Cars packed the parking lot at Vicksburg National Military Park throughout the week as families looking for some spring break adventure made their way to Vicksburg.

Jamie Holman made the trip from Palestine, Texas along with her husband and two sons to explore Vicksburg and learn more about the Civil War siege.

“We like Civil War history so that’s what brought us here,” Holman said. “We always like history, so we always on our vacations try to find history related things. We went to the courthouse museum, the railroad museum and the river museum.”

The summer months between Memorial Day and Labor Day remain the busiest time of the year for tourism, but in recent years Vicksburg has seen a spring break spike as part of a national trend.

“Spring break here at Vicksburg and even park service-wide is becoming an incredibly busy season for us,” VNMP chief of interpretation Scott Babinowich said. “The tricky thing with spring break is, it’s not very cohesive any more. It is almost like a season that starts at the beginning of March and goes through the end of April. It is definitely a time of year we are seeing trend of higher visitation.”

Babinowich said they don’t have official numbers for how many visitors have come through, but they can tell there has been in increase as the requests for battlefield guides has gone up.

“It definitely feels and looks a lot busier than it did last season, and some of the staff that’s been here for a while have commented the same thing — that it seems like we’re seeing a lot more visitors coming through the park,” Babinowich said.

Spring break has become the official start of the tourism season in Vicksburg, said Bill Seratt the executive director of the Vicksburg Visitor and Convention Bureau, and it carries into summer before it will peter out a little as temperatures rise before picking back up in the fall.

“March is when we really pick up and March is when the travel season is beginning,” Seratt said. “It is always marked by the state spring breaks and the two or three weeks those occur. This is when we really start seeing tourism kick in. It is always slow during January and February, but then when spring breaks begin is when it starts picking up.”

Spring break and the summer have the added benefit of bringing not just older visitors to the military park, but also families looking to share a slice of history with their children and turn spring break into an educational experience.

“We’ve definitely seen a lot of children, families touring throughout the park,” Babinowich said. “We’ve even had some boy scout troops come through these last couple weeks. For me and the rest of the staff, it’s exciting to see the younger generation getting involved at their national parks.”