At 2 a.m. on April 27, 1865, the boilers on the steamboat Sultana exploded while the overcrowded boat was traveling up the Mississippi River near Marion. The Sultana was registered to carry 376 people. It instead was packed with almost 2,100 recently released Union prisoners of war. About 1,800 people were killed in the accident, making it the worst maritime disaster in the country's history.
Author Andrew Carroll has described it as "one of the greatest forgotten stories in United States history."
Earlier this year, I wrote about my visit to the Sultana Disaster Museum at Marion. The small museum is open from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. Sunday. For those interested in Arkansas history, it's well worth a visit. What I didn't report at the time is that a fundraising campaign has been launched that, if successful, will result in a 15,000-square-foot facility that should be a major attraction for east Arkansas.
Think about how intrigued Americans are by the sinking of the Titanic, a disaster in which 1,517 people perished. If an Arkansas museum could bring to life a tragedy that claimed even more victims, many of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who find their way to Memphis each year might have another reason to cross the river.
"I get emails every day from people across the country who are fascinated by the Sultana," says Louis Intres, who's leading the fundraising effort. "What's left of the Sultana is 37 feet beneath a soybean field near Marion. It's now a mile to the river channel. We consider this hallowed ground, and there's no way to remove what's down there. What we can do is to build a museum that will tell the story of the people who were aboard. There's a lot of competition for charitable dollars these days. I realize that. I also realize that we have one of the most significant events in American maritime history, and that story needs to be told here in Arkansas where what's left of the Sultana now rests. If we don't tell the story now, it could be lost forever."
Intres is a Fort Smith native who graduated from what's now the University of Central Arkansas at Conway and then spent 38 years in banking. He has been interested in history his entire life. Intres retired from banking at age 58 and went to Arkansas State University in Jonesboro to obtain a master's degree and a doctorate so he could teach history.
Being from Fort Smith, he's well aware of the patience it took officials there to raise enough money to begin construction on the U.S. Marshals Museum. Construction commenced last month on the 53,000-square-foot building along the banks of the Arkansas River.
It has been more than 11 years since the U.S. Marshals Service designated Fort Smith as the site of its museum. Those involved in that effort are trying to complete the $58.6 million facility so its opening will coincide with the 230th anniversary of the Marshals Service in September 2019.
Intres is hopeful that the fundraising efforts at Marion won't take more than a decade, especially since the Sultana museum will be smaller than the one on the other side of the state. It could be a big boost to tourism to have unique museums on both the eastern and western borders of Arkansas.
"The sites of most major battles of the Civil War have become either national parks or state parks," Intres says. "People just don't know about the Sultana. For more than a century, virtually nothing was written or said about it. A small group of people then began researching the incident. We've uncovered the life stories of those who were aboard the boat, and some of those stories are amazing. There are stories of heroism. There are stories of corruption. This has it all. We want to build the jewel of the Delta in Marion and use it to tell those stories."
When the Sultana was launched in 1863, the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune described it as "one of the largest and best business steamers ever constructed." The Sultana was built to haul cotton. Union forces later commandeered the steamboat for use in ferrying supplies and personnel. The captain, J. Cass Mason, had financial difficulties. He viewed this as the path to prosperity: a deal to haul released prisoners from Andersonville, Ga., and Cahaba, Ala., back to the North. More than 5,000 Union prisoners were sent to Vicksburg, Miss., to be loaded onto boats headed north.
In Vicksburg, Mason entered into an arrangement with a Union officer named Reuben Hatch, whose family had connections to President Abraham Lincoln. The federal government was paying $5 per man for transport, and Mason agreed to give Hatch a cut of his earnings if Hatch would guarantee a large load.
Mason made the deal even though he knew that one boiler was dripping water through a ruptured seam. Rumors were spread in Vicksburg that other available boats were tainted with disease. So it was that the Sultana was loaded far beyond capacity while two other steamboats left Vicksburg practically empty.
In recent years, Marion has been known as the place where Toyota almost built automobile assembly plants twice before deciding on locations in Texas and Mississippi. It was announced last month that the city of Marion, the city of West Memphis, and Crittenden County have partnered with Entergy Arkansas and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission to develop a so-called super site containing 1,800 acres. The site is adjacent to a Union Pacific Railroad Co. intermodal terminal. Five Class One railroads operate in the area, which Southern Business & Development magazine in Alabama once designated as the best place in the South for an automotive plant.
Like so many other river towns, Marion once had a reputation as an unruly place.
"The ferry landing at Hopefield was known as a haven for drinking halls, gambling, horse racing and robbery," Ralph Hardin writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. "However, the traffic of local inns and rooming houses was indicative of a steady rate of growth. . . . The railroad later became important to the continued growth and prosperity of Marion."
As the Marion School District became more of an attraction for families, the city's population soared from 881 in the 1960 census to 12,345 in the 2010 census. Now, an expanded Sultana museum could put the city on the map for tourists.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 08/19/2018