Top brass from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got a private preview Wednesday of exhibits coming into place at the Lower Mississippi River Museum and Riverfront Interpretive Center.

The main building of the museum, which will house interactive displays about the Mississippi River and the Corps, is set to open in August. Work crews were installing exhibits Wednesday until about 4:30 p.m., when the tour began.

“Right now, we are about 80 percent complete with the exhibits and the building,” said senior project manager Mike Renacker.

Once the building is complete, exhibits including a look at daily life aboard a boat and a piloting simulator will be installed in the attached MV Mississippi IV, Renacker said.

Visitors will also get to tinker with models of the levee system and get a glimpse of life inside a refugee tent during the 1927 flood.

The interactive nature of the museum and the history of Vicksburg are a fantastic mix, said Brig. Gen. John Peabody, division commander for the Corps of Engineers.

“The location is great, and hopefully it will help draw people into the downtown area,” Peabody said.

One exhibit in the interpretive center will have moving glass plates to simulate the creation of oxbow lakes caused by migration of the river between Mississippi and Louisiana since 1775. Showing the migration of the river, the history of the levee system and giving the public a “what if” simulation of changes to the system helps teach about the Corps’ Mississippi River and Tributaries project, Renacker said.

“This is one of the few areas where we can really explain the project,” he said.

Because of the river’s movement, some cities that once were ports are now landlocked while others have been washed away, said project designer Alainna O’Bannon.

Though the tone of many of the exhibits is serious, all material is on an eighth-grade level, and plenty will be available to interest younger children, O’Bannon said. What might be the biggest draw for children is a scale model of the river’s path between Greenville and Natchez. The model, in which kids will be encouraged to play, will hold about 2 inches of water to represent normal conditions and about 5 inches to represent a flood.

Another exhibit will tell the story of five cultures — a 1950s teen, an early 20th century sharecropper, an early frontier woman, a Spanish soldier and a Choctaw child — and how the river affected their lives, said archeologist Rodney Parker, a member of the museum’s design team.

“These contractors did an awesome job as far as depicting these stories,” he said.

Exhibits will be rotated every three years and temporary displays will be changed out every few months, Renacker said.

Ground was broken for the center in 2009. The concept began in 1995, when the city purchased the retired towboat for $1. The title was returned to the Corps in 2007, when the vessel was slow-rolled down Washington Street to the museum site at Washington and Jackson streets.