With the tall order of preserving America’s past, the Vicksburg National Military Park stays busy.

“A lot of what goes into managing a national park is (figuring out) how to preserve it for future generations,” Bill Justice, park superintendent, said at the Vicksburg Kiwanis meeting Tuesday. “We have to think about your great- great-great-grandchildren because these things belong to them too.”

For Justice, park preservation has a far reach, often extending beyond just the borders of the current military park.

He noted this year’s game plan includes rehabbing monuments located on public property outside of the park’s boundaries, like those on Confederate Avenue or Pemberton Square, because they are technically still owned by the National Park Service per the 1960s agreement that sold parts of the park to the city of Vicksburg for expansion purposes.

“Preserving these monuments—all of them—is a major part of our job,” Justice said. “There’s no other park in the entire national park system or anywhere in the country that has a collection of outdoor art out like you can see here.”

This plan builds off of last year’s success cleaning and restoring each monument in the park, which included waxing any bronze areas to protect from patina and hiring a craftsman to repair bayonets on one of the monuments, Justice said.

“One of the things that the National Park Service has at its disposal is really great historical craftsman to care for these special things that are set aside by the people of the United States,” he said.

Justice also addressed the plan to expand the parks current 1,800-acre reach, a process he said will probably continue past his lifetime. The expansion plan includes approaching willing sellers for battlefield land at Champion Hill, Port Gibson and Raymond to possibly add more than 11,000 square acres to the park.

“This park is going to be going through the greatest change it’s ever gone through in the next several years,” he said. “These (areas) are really important parts of the story, so the park’s efforts for perhaps the next 25 to 40 years will focus not just preserving the park we have now but creating what will become the larger Vicksburg National Military Park. I can’t think of anything more exciting than doing that.

“It’s a time of change, not just for the park but the community and this entire area of Mississippi.”

Justice noted that the National Park Service has acquired no land so far, but internal plans on how to tackle the expansion project are underway.

“As we do that, then the vision of the park will come, but even (the general management planning process) is years down the road,” he said. “We’re just going to see how the park evolves.”