Vicksburg in the Fog/Mist 2018 (Tri-X film in Hasselblad)

Walnut Street with St. Paul's Catholic Church and USACE Mississippi River Division office, 50mm Distagon lens.

Old Court House Museum from Relax Inn 4th floor, 250mm lens.

Winter is the best time to wander around Vicksburg and take photographs. The light is soft, the temperature reasonably comfortable, and the results look different than the normal bright sunny day snaps with harsh shadows. One misty day last January, I loaded some Tri-X 400 in the Hasselblad and wandered around town.

Walnut Street, view north from Relax Inn, 50mm Distagon lens. 

The manager of the Relax Inn generously let me take my tripod and camera up to the 4th floor balcony. There is a good view of the Old Court House Museum from there, and I was testing my new/old $87 250mm Sonnar lens. For the views of Walnut Street, I leaned out over the edge of the balcony wall and held the camera sideways. With the Hasselblad's waist-level finder, you can still see the ground glass while holding the body out to the side.

Clay Street, Vicksburg

Clay Street drops downhill quite steeply from the intersection with Cherry street. The ugly white slab on the right is the Thomas Building, which seems to be perpetually for rent. For some reason, it is a troubled or unusable building.

A two-floor asbestos-clad house sits next to Stouts Bayou at 900 National Street. The house has been empty for years. The open windows are a bad sign.

Vicksburg Southern Railroad tracks at Haining Road, 250mm Sonnar lens.

Vicksburg Southern Railroad tracks view south from Haining Road.

Haining Road leads to the Port of Vicksburg and crosses the railroad tracks at the junction with North Washington Street. The buildings on either side are part of the Anderson Tully wood mill, which now has a new owner.

Vicksburg Southern Railroad tracks view north from Ford Road. (Kodak Panatomic-X film (expired 1989), 250mm Sonnar lens, March 2018).

This is an March view of the tracks north of the Anderson Tully complex.

Grammer Street, Vicksburg, 250mm Sonnar lens

Finally, here are the remaining shotgun houses on Grammar Street. Once, both sides of the street (alley) were lined with these cottages, but most have been demolished over the years. In a previous post, I showed scans of Kodachrome slides from the 1990s and early 2000s.

We will look at more Vicksburg scenes in future posts.

Saved Victorian House: 916 Walnut Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Dear Readers, good news! This big 1890s-vintage Queen Anne-style house at 916 Walnut Street in Vicksburg is being renovated and repaired.

In past decades, the building was used as an Elks Lodge, but the organization left the building many years ago. For at least two years, periodically a condemnation notice from the City inspector was posted on the building, but afterwards the sign would be gone. Was the owner repairing the structure? It certainly did not look like any work was ongoing.

Finally, in October or November of 2017, serious renovation began. Vicksburg developer Daryl Hollingsworth (an energetic fellow - he also ran for mayor) bought the huge old house and set about stabilizing it and cleaning out interior debris. Mr. Hollingsworth generously showed me around and let me take pictures.

The house has been so abused over the decades, it is hard to tell how the rooms were used. Was this once the main parlor?

Night club wallpaper on the old plaster walls! Notice the wood lath. Mr. Hollingsworth said he will have the damaged areas replastered the right way (i.e., with plaster, not covered with sheetrock).

The stairs were oddly narrow for what was once a magnificent house.

Upstairs: more funky wallpaper and damaged walls that had been covered with cheesy paneling of the type you might have seen in a 1970s den. That garbage paneling was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, even though everyone knew it was just plywood.

A beautiful fireplace with its original glazed tiles survived on the second floor. These were small fireplaces intended to burn coal on a metal pan. Vicksburg was a railroad town, so coal was readily available. The problem with coal was that embers sometimes went up the chimney and could land on the roofs of nearby houses. Resisting fire is a main reason that fireproof asbestos shingles were so popular in the early 20th century.

This well-lit room faces the north and west, with a view of the Yazoo Canal. This fireplace also survived semi-intact with its cast-iron trim cover, but only a few of the decorative tiles remain. The square hearth tiles are identical to the ones in my 1920s house.

Another place to explore: a narrow stair leads to the attic. Notice the lath on the walls where damaged plaster has been removed.

The attic has plenty of headroom. Originally, slate shingles would have been nailed to the dark wood horizontal boards that span the roof joists. I know the shingles were slate because the tower still has its slates (see photograph 2 above), while the rest of the house has been re-roofed. A friend on Baum Street had such a slate roof on his house - no roofing paper or decking, just slate tiles you could see from below. The slate lasts decades, but after a century or so, weathering takes its toll and the tiles begin to crack or get thin. Also, after a century, the the nails fail (when done the right way, slate and tile roofs must use copper nails - if your roofer tries to sell you galvanized nails, fire him). This house on Walnut Street was re-roofed with new plywood decking laid above the 1890 boards.

Some original doors had been stored in the attic. They can be cleaned and hopefully used in the rooms below.

Jackson Street view west towards the Yazoo Canal.

Let us take a quick look outside. This was once a fashionable neighborhood with other grand Queen Anne houses. The parking lot south of 916 Walnut (see photograph 1) almost surely had a house on it, but it has been gone for decades. When Vicksburg was platted, Jackson Street was envisioned to be the main east-west thoroughfare, the business center of the city. Therefore, it had a grand boulevard design, with a grass center strip. Commercial businesses instead developed along Clay Street, leaving Jackson Street relatively quiet, and, I assume, mostly residential. The upper part of Jackson Street still has its brick paving and grass median; very nice. Lower Jackson Street, joining Washington Street, has been covered with pavement and now looks like any other crummy tarred street.

In summary, it is welcome news that this house is being saved. Vicksburg has lost far too much of its historical architecture because of neglect, corruption, greed, lack of imagination, and misguided "urban renewal."

Photographs taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, most with the Fujinon 14mm f/2.8 lens. All frames were tripod-mounted.

UPDATE Sep. 2, 2022. Renovations and repairs are still ongoing.

Jackson Street Branch YMCA, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Long-time residents of Vicksburg will remember that the YMCA once had two branches in town. The main facility was the handsome brick building at 821 Clay Street (see the 2010 article for interior photographs). A prominent local citizen, Mrs. Junius Ward, provided funds for this structure as a memorial to her husband.  But this was the era of segregation, so Mrs. Ward generously provided funds for a separate YMCA building on Jackson Street for African-American men. The Jackson Street Branch opened in 1924 and remained in service until the early 1990s. It was demolished in 1995 to make way for a new community center (the formal address is 923 Walnut Street).

As the photographs show, the Jackson Street branch was a handsome and formal 2-floor brick building with "1924" engraved in the panel above the entry door. It contained some residence rooms like the ones in the Clay Street branch.

I never went inside while it was in operation, but took photographs when it was being demolished.

Interior view of auditorium, taken during demolition.  Leica M3 with 135mm Tele-Elmar lens.

Photograph taken with a Leica M3 and the 8-element 35 mm f/2 Summicron-RF lens.

The gymnasium once occupied a big section of the building. Up through the 1970s, the famous Red Tops held rehearsals every Monday evening at the Jackson Street Y, possibly in this space. As you can see, construction was substantial. I often wonder why the wood beams and bricks were not recycled rather than just crushed and trucked away.

Finally, here is another interesting structure, a remnant of the architecture that once dominated Vicksburg. This Queen Anne-style building is at 916 Walnut Street. In 1992, it was used by the Elks Club, but another fraternal organization occupies it now. As of 2013, it is on the City's condemned list. Notice the roof, covered with zinc or galvanized roof shingles.

The first photograph was taken with a Pentax Spotmatic camera with 150 mm Super-Takumar lens on Kodachrome 25 film. Black and white photographs taken with a Leica M3 rangefinder camera with 35mm f/2.0 Summicron-RF lens (the famous first generation 8-element version) and 135mm Tele-Elmar lens on Kodak Tri-X film. The square frames were taken with a Rolleiflex 3.5E camera on Kodak VPS HC film (another great emulsion that is now discontinued).

Fading commercial block on Grove Street, Vicksburg

View north, from "Vicksburg: A Study in Urban Geography" (1931).

As late as the 1930s, a view to the northwest from a tall building in downtown Vicksburg would have revealed a bustling commercial city with warehouses, shops, small manufacturing concerns, and homes. The black and white photograph is from a 1931 paper (James, P.E. 1931. Vicksburg: A Study in Urban Geography, Geographical Review, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), pp. 234-243). Today, many of those shops, warehouses, and commercial buildings are gone, lost to fire and neglect. Empty lots leave few clues as to what was once on those sites. Old-timers tell me that the 1970s "urban renewal" was deadly to historic architecture.

917-921 Grove Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi

In this article, we concentrate on a partial block of commercial buildings at the corner of Grove and Walnut (see the circle on the map). Once, the block must have continued downhill to Washington Street, but since the mid-1980s, these are the only remnants. The middle building is 917 Grove, the one on the right 921 Grove.


The simplicity and symmetry of these buildings always intrigued me, and I photographed them many times. The color views above are scans of Kodachrome 25 film taken with a Leica M3 rangefinder camera.


These two black and white photographs from 1990 are prints on Polaroid Type 54 film, taken with a 4x5" camera with a 90 mm Kodak Ektar lens.  Type 54 was a wonderful, full-tonal range print medium. A good friend told me she used to visit a club or lounge in one of the buildings. A hair-dresser also occupied one of the shops for many years.

Here is the same front-on view in color, another Kodachrome scan. Notice how the architect had to fit the building on a steeply-sloping hill.

Kodachrome, Leica camera with 20 mm Russar lens

In 2004, the building on the left was ready to collapse and the roof had partly fallen. This interesting stair led up to a door on the back. Photographs taken with Kodak Panatomic-X film in a Fuji GW690II camera.

Afterwards, someone partly rebuilt the building, but a recent article in the Vicksburg Post said the city was ready to condemn one of the units (I am not sure which one). As usual, fate unknown.

Update July 2013:  Here are two interior photographs from the corner building, no. 721.  You can see a small fireplace.  Most of these small fireplaces were used with a coal insert, not for open wood fires. With Vicksburg being a railroad junction, there was always coal available, and coal burned hot and long.

Grove Street commercial block from Washington Street, 2013

(If any readers know more of the history of these buildings, please comment. Thank you!)