Sultana Tragedy - Mansfield, OH
N 40° 45.528 W 082° 31.020
17T E 371951 N 4513088
This plaque is at the entrance to the Mansfield Memorial Museum and honors the victims of the Memphis, TN riverboat explosion of the Sultana that killed up to 1,700 people, most of whom were former Union soldiers returning home.
Waymark Code: WM2M99
Location: Ohio, United States
Date Posted: 11/19/2007
Views: 59
Above the names of those lost from Richland County, the plaque reads:
On April 27, 1865 the Sultana, a 260 foot, wooden hulled steamboat exploded, burned and sank on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee. More than 2,300 Union Soldiers were on board, six times the ships legal limit. More than 1,800 lives were lost in the disaster. Most were Union Soldiers on their way home from confederate prison camps. Among the 357 Ohioans lost were seventy-three men from Richland County.
According to Wikipedia.com (
visit link)
The Sultana, under the command of Captain J.C. Mason of St. Louis, left New Orleans on April 21, 1865, with 75 to 100 cabin passengers, and considerable livestock bound for market in St. Louis. At Vicksburg, Mississippi, she stopped for a series of hasty repairs and to take on more passengers, and well over a thousand crowded aboard. Most of these new passengers were Union soldiers (mostly from Ohio) just released from Confederate prison camps such as Cahawba and Andersonville. Sultana had been contracted by the United States government to transport these former prisoners of war back to their homes. With a legal capacity of only 376, the Sultana was severely overcrowded, and many of her passengers had been weakened by their incarceration and associated illnesses. Passengers were packed into every available berth, and the overflow was so severe that the decks were completely packed.