew Glass,

who is the aggressive ghost of the house.

But McRaven house is also open for you to dine and to tour.

And so it's another place if you're looking for something

fun to do in Vicksburg and you're into that sort of thing.

It used to be on McRaven road and that's why it has the name McRaven

house, but that's no longer the road.

It's now 1503 Harrison street, but you can tell it's the original area of Vicksburg.

Now one of the things that I liked and I don't know if this

is what you were gonna move on to next was more of the downtown with

some, some modern day ties, right?

And this was the Coca Cola memorabilia museum.

I had not even thought to think of something like that.

And you said, Oh, there's a Coca Cola museum.

I was like, why is there a Coca Cola museum here?

And it was because the very first bottle of Coke was bottled there in Vicksburg.

Yeah.

How interesting is

It's crazy.

So Coca Cola is invented in, as we all know, in Georgia.

And it is invented by a confederate.

think that's where the big museum is.

It's what the big museum is.

And in 1894, the owner of the downtown Vicksburg candy shop Benningham

Bite and harn.

He decides to bottle this for his rural customers.

So Vicksburg is not only like a rural area, but they're on the Mississippi.

So you can imagine they can get to people easily.

That's the main.

It's a good transportation hub.

And so he feels like if I could bottle this fountain drink for my customers,

it would be really great for business because Coca Cola time is thought of

as more than just a refreshing drink.

They use it for medicine and to calm the stomach and things like that.

So Coca Cola gives them the okay, gives them the recipe and they're

the very first people to bottle it.

Now, this is downtown Vicksburg.

This is not along the waterfront where the murals are.

This is like the main street.

So it's 1107 Washington Street.

And you can tell there's cool kind of ghost writing on big buildings

there from the times when this was probably happening in the 1800s.

Yeah.

And I'll put a link in the show notes.

So I, when we go to these locations, I try to be good about kind of marking

each spot and kind of collecting it as like a Google map kind of folder.

So I'll actually, I'll put a link and if you click on this Google

maps link, it'll show you all of the spots that I saved, whether it's the

waterfront murals, the Coca Cola museum.

The different houses and you can click on it.

It'll open up your Google maps app, and then it'll show you

all these places to be visited.

So if you are going down there and you're listening to this on the way

down, look in the show notes of this podcast episode, click on that Google

maps link, and then automatically you have all these spots just ready to go

Absolutely.

And two places we really didn't get to see, but I want to touch on them is rape.

Well, three actually right beside the Coca Cola museum is a awesome little park and

it says Vicksburg and it has 200 and has a great place where you can put your phone

and you can stand by the sign and click.

There's also a great maritime museum and it's made from an old steamboat

that they've dry docked and they've retrofitted and you can go visit this

museum to the history of the Mississippi and the different boats and the people

who have worked along that river.

And then there's also a little Civil War museum along that

street that I hear has some really great relics and things in there.

it's not well known, but it's really cool from what I hear.

So that's another place we didn't get to visit, but it's

all along that main street.

and that main street where the Coca Cola Museum is, where the Vicksburg Park

is and the museums, it's literally like two blocks from the riverfront murals.

Yeah, you could walk up there.

I mean, you can see the riverfront murals and there's an old courthouse there

that used to be the original courthouse.

That's where Grant is going to his famous picture.

He comes after they've sieged Vicksburg and they've won.

That courthouse is also now a museum.

So it's just a really great city.

It has so much history.

It was great for the kids.

they loved playing downtown.

It was beautiful.

I felt safe there.

great food, great Southern hospitality.

I would definitely recommend if you're going to visit, spend two days,

definitely one day for the battlefield.

Do you want to see that the civil war battlefield there?

That's the key to the South.

And then another day.

for the actual city.

Walk with History had a wonderful time.

We hope if you're driving there right now or if you're going that we've given

you some good ideas and places to see.

And please let us know what you thought about your visit to Vicksburg.

Yeah, it was super fun and it very much made Vicksburg more

to me than just the battlefield.

Some of these cities and towns kind of become only the battlefield.

For especially for American Civil War stuff, but to me, it's a little

bit akin to Gettysburg because you can do the battlefield for an

entire day, if not more, because there's a lot to do over there.

And we'll talk about that on another episode coming up, but then there's

plenty to do in the town and in the city.

So it was really neat.

As we wrap up our journey through Vicksburg history, it's worth noting

that these fascinating tidbits that make this city truly unique.

Before you listen to this podcast, you may not have known that Vicksburg was

the site of the first bottling of Coca Cola in 1894, or that the beloved teddy

bear got its name from an incident involving Theodore Roosevelt during

a hunting trip near the area in 1902.

These little known facts add an extra layer of intrigue to the city's

already rich historical tapestry.

When you chat with your fellow history fans, remember that Vicksburg

history isn't all lighthearted.

The city was the scene of the worst maritime disaster in U.

S.

history when the steamboat Sultana exploded not too far

from its shores in 1865, claiming more lives than the Titanic.

During the Civil War, Vicksburg earned the nickname Gibraltar of the Confederacy

due to its strategic importance.

Interestingly, the city didn't celebrate Independence Day for 81

years after the Civil War, only resuming the tradition in 1945.

These captivating historical nuggets showcase why Vicksburg

continues to fascinate history buffs and casual learners alike.

When you visit Vicksburg, make sure you take the time to get beyond the

battlefield to these fascinating and important historical sites.

This has been a Walk With History production.

Talk With History is created and hosted by me, Scott Bennie.

Episode researched by Jennifer Bennie.

Check out the show notes for links and references mentioned in this episode.

Talk With History is supported by our fans at thehistoryroadtrip.

com.

Our eternal thanks to those providing funding to help keep us going.

to Doug McLiverty, Larry Myers, and Patrick Benny.

Make sure you hit that follow button in your podcast player,

and we'll talk to you next time.