[2/13/04] A quotation from Jefferson Davis after the end of the Civil War may be added to a planned riverfront mural as part of a compromise suggested by a local citizen.

Nellie Caldwell, co-chairman of the Riverfront Mural Committee, said the committee will talk with Louisiana artist Robert Dafford about adding the words to the design. She said a second possibility could be putting the quote on a plaque in front of the mural.

“The past is dead. Let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations. Before you lies the future. A future of golden promises. A future of expanding national glory before which all the world will stand amazed,” is the suggested quote from Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America.

“We don’t want anything disruptive, and the wording is very good and could be very positive,” Caldwell said.

John Shorter, a local political observer, told Vicksburg officials Tuesday that the planned mural, depicting Davis and his wife, Varina, on their South Warren County plantation as he learned he had been elected, would be divisive. He suggested the wording be added.

“It sends two messages. To the black, it’s a symbol of strength and that you can’t keep dwelling on the past and to the whites, maybe it will send the same message,” Shorter said.

The project on City Front’s floodwall began two years ago, and work is expected to begin on the next three murals, including the Davis mural, next month. Completed panels depict instances in local history from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 bear hunt north of the city to the first Spanish settlement to the first-ever bottling of Coca-Cola.

Davis, a Kentucky native, lived in Warren County at the start of the Civil War. He is depicted in at least two statues in the Vicksburg National Military Park, there is a Davis Bend in the Mississippi River and Jeff Davis Road leads toward his former plantation site, now in Louisiana.

The privately funded panel is sponsored by the Vicksburg and Warren County Historical Society, which operates the Old Court House Museum. The largest gift was from Nancy Neilsen, who contributed $5,000 in honor of Gordon Cotton, director of the museum, who was one of Neilsen’s high school teachers.

Each panel costs $15,000. The two other murals planned this spring will depict the history of the railroad here, funded by Ray Neilsen, and African-American history, funded by the City of Vicksburg.