A Streetcar from the Magnolia State - Updated

Thanks to Bill Wall for alerting me to this article from late August that describes an exciting development. The last (known) surviving Vicksburg, Mississippi, streetcar, which was discovered four years ago as reported right here, has now officially been preserved at a museum. The car body has been restored, as shown above, and moved to The Old Depot Museum, which is the local history museum and happens to be located in the old railroad depot.

Kudos to the folks in Vicksburg who turned this from just another "streetcar body found in a house and then shoved into storage somewhere" into a rather attractive display piece. Unfortunately, I still don't know anything about the car! I haven't managed to dig up any Vicksburg rosters. They apparently numbered their cars by tens, so builder records suggest that cars 75, 105, 115, 125, and 135 were all built by St. Louis Car Company between 1913 and 1916. Cars 145, 155, 165, and 175 were Birneys bought secondhand, and this car definitely isn't a Birney, so my guess is that it's in the 75-135 series. But I don't know what happened to numbers 85 and 95, so I can't even say with confidence that this is a SLCC product.

Nevertheless, even with as little information as I have, the car is certainly preserved and displayed, so I should add it to the PNAERC list. It's been added and is now the only car on the list to hail from the Magnolia State (though this car is preserved in Mississippi, it's from over the border in Memphis). If anyone happens upon a photo, roster, or any other information that might shed some light on the single-truck pre-Birney cars used in Vicksburg, please drop me a line.

And with that, I think I'm down to just four states that aren't represented by cars preserved on the list: Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Don't confuse that with states where cars are preserved; I mean that I don't think there are any cars on the list that ran in those states in regular service. I'd say 46 out of 50 ain't bad. As for states where cars are currently preserved, I think we're at 47/50, missing only Hawaii, New Mexico, and Vermont.

UPDATE: Photos taken in October 2024 by Murphy Zane Jenkins-Henson have been posted on Facebook here, though I'm not sure whether that link will work. I've reproduced a couple of the photos below. They show the Vicksburg car on display under a substantial shelter next to The Old Depot Museum.

SECOND UPDATE: I was able to obtain builder's photos of Vicksburg cars 75, 115, and 135 from Washington University, which holds the surviving St. Louis Car Company records. And (drumroll) ...none of them look anything like the preserved body! They're all eight-window cars, whereas the preserved car is a six-window car. More noticeably, they have doors at all four corners, suggesting they were not delivered as one-man cars. The preserved car may have been rebuilt, but it looks to my eye like it was built new with doors only at two corners. Is it possible that the preserved car was delivered after the city's Birneys, maybe numbered 185 or 195?