Vicksburg is home to the Vicksburg National Military Park, and this week is National Park week, a presidentially proclaimed celebration to recognize America’s National Parks.

Through April 24, the VNMP along with 127 other national parks across the country will be waiving all entrance fees as part of the celebration.

The VNMP was established in 1889 to commemorate one of the most decisive battles of the American Civil War, the campaign, siege and defense of Vicksburg,

“The story itself of the park is war,” park guide Nikki Anderson said.

“It is going to be the good, the bad and ugly, and it is a hard story to tell, but the reality is that it happened.”

Because the VNMP is located on the grounds where battles were fought and lives were lost, visitors are asked to be respectful when visiting, Anderson said.

The VNMP park has 1,325 historic monuments and markers, 20 miles of reconstructed trenches and earthworks, a 16-mile tour road, an antebellum home, 144 emplaced cannon, the restored Union gunboat-USS Cairo and the resting ground for the remains of 17,000 Civil War Union soldiers.

The park’s cemetery was established in 1866 with the first burial in 1867, Anderson said.

“Unfortunately for the cemetery a lot of the record keeping was not the best for the time especially under war conditions so a lot of the information we have for our burials is the Unknown Soldier.”

When the cemetery was initially established, it was only open to those soldiers who died in service to the country, which at that time only included Union soldiers. It was closed to Confederate soldiers, Anderson said.

However, there are two Confederate soldiers buried on the grounds, Anderson said.

The majority of their comrades who fought in the Vicksburg Campaign are buried in the Cedar Hill Cemetery. Anderson said there are approximately 5,000 Confederate soldiers buried at the Cedar Hill Cemetery and about 3,000 of them are classified as Unknown Soldiers.

In 1917, approximately 8000 former soldiers returned to the sight of the historic battle and attended a four-day veteran’s reunion on the grounds of the VNMP. The event was sponsored and paid for by the U.S. Congress.

A $150,000 was appropriated for the reunion, and at its conclusion, about $35,000 remained unspent. It was decided that the remaining funds were to then be used to commemorate the historic gathering.

“A Memorial Arch, sculpted by Charles Lawhon using Stone Mountain (Ga.) granite, was dedicated in 1920 (in remembrance of the reunion). It stood astride Clay Street until 1967 when, having been declared a traffic hazard, it was moved to its present site within the park,” the VNMP website states.

“The VNMP is a national treasure and the primary reason why people travel to Vicksburg. It is the one aspect we are known for and our place in history is what inevitably ended the war,” the executive director of the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau Bill Seratt said.

The annual local economic impact of the VNMP has remained at a steady $30 million, as reported in an article published in the Vicksburg Post April 28, 2015.

The article also stated a National Park Service report showed 550,875 visitors came to the Vicksburg National Military Park in 2014 and spent $30,894,800 in communities near the park. In a quote from the same article, VNMP superintendent Bill Justice said, “that spending supported 517 jobs in the local area and had a cumulative benefit to the local economy of $40,397,600.”

According to the 2014 report, most park visitor spending was for lodging  — 30.6 percent — followed by food and beverages — 20.3 percent.

For more information about the VNMP, call 601-636-0583 or visit nps.gov/vick/planyourvisit/events.htm.