Battle of Port Gibson

Ridges, ravines and cane thickets made the ground west of Port Gibson hard to attack, and John Bowen used it. He had roughly 6,500 men against the 22,000 Grant had put ashore at Bruinsburg the day before. Fighting began after midnight near the Shaifer house and ran along two parallel roads toward town. Each side lost about 800 men before Bowen pulled back across Bayou Pierre. The win gave Grant a secure beachhead and a base for supplies, and about nine weeks later Vicksburg surrendered on July 4.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Windsor Ruins — 8.6 mi
  Twenty-three standing Corinthian columns left by an 1890 fire, the largest antebellum mansion in Mississippi, built with enslaved labor on a 2,600-acre cotton plantation.
• Alcorn State University and Oakland Memorial Chapel — 11 mi
  The 1871 Reconstruction college on the old Oakland College campus, first led by Hiram Revels, with the 1838 chapel built by Black craftsmen.
• Lake Bruin State Park — 13 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.
• Mount Locust — 22 mi
  A 1780s Natchez Trace inn and cotton farm at milepost 15.5, with an enslaved people's cemetery of 43 graves and a brick kiln behind the house.

More markers nearby

• The Bernheimer Complex — steps away
• Bruinsburg — steps away
• Port Gibson — steps away
• Claiborne County — steps away