C.S.S. Arkansas

The Arkansas was never a finished warship, and how it got built is the story. Towed up the Yazoo ahead of the Union advance, first to Greenwood and then to Yazoo City, it was completed in roughly five weeks where almost no shipbuilding capacity existed. Local blacksmiths, detailed soldiers and hired-out enslaved laborers did the work, and with no rolled plate to be had, raw railroad rails became the armor. Parts trickled in from four cities. Belowdecks the heat reached 130 degrees under steam, and the unreliable engines quit at Baton Rouge on August 6, 1862.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Court House Museum — 0.3 mi
  Vicksburg's Greek Revival courthouse of 1860, raised on a hilltop with the labor of enslaved artisans and now a private local-history museum heavy on Confederate relics.
• Vicksburg National Military Park — 1.9 mi
  A 16-mile tour road through the trenches of the 47-day siege of 1863, with a national cemetery and the story of the thousands of enslaved people who reached freedom behind Union lines.
• USS Cairo Gunboat and Museum — 2.0 mi
  The raised hull of a Union river ironclad sunk by a mine in the Yazoo in 1862, displayed at Vicksburg National Military Park with the artifacts the river mud preserved.

More markers nearby

• The Steamer Sultana — steps away
• The Vicksburg & Queen of the West — steps away
• Firing on the A.O. Tyler — steps away
• Red Tops — steps away