The Board of Mayor and Aldermen is looking for an engineer to develop plans to dismantle and move the 124-year-old Fairground Street Bridge to the farmers’ market site at Washington and Jackson streets.

The board Thursday authorized city clerk Walter Osborne to advertise for requests for qualifications for the project.

Flaggs initially wanted to demolish the bridge, calling it a blight and unsafe. On Monday he said he changed his mind and wanted to relocate the bridge to Washington and Jackson streets, which is the site of a proposed multipurpose park.

“We’re going to recommend that it be moved to our land adjacent to the Mississippi Barbecue just to enhance the farmers’ market multiplex (park), and see if we can get Kansas City (Southern) to pay for it because they want it out of the way,” he said at the time.

Flaggs wants to make the bridge a museum with either a kiosk or informational tablets about the bridge, and add a marker identifying it as a National Historic Landmark.

He is expected to meet Jan. 25 with Mississippi Department of Archives and History officials to discuss the plan and visit the bridge.

The Fairground Street Bridge is listed as the oldest standing bridge in the state. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Mississippi landmark.

Installed in 1895, the bridge provided access to Levee Street from the city’s garden district after railroad tracks were built in the 1800s.

The Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, which owned the tracks at that time, installed the bridge as part of a deal with the city that allowed the company right-of-way through Vicksburg.

The bridge was closed to traffic in 1995 as unsafe.

Its approach at the intersection of Pearl and Fairground streets is overgrown with trees and other vegetation, and the crumbling structure now crosses over the Kansas City Southern Railroad yard.

An earlier attempt to relocate the bridge to Washington Street near the Jesse Brent Lower Mississippi Museum and Interpretive Center to serve as a pedestrian bridge from Washington Street to Levee Street was shelved because of the project’s $4 million estimate.