Long-term Vicksburg (Mississippi) residents remember when Battlefield Mall was the first mall in town. Sears Roebuck anchored the west end of the building, while other stores occupied the east end. When I moved here in 1985, only an ice cream shop and a drug store were left in the east section because the new Pemberton Mall had opened and most companies moved to the new location. But Sears was a full-line store and remained in its Battlefield location until about 1993 or 1994. The mall remained empty for a few years until the Vicksburg District of the US Army Corps of Engineers rented it, using it for office space. Corps employees remember it as awful, with inadequate climate control.
If you were on Wisconsin Avenue, you could reach the Battlefield Mall by driving down a steep, narrow road called Battlefield Road (imaginative). The concrete building on the right was the Sears repair and parts center.
The parts and repair center was a rather severe brick and concrete building. For decades, it was one of the strengths of Sears that you could have their appliances and equipment repaired all over the USA and Canada. Their parts depots were amazingly well-equipped. And if you needed an item that was not in stock, it would be shipped to your local repair center at no additional shipping cost.
The building is closed and locked - fate unknown. And it has not been vandalized from what I could tell. Can anyone use such a warehouse in a town that is de-constructing?
Surprise: the old Battlefield Road has been dug up, as part of a project to make a connector street between Wisconsin Avenue and North Frontage Road (from the
Vicksburg Post).
I took most photographs with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, except for the last frame, which is from a Nexus 4 phone.
2 comments:
I remember this building well! I always thought it was an odd location way up the hill so disconnected from the mall. Besides repair, I recall catalog deliveries were picked up there too. My mom would always buy jumbo size boxes of Sears laundry detergent and that was where they were sold, not in the usual mall store. I always wondered how those delivery trucks drove up and down that narrow and steep Battlefield Rd connecting the Mall and Wisconsin Ave!
Thanks, Anonymous. Yes, you jogged my memory. One did pick up catalog orders at this warehouse. But I never took any repairs there. Sears once offered such amazing service all over the country.
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