After an absence of a little more than a year, the founder of the Vicksburg Battlefield Museum has returned to oversee its day-to-day operation.

Lamar Roberts, who founded the museum in 1993 as the Gray and Blue Naval Museum, relinquished control of the operation adjacent to the Battlefield Inn to Warner Byrum, the owner of the inn and a partner in the museum, in July 2005.

Byrum sold the Battlefield Inn in June to Yogesh Patel of HSG Hospitality of Florida. Byrum moved to Sanibel-Captiva in South Florida.

After Roberts left the museum, he began work on a transportation museum proposed for the old railroad depot on Levee Street. He will remain involved in both the transportation museum and the Battlefield Museum, and they will be operated as separate but associated entities, he said.

&#8220There will be one board, one director and so on,” he said, adding that a visitor buying a full-price ticket to one will be able to visit the other at a discounted price.

When Roberts opened the museum, it was in a small building at Clay and Spring streets. At the time, the facility housed 33 models and 13 paintings.

A short while later, Gray and Blue moved and occupied two locations on Washington Street. It operated on Washington Street until its move into its specially constructed building in May 2003. The building was constructed to resemble an ironclad gunboat from the War Between the States, complete with simulated guns and smoke stacks.

When Roberts took over Oct. 9, the museum boasted 109 models of Civil War-era gunboats, some 50 models of towboats from a number of eras and other riverboats and 55 of the 108 vessels named for Mississippi, places in the state and people from Mississippi.

With his return, Roberts added another towboat model, that of the steam-powered towboat Mateur, which was used by the Vicksburg District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1947 until its retirement in 1978.

Over the years, the Mateur forged its place in Mississippi River history. When it was built by St. Louis Shipbuilding, St. Louis, Mo., for the Defense Plant Corp. in 1944 it was the last or one of the last steam-powered towboats built, according to information supplied by Roberts and Michael Logue, District public affairs officer. During World War II, the boat was chartered to Federal Barge Lines. It was then transferred to the Corps in 1947.

When built, the Mateur was about 181 feet long and 52 feet wide. It was powered by two, four-cylinder steam engines that produced about 1,200 horsepower each. Instead of driving a sternwheel as steamboats of earlier eras did, the engines drove screw propellers such as the ones used on modern diesel towboats.

The boat was acquired in 1980 by East Mississippi Community College and was used for a deckhand training school near Columbus. It was offered for sale in 1988 and eventually bought by D. James Jumer Enterprises. It was converted into the Effie Afton Tow Boat Restaurant which is now part of Jumer’s Casino Rock Island (Ill.).

Roberts said he has plans he hopes will reverse the drop-off in visitors to the Battlefield Museum that has happened since July.

&#8220Our attendance dropped. Everybody’s dropped but ours dropped more than others,” Roberts said.

Pointing out he believes a museum is a living being and must be treated as such, he said one of the first things he did was acquire the Mateur model built by Dave Nieuwenhuis of Lodi, Calif. He also acquired another original painting by Civil War naval artist Herb Mott.

&#8220It was the first thing added in a year-and-a-half,” Roberts said.

The museum now owns 13 of Mott’s originals, and even though Mott is 83, living in an assisted living facility and nearing the end of his painting career, Roberts said he would like to see the artist complete a specific painting of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas. The Arkansas was built at Yazoo City.

&#8220He had done a good job illustrating things about the Arkansas and the Yazoo River,” he said.

Roberts said his plans to increase attendance at the Battlefield Museum include mailings to operators of tour companies and to schools to attract business. Also in the works are plans to reconnect with World War II reunion groups, particularly those with ties to warships associated with Mississippi, with the idea to persuade them to plan some of their reunions in Vicksburg.

The Mateur model could work into the plans to seek reunions. It was named after a battle at Mateur, Tunisia, that took place during the Allied campaign to take North Africa from the hands of the Germans and Italians.

Units from the U.S. Army II Corps under the command of Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley captured the town May 3, 1943. Mateur is located in northern Tunisia northwest of the capital city, Tunis.