History of Vicksburg

On March 12, 1894, the popular soft drink Coca-Cola was bottled for the first time in Vicksburg by Joseph A. Biedenharn, a local confectioner. Today, surviving nineteenth-century Biedenharn soda bottles are prized by collectors of Coca-Cola memorabilia. His original candy store has been renovated as the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum.

During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, where hundreds of thousands of acres wre inundated, Vicksburg served as the primary refugee gathering point. Relief parties put up temporary housing, as the flood submerged a large percentage of the Mississippi Delta. Because of the overwhelming damage from the flood, the US Army Corps of Engineers established the Waterways Experiment Station as the primary hydraulics laboratory, to develop protection of important croplands and cities. Now known as the Engineer Research and Development Center, it applies military engineering, information technology, environmental engineering, hydraulic engineering, and geotechnical engineering.

In December 1953, a severe tornado swept across Vicksburg, causing 38 deaths and destroying nearly 1,000 buildings.

Political and racial unrest after the Civil War

In the first few years after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan developed chapters throughout the South, beginning in Tennessee. It was suppressed about 1870. By the mid-1870s, new white paramilitary groups had arisen in the Deep South, including the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the White League in Louisiana, as whites struggled to regain political and social power over the black majority. On December 7, 1874 in the Vicksburg Massacre, white men disrupted a black Republican meeting, and swept through black areas, killing at least 50 black residents. Historian Emilye Crosby