Robert “Boo” Keyes Jr. has some heady plans for his 85 acres of land that tower above North Washington Street, which divides the high bluffs once known as Walnut Hills from the swampy lowlands generally defined as Chickasaw Bayou.

“I plan to build me a house one day up there,” said Keyes, who purchased extra land from Anderson-Tully Co. last year after dirt was used from his land to protect the company’s lumber yard and sawmill from the Mississippi River Flood of 2011. Some of Keyes’ land is being cleared for eventual development, he said.

“(Anderson-Tully) reserved the right to cut timber on it for 12 months,” Keyes said. “I’ll just be left with a dirt pit and the ground once they’re done.”

But he might also have history.

The area is where Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman led a charge against Confederates in December 1862, covering areas between the present-day Yazoo Diversion Canal and North Washington Street, along both sides of the highway and up what is now U.S. 61 North to the Mississippi 3 exit, said Terry Winschel, historian for Vicksburg National Military Park.

None of the battlefield is in the park’s footprint and won’t be anytime soon — short of an act of Congress. Clearing trees on private property in the vast Chickasaw Bayou Battlefield on the park’s periphery is fine in the government’s eyes, regardless of how the histories of the winter and spring of 1862-63 are tied together.

“It’s private property,” park superintendent Mike Madell said. “They can do what they want.”

On Dec. 26, 1862, Sherman led three Union divisions down the river as part of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s initial order to move on Vicksburg, a prime Confederate stronghold. They disembarked on the Yazoo River at Johnson’s Plantation — burned by Union forces three days earlier — and approached from the northeast; a fourth division landed farther upstream a day later. Confederate defenses just 6,000 strong compared to Sherman’s 32,000 men held Walnut Hills during two days of fighting that ended in Confederate victory Dec. 29, 1862. Casualties mounted to 1,776 for the Union forces, while Confederate forces lost 207, according to the National Park Service.

“The Confederates had a defense of depth all the way up the east side (of modern-day North Washington Street),” Winschel said.

Logging on seemingly hallowed ground won’t create problems for ATCO or Keyes, as the legislation that created the park in 1899 limited the park’s mission to that which commemorates “the campaign and siege and defense of Vicksburg.”

“Campaign, siege and defense are the operative words there,” Winschel said.

In essence, it’s a definition that starts with Grant’s orders on March 29, 1863, to move downriver to take Vicksburg. The city was surrendered by the Confederates on July 4, 1863.

“Consequently, the significant action that took place along the banks of Chickasaw Bayou, in December 1862, did not fall into the time range of the campaign as established by the War Department,” Winschel said. “Thus, the battlefield at Chickasaw Bayou was not included in the legislation.”

Grant’s Canal site, behind the mainline levee near Delta, La., also was excluded from the park’s reach because work on the concept, a canal for Union boats to cross DeSoto point, was abandoned before March 29, 1863. In 1990, Public Law 101-442 expanded the interpretive mandate of the park “from April 1862 to July 4, 1863, and the history of Vicksburg under Union occupation during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

No similar effort has ever been afforded to the vast Chickasaw Bayou battleground, Madell said.

History has a way of unearthing itself despite boundaries, political or otherwise. Pottery, artillery and projectiles of all sorts have been dug up for years around where Keyes wants to build a home, he said.

Clearing land anywhere near important battle sites comes with caution, said Norman Davis, president of Anderson-Tully, the firm’s land and timber arm.

“There’s quite a lot of property we cut around those,” Davis said. “But, we keep an eye out for cemeteries, trenches, those things.”