If Walls Could Talk

The site of the Warren County Court House had originally been chosen by the Reverend Newit Vick, founder of Vicksburg, for his home, but after he and his wife died of yellow fever in August 1819, it was set aside permanently as a public square. Built on one of the highest bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, the courthouse was completed in October 1860, two months before Mississippi seceded from the Union. Admiral Porter's Union gunboats threw shots about the courthouse, prompting the Confederate Army to hold Union prisoners in the courtroom to deter shelling of the building. During the 1862 Union Navy bombardment of Vicksburg, Confederate Generals Breckenridge, Lee, and Van Dorn watched the action from the cupola atop the courthouse. After a new courthouse was completed, Eva W. Davis's activism saved the old courthouse from demolition; in 1948 it became a museum and was the first building in Mississippi named a National Historic Landmark.

Vicksburg, Mississippi · United States