Vicksburg Riverfront Murals

Robert Dafford painted a mile of American time on a concrete floodwall. Thirty-two life-size murals run along the Yazoo Diversion Canal in downtown Vicksburg, open air and free to walk. Dafford — the same Louisiana artist who painted the Paducah and Shreveport floodwall projects — began work in 2002 after Vicksburg residents visited Kentucky looking for ideas. What he painted was the city's entire chronicle: the Natchez who occupied the bluff for thousands of years, French colonists building Fort Saint Pierre in 1719, steamboat traffic when Vicksburg was a key Confederate river-port, the 47-day siege that starved the city into surrender in July 1863, the 1874 massacre when white insurgents killed hundreds of black residents and ran an elected black sheriff out of town, the Great Flood of 1927 when Vicksburg became the primary refugee gathering point, the tornado that killed 38 people in 1953, Willie Dixon and the delta blues, Rosa A. Temple High School and civil rights activism. The subjects trace straight from the historical record — Theodore Roosevelt's bear hunt, the steamboats Sultana and Sprague, the Vicksburg National Military Park. A 33rd mural, painted by Vicksburg artist Martha Ferris, celebrates the three systems that shaped the city: the river, the railroad, the highway. The walk is about a mile along Levee Street. The floodwall exists because the Mississippi River changed course in 1876, cutting Vicksburg off from the water that built it. The Army Corps of Engineers completed the Yazoo Diversion Canal in 1903 to restore river access. A century later, Dafford turned the concrete retaining wall into proof that a city remembers what it survived.