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==An American River Port City Becomes “The Gibraltar of the Confederacy”==
[[File:ShirleysWhiteHouseVicksburg1863.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|Shirley's White House during the seige of Vickburg, 1863]]
Newitt Vick was an ambitious Virginia minister who arrived on the Mississippi River in 1814 and split his time acquiring Methodist converts and productive farmland. He especially favored the thick, black soils of the bottomlands where the Yazoo River flowed into the Mississippi. He bought as much as he could afford and envisioned a great cotton-shipping port city rising on his land but Vick contracted yellow fever and died in 1819 before his dreams could be realized. <ref>”The Founding of Vicksburg and Methodism: The Legacy of Tobias Gibson and Newitt Vick,” Vicksburg Downtown Murals, Historic Downtown Vicksburg, 2008</ref>
