The Claiborne County site of an early battle in the Civil War campaign for Vicksburg has been given one of the nation’s top historic designations.

Public and private land where the Port Gibson battle was fought has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior, it was announced Friday.

The announcement followed an application process that took about 10 or 12 years, said Libby Shaifer Hollingsworth, a supporter of the process on whose family’s land much of the battle took place.

The designation is for about 3,400 acres west of Port Gibson, where Union forces under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated Confederates on May 1, 1863, leading to the establishment of a critical Union beachhead east of the Mississippi.

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History owns the publicly owned part of the site and it applied for the designation, said its Civil War sites historian, Jim Woodrick. Most of the site is privately owned, he added.

Hollingsworth’s family donated land and a former home that is on it, the Shaifer House, to the department about 1979, she said. The home was used by Union forces as a headquarters and by both Union and Confederate forces as a hospital, and plans for restoration of it by the MDAH are in place.

The site also includes the sunken, unpaved Shaifer Road/Bessie Weathers Road. Woodrick described it as “one of the most historic roads not only in Mississippi but in America.”

The road was traveled by about 27,000 Union troops led by Grant. Confederate forces in the battle numbered about 5,600.

Sites that will receive the National Historic Landmark designation are chosen from those on the National Register of Historic Places.

“Only 3 percent of properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places are designated as National Historic Landmarks,” DOI information on the designation says.

The new designation “expands the boundaries and better defines the boundaries” of the Port Gibson battle site as it had been listed on the register, Woodrick said.

The Port Gibson battle site joins as National Historic Landmarks 37 others in Mississippi, including one other in Claiborne County, Oakland Memorial Chapel at Alcorn State University.

No visible changes to the site are expected to take place immediately but long-range plans are for it to be better-marked, said Parker Hills of the preservation group Friends of the Vicksburg Campaign and Historic Trail.

“We’re hoping to get some interpretive signage up,” Hill said, adding that depending on funding markers could be in place as soon as within a year.

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., commented on the designation in a Friday press release announcing it.

“Preserving sites and linking them can contribute significantly to the state’s tourism economy and to the study of American history,” Lott said. “Certainly, Port Gibson is one of Mississippi’s most historic and storied communities, and its pivotal role in the Vicksburg Campaign remains a key part of America’s development.”

Union troops were taken by boat from Louisiana to the eastern bank of the Mississippi River at Bruinsburg in Claiborne County south of the Port Gibson battle site. The Union victory at Port Gibson led to the establishment of a beachhead to the north at Grand Gulf that became “a huge supply base” for subsequent troop movements, Hills said.

“The Port Gibson engagement marked the beginning of the final phase of (Grant’s) epic struggle to capture Vicksburg, the South’s last stronghold on the river,” the release from Lott’s office said.

Among the aspects of the site highlighted in the application for the new designation were that it retains a high degree of integrity and that the road the troops traveled on it has not been changed since they traveled it, Hollingsworth said. Grant and many of the other Northern military leaders who traveled it went on to become top political leaders after the war, she added.

“We’re thrilled with the designation, and hope people will help us take care of it,” Hollingsworth said of the site.

Another battle site on Grant’s route to Vicksburg, the Champion Hill Battlefield in Hinds County, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Three Warren County sites, the Old Court House Museum, the former headquarters building of Confederate Gen. John C. Pemberton and the northern Warren County site of the former French fort Fort St. Pierre, are also on the list.