Lamar Roberts, who founded the Old Depot Museum in the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad Depot on Levee Street, died Saturday. He was 78.

“He had a type of dry humor, but he was full of jokes,” said museum curator and director Dave Benway, who worked with Roberts for 25 years. “He was quite a guy to work with. He was very inventive; he thought of ways to put things in the museum to put different displays up. He was incredible about that.

“He was very interested in the history of Vicksburg and thought about the Confederacy,” he said, adding Roberts was life member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and held many offices in the organization, and was responsible for the observance of Confederate Memorial Day in Mississippi.

He was on the board of directors of Beauvoir; a charter member of the Vicksburg Genealogical Society, serving several terms as president; was a deacon, youth director and Sunday school teacher at Oakland Baptist Church; and a member of the board of directors of the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau.

A native of Satartia, Roberts came to Vicksburg in 1973, where he worked for Cappaert Manufactured Housing for 35 years, starting as a draftsman and leaving as a vice president.

“When I left Magnolia and opened Cappaert Manufactured Housing, I brought Lamar with me. He basically laid out the Cappaert Housing plant.

Lamar very much enjoyed our Civil War history here and he is responsible for so much being built here.”