CARBONDALE, Illinois – Mississippi might seem like an unlikely place to honor Ulysses S. Grant.
After all, the Union general’s military victory at Vicksburg helped turn the tide of the Civil War against the state and the rest of Dixie.
But after a legal dispute with an Illinois school, Mississippi State University has become the new home of 90 file cabinets stuffed with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and memorabilia about Grant and some of his descendants.
The collection – one of the biggest involving Grant – had been a source of pride for Southern Illinois University for more than four decades until a falling out between that Carbondale school and the group that owns the items, prompted by sexual harassment claims against the man who oversaw the collection.
Read the full AP article in the January 28, 2009 edition of the Columbus Dispatch.