End of the Road: Downhill Drive, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Downhill Drive is another one of Vicksburg's mystery streets.  It even has conflicting names in the various online map databases. It is a steep road that drops precipitously from Fort Hill Drive down to the west. I think the correct name is Downhill Drive, but it may also be Lower Fort Hill Drive or Elizabeth Street.

Drive down the hill (first gear for engine braking!) and you enter a forest with birds everywhere. It feels like you are far from anything except when a truck rumbles along just below on North Washington Street.


There are only a few cottages here, possibly 1940s-vintage. The blue one was deserted.  The previous resident owned a collection of electric trains and the plywood-mounted layout was in the porch along with a lot of equipment.


A nice lady came out of one of the houses while I was photographing and said she had owned the Chrysler since new. She might entertain an offer to sell it.

All photograph taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera, tripod-mounted.

The end of the road: Short Sherman Avenue, Vicksburg, MS

As I have noted before, Vicksburg has a number of dead-end roads that few people visit. One of these is Short Sherman Avenue, which loops south from Sherman Avenue and stops at a former entrance to the Vicksburg Military Park. Once this road extended to Sherman Loop in the Park, but it has obviously been closed for years. If you hike the Al Scheller Boy Scout trail, you walk along the former roadway, now badly gullied.


There is not much here, just a few cottages, an old pig-breeding barn, and this rusting Chevrolet truck. Every year I see it getting progressively more covered with vines. Soon it will be engulfed with the creeping brush.


Here is an oddity: down in a gully is a surprising well-preserved Rexall Drug sign from Rose Drug. The paint must have been amazingly good quality because the colors are still vivid. A friend and I considered recovering the sign, but it is on Military Park property, meaning it is an archaeological artifact and therefore illegal to remove.

Digital images are from a Fuji F31fd compact digital camera.

UPDATE MARCH 2020: The sign is gone. A lady in a nearby house said some guys from a company that sells old stuff came and removed the sign.