Brices Cross Roads monument/NPS file
Long-needed rehabilitation is coming to the monuments at the Tupelo and Brices Cross Roads national battlefield sites located along the Natchez Trace Parkway in Lee County, Mississippi. Both sites were established by Congress in 1929 and administered by the War Department until transferred to the Interior Department in 1933.
Each one-acre site consists of a large central monument flanked by cannons and carriages along with small commemorative markers. The sites are remnants of the larger Civil War battlefields they commemorate and are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Crews from the National Park Service's Historic Preservation Training Center will comprehensively clean the monuments and markers using methods and products designed specifically to preserve the stone and bronze elements. The monuments’ joints will be repointed using mortar matched to the existing historic material.
“The original mortar holding the monuments together is beginning to fail,” said Resource Management Chief Chris Smith, “but in order to maintain their historic integrity, we asked the NPS’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training to analyze samples so we could match the new mortar with the exact material and consistency of the original.”
Work was to begin this week at Brices Cross Roads, followed by rehabilitation of the Tupelo National Battlefield monuments.
