YAZOO CITY, Miss.–If you’ve ever been to Washington, D.C. to see the Vietnam Memorial, then you know it’s a sobering experience to see the names of the people who died in the war. If you’ve never made it to DC, you’ll soon be able to experience the memorial wall in Mississippi, when the Moving Wall comes to Yazoo City at the end of the month.
Yazoo is the only place in Mississippi to host the wall this year, which is the only Congressional sanctioned Vietnam wall memorial outside of DC. The Moving Wall has been touring the U.S. for about 30 years.
LINK: Site for The Moving Wall
“It is a half-sized replica. It’s 250 ft. long, which is the exact length,” said Whitney Hurt, executive director of the Yazoo County Chamber of Commerce. “But it’s 6 ft. tall, which is half the height.”
The memorial sits on a platform about one and a half ft. tall, which makes it almost 8 ft. tall, in all.
Hurt said it has black aluminum panels to emulate the black granite on the wall in DC.
Why it’s coming to Yazoo has a lot to do with some natural disasters, including the two tornadoes that hit Yazoo in 2010, and flooding on the Yazoo River the year after.
“Our chairman of Yazoo Salutes the Troops, Pat Brock, wrote a letter to the Moving Wall. This county worked really well together, pulled themselves out and put people back in homes. The Moving Wall committee was so moved by that, they bumped us to the top of the waiting list,” said Hurt.
The Wall will be in Yazoo on Oct. 29 to Nov. 1. An opening ceremony will happen Oct. 30, which will include Gov. Bryant, congressmen Thompson and Harper and possibly a flyover, plus salutes to Mississippi’s veterans.
The site is the old Yazoo Motor Company, which was demolished by the mile-wide tornado in April 2010.
“Baptist Hospital bought it a couple of years ago and they were gracious enough to donate the property. We pretty much had to build it from scratch, plant the grass. We laid the concrete last week.”
A candlelight remembrance ceremony will top things off at 7 p.m., Nov. 1, before the Wall moves on.
