The Catfish Row Museum in Vicksburg has received a grant from the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area that will provide support in engaging with the community and building the museum’s relationship with the Delta and the culture of Mississippi.
Public events will include hands-on workshops, curatorial events and panel discussions centered around local Foodways. Through workshops, we will develop content and collect artifacts for the museum. In the Museum Lab space, visitors can scan, copy and donate documents such as letters, recipes, and historic photographs, as well as record oral history interviews. In the Exhibition space, community members can observe and provide feedback on how their artifacts and stories will be used in exhibits.
At the heart of Foodways lie rich stories of crossing barriers and borders, of lives intertwined with food, as food and place are linked through the diversity of income and ethnicity in the south.
Save the date for the first Food for Thought program:
Saturday, February 26: Margaret Walker: Food, Fellowship, and Forms of Activism — Robert Luckett, civil rights historian and director of a special collections archive with the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University
The Museum Lab will perpetuate culture, tell the stories of often overlooked communities, offer a viable community space for special events and live music, and build the network by forging a strong partnership with the city’s most valuable asset, its people. We will engage with the public on issues relating to race, place, ethnicity, history, music, foodways and the arts, revealing the complicated identity of Vicksburg.
This project will illuminate the cultural contributions of Native Americans and African Americans, and how their food traditions intersected with Europeans, resulting in a complex array of Foodways. Culinary creativity in this port city is unique; National and International cultural influences such as Italian, Mexican and Middle Eastern are found in church communities as well as local restaurants. The Lebanese and Chinese communities that populate the region lived in Vicksburg to trade on the river before settling in the Delta. We will highlight these creative connections through the Foodways stories collected in the Catfish Row Museum.
Share This Story
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish most of our stories for free under a Creative Commons license.
For digital publications:
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @catfishrowvicksburg on Facebook and @catfishrowmuse on Twitter.
For print publications:
- You have to credit Catfish Row Museum or Front Porch Fodder. We prefer “Author Name, Front Porch Fodder” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Front Porch Fodder for Catfish Row Museum” and include our website, catfishrowmuseum.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @catfishrowvicksburg on Facebook and @catfishrowmuse on Twitter.
If you have any other questions, contact Lauchlin Fields.