Park Day at Vicksburg National Military Park, which was scheduled for this Saturday has been postponed until April 14 due to rain and thunderstorms forecast for the area this weekend.

Park Day is a partnership between VNMP and the Civil War Trust and will include multiple projects in the area of the Cairo Museum aimed at getting the park ready for the summer tourist season.

“We have four projects going on,” Rains said. “The main project is going to be headstone cleaning in the graveyard. We are also going to be cleaning the Cairo, installing new picnic tables and ripping out old wayside panels.”

Scott Babinowich, the park’s chief of interpretation, said the project in the cemetery is the first step in a larger project that will include multiple volunteer days.

“Really at this point, all 17,000 headstones need to be cleaned at least a little bit, some more than others,” Babinowich said. “We will definitely make some good progress and then hopefully keep that momentum going forward with some recurring volunteer events and volunteer groups.”

The plan is for volunteers to meet at the Cairo at 9 a.m.on Saturday the 14th, Rains said, before beginning work on the four projects.

The annual event typically brings more than 100 volunteers to the park enabling them to make a much larger dent in the work that needs to be done than what the park staff could do on its own.

“It is probably one of our bigger volunteer events of the year so it allows us to tackle a lot of larger scale projects that include a larger workforce,” Babinowich. “We get 75 to 100 people, we can be a lot more productive than a smaller volunteer event.”

To register for the event call 601-630-6021 or send an email to danielle_rains@partner.nps.gov.