The owners of the Effie Afton decided to take the railroad companies that had built the bridge to court. During the Civil War steamboats carried Iowa soldiers, weapons and food supplies to army posts. "We feel like we're a part of this Civil War story, but we're the conclusion that no one heard," says Lisa O'Neal, a Marion resident and member of the Sultana Historic Preservation Society. Steamboat Accidents on the Mississippi River by Sara Mayer - Prezi Among other St. Louisans along for the ride was Capt. (Post-Dispatch), Capt. The story of the Sultana isn't well-known even among people who live along the Mississippi. Many of the stories that the newspapers got from survivors were not always correct (one man said that there were people from every state in the Union on boardnot so), but they were reporting what they were told. Almost 1,200 people perished. Explosion of the Steamboat Constitution, May 4, 1817, Point Coupee, Louisiana. [19][20] Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests. The most recent investigation into the cause of the disaster by Pat Jennings, principal engineer of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, which came into existence in 1866 because of the Sultana explosion, determined that three main factors led to the disaster: 1) The type of metal used in the construction of the boilers Charcoal Hammered No. Without a pilot to steer the boat, Sultana became a drifting, burning hulk. There were 10 passengers on board. Click on links in the titles below to reach Lloyds descriptions of the accidents pictured. The Sultana was a 260-foot-long wooden steamboat, built in Cincinnati in 1863, which regularly transported passengers and freight between St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi River.. On April 23, 1865, the vessel docked in Vicksburg to address . Sign up to get updates about new releases and event invitations. Concussion swept away the infrastructure, and the upper cabins, state rooms, and hurricane deck collapsed inward. But there were many other reasons the event didn't get much attention at the time. Regaining control, Smith wheeled toward the island and shoved the bow against the bank as the boat listed to port. [4]:164 Other vessels joined the rescue, including the steamers Silver Spray, Jenny Lind, and Pocahontas, the navy ironclad USS Essex and the sidewheel gunboat USSTyler. "The war had just ended a few weeks before," he says. It went upward at a 45-degree angle, tearing through the crowded decks above and completely destroying the pilothouse, instantly killing Captain Mason. The West Memphis Boatwrecks Project - Arkansas Archeological Survey The Wreck of the Sultana for visitors to the Mississippi River GES: The Sultana Disaster Museum is located in Marion because that is the closest city to the remains of the vessel. In his book River of Dark Dreams, historian Walter Johnson writes that the table of contents of Lloyds bestseller was sort of a nightmare poem of alphabetized Americana: a catalog of 97 major and hundreds of minor boat disasters. Probably the most interesting of the wrecks are Vessel No. Cost $8 for poster plus $3.50 postage (U.S.). Although they knew that the water above Cairo was cleaner, the only problem they thought they faced by the dirtier lower Mississippi water was that they had to clean their boilers more often. The exact number of steamboat accidents in Iowa Rivers is not known. Eclipse [Steamboat] - Encyclopedia of Arkansas The Missouri History Museum displayed it from 1962 to 1996 and preserves it in storage. Passengers were blown apart or scalded by the hot water. Today, Potter describes the scene from a park along the banks of the Mississippi, just north of Memphis. yet the tragedy got very few headlines. Heroine (steamboat) | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History. Investigation Tip: Cardinals latest, deflating loss compounds concerns, Man shot, killed near Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis, What was Andrew Knizner thinking? Appendix A - List of Steamboats on the Upper Mississippi River, 1823 Steamboat Disasters - Encyclopedia of Arkansas Persac, Marie Adrien (Artist) I gave only short shrift to the coal-torpedo sabotage theory. Explosion of the Moselle, Near Cincinnati, Ohio, April 25, 1838. Jan. 3, 1844 Steamboat wreck kills as many as 70 on the Mississippi The Sultana was on its way from Vicksburg, Miss., to St. Louis when the explosion occurred, says Jerry Potter, a Memphis lawyer and author of The Sultana Tragedy. ", 15th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, "Sultana: A Tragic Postscript to the Civil War", https://www.nationalboard.org/SiteDocuments/General%20Meeting/Jennings.pdf, "The Sultana Disaster (Coal Torpedo theory)", http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigation/civil-war-sabotage/, Sultana museum in Arkansas memorializes 1,169 people who died in river, "Surviving the Worst: The Wreck of the Sultana at the End of the American Civil War", "Blues in the Water, by King's German Legion", "Ardent Presents: Cory Branan "The Wreck of the Sultana", "Remember the Sultana | Film Threat - Part 2", Shipwrecks and maritime incidents in 1865, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sultana_(steamboat)&oldid=1152358259, Articles with incomplete citations from April 2022, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2022, Articles with unsourced statements from July 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Initially Capt. FS: What was the role played by the last Sultana in the Civil War, and how significant was that role? Early western river navigation was always dangerous, but it was a necessity in order to ship supplies to U.S. Army frontier posts and civilian settlements. And finally, at the end of the war, the Sultana would have played a significant role in transporting former Union prisoners-of-war back to the North. By the time the repairs would have been completed, the prisoners would have been sent home on other boats. On a landscape lacking roads but braided with bayous and rivers, travel via water was the only efficient means of transportation. Low Mississippi River ranges expose sunken WWII ship - Dailynationtoday Between 1823 and 1848, 365 boats made 7,645 trips. The Missouri was a dangerous river. "It's pretty exciting. Explosion of the Oronoko, April 21, 1838, near Princeton, Mississippi. Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,169 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history. Only six years before, it had foundered in the river near Chester, Ill., with one crew member lost. [13] The dead soldiers were interred at the Fort Pickering cemetery, located on the south shore of Memphis. On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people. 2), built in 1860 but coming downriver on her maiden voyage after being refurbished,[6] arrived at about 2:30 AM, a half hour after the explosion, and rescued scores of survivors. The St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, April 29, 1865, states that the "steamer Sultana left New Orleans on Friday evening the 21st, with about seventy cabin passengers, and about eighty five employees on the boat. The location of the explosion, from the top rear of the boilers and far away from the fireboxes, tends to indicate that Louden's claim of sabotage of an exploding coal torpedo in the firebox was pure bravado. [5] About ten hours south of Vicksburg, one of Sultana's four boilers sprang a leak. Immediately, Captain Mason grabbed an armload of Cairo newspapers and headed south to spread the news, knowing that telegraphic communication with the southern states had been almost totally cut off because of the recently-ended American Civil War. There were 10 passengers on board. The Hayne was sold in 1908 to C.J. Beneath Tennessee River, Steamboat Wreckage Presents Mystery Once the driving force of the southeast Tennessee city's economic growth, Chattanooga's riverfront is home to just the 10th shipwreck recorded in state history - a boat whose story time forgot. (Post-Dispatch). Nashville: Land Yacht Press, 2000. Being so closely packed within the 48-inch (120cm) diameter boilers tended to cause the muddy sediment to form hot pockets and were extremely difficult to clean. BHYHA on Instagram: "On this day in 1865The steamboat Sultana Library of Congress [4]:146147,168176, Passengers who survived the initial explosion had to risk their lives in the icy spring runoff of the Mississippi or burn with the boat. [12] In 1880, the War Department placed the number of survivors at 931, but the most recent research places the number at 961. From 1817 to 1871, about 5,600 people died on Mississippi River wrecks of all sorts, including burst boilers, collisions and fires. GES: Sultana (No. When steamboats went out to investigate the wreck, they reported on what was found. At least thirty-nine passengers and crew members died in the accident. Newspaper accounts indicate that the residents of Memphis had sympathy for the victims despite the ongoing Union occupation. The train derailed in Crawford County at about 12:15 p.m. Two of the train's three locomotives and an unknown number of cars . 2, a stern-wheel steamboat. Among its owners on that day was Herman Pott, St. Louis boatbuilder. It was her 82nd birthday. By Lieutenant Commander Ralph P. Dillon, U. S. Naval Reserve. FS: Given the mistrust of any reporting from the press in some parts of our society today, how reliable would you say the reporting on these disasters was back in its day? Subscribe now and never hit a limit. (Post-Dispatch), Retired Capt. Pages in category "Shipwrecks of the Mississippi River" The following 50 pages are in this category, out of 50 total. On November 19, 1840, The Burlington Hawkeye newspaper reported upwards of 100 flatboats had passed Burlington going downstream loaded with produce. Salecker, historical consultant for the Sultana Disaster Museum in Marion, Arkansas, recently participated in an author q&a with former Naval History editor-in-chief Fred Schultz to discuss the book: FS: After having read your exhaustive story of the various iterations of the steamboat Sultana, I couldnt help but compare her fate to the loss of the Titanic, which, as Im sure you know, has received much more attention from historians. An engraving of the Sultana explosion, published in Harpers Weekly, May 20, 1865. Savannah Davis, 23, died from blunt . A potential reader should care about this story because it shows that greed and corruption in the government is not a new thing. Frank Barton is the descendant of one of those Confederate soldiers, a man named Franklin Hardin Barton. [7] Many died of drowning or hypothermia. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. BNSF said in a statement that two of . Instead, newspaper accounts say Franklin Barton saved several Union soldiers. Preston Lodwick, then a consortium including Capt. Men in skiffs from both riverbanks rescued people clinging to debris. 2023 In writing my first few books I literally had to go to the U.S., state, and military archives to do my research. Lake Geneva. SS Sultana:The steamboat was bound for St. Louis in April 1865 when the boilers failed right above Memphis, 13 days after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,169 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history. Poster: Shows location of 31 steamboat sinkings on Mississippi River between Trempealeau, WI and Victory, WI (many boats were recovered and refitted). And, the cost of a stateroom was not based on the wealth of the traveler. It was late April 1865 and more than 2,000 tired, sick, and injured men, wearing dirty and tattered clothes, filed down the bluff from Vicksburg to a steamboat waiting at the docks on the Mississippi River. [15][full citation needed], The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be the mismanagement of water levels in the boilers, exacerbated by the fact that the vessel was severely overloaded and top-heavy. Why should potential readers care? "Somebody had came by and notified us. "It was like a tremendous bomb going off in the middle of where these men were," Potter says. New York: Dover Maritime, 1994. HEROINE. 1 was no longer used to manufacture boilers after 1879. Shewas a sidewheel Mississippi steamboat carrying nearly 2,000 releasedUnion prisoners-of-war back north at the end of the Civil War. Daniel Jackson / May 29, 2021 But some of the most poignant stories involve Confederate soldiers rescuing their Union counterparts. I copied everything I could find, even though I may never use the material. As a lawyer, Potter was well-equipped to investigate the mistakes and malfeasance that led to the Sultana disaster. Paskoff, Paul F. Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 18211860. They'd stay in a motel at night, but she loved to cook for the crew and the men from the Coast Guard. As the crew made sure the cargo was packed tightly, the captain blew the whistle. The Capt. hide caption. Flatboats and keelboats carried cargo down the river. During her time in port, and while the repairs were being made, Sultana took on the paroled prisoners. {{start_at_rate}} {{format_dollars}} {{start_price}} {{format_cents}} {{term}}, {{promotional_format_dollars}}{{promotional_price}}{{promotional_format_cents}} {{term}}, Cardinals send prized prospect Jordan Walker to Class AAA in curious series of moves, Rudderless ship of chaos: St. Louis judge advances Kim Gardner contempt case, What Oliver Marmols gamble in ninth vs. LA reveals about managing to spark Cardinals, How sending Jordan Walker to Class AAA is a bet clarity can correct muddled outfield: Cardinals Extra, Messenger: Kim Gardner drives the judicial bus over her employees and into the ditch, A closer on ice. Sometimes these snags stuck out of the water.