The Sultana Disaster
Charles Lepold, Chairman of the Military Committee at the Wayne County Historical Society, on the 1865 disaster.
This engraving from Harper’s Weekly depicts the destruction of the steamship Sultana, which to this day remains the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history.
A number of Wayne County residents serving in the 102nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry were captured in Alabama on September 24, 1864, and held at a Confederate prison at Cahaba, Alabama. These P.O.W.s at Cahaba were later victims of one of the most tragic events of the war. Upon their release at the end of the conflict, the prisoners from the 102nd were loaded onto a steamboat, the SS Sultana, to begin their voyage home up the Mississippi River. Despite having a capacity of only 376, the overloaded steamer was carrying 2,200 people, 2,000 of whom were paroled P.O.W.s. In the early morning of April 27, 1865, one of the boat’s boilers exploded, destroying the vessel and sending men and hot coal flying into the water. The Wooster Republican reported the destruction: “Hundreds of people were blown into the air, and descending into the water, some dead, some with broken limbs, some scalded, were borne under by the resistless current of the great river, never to rise again.” 1,800 of the Sultana’s passengers died in the blast or drowned and only a few hundred men were able to cling to pieces of wrecking in the darkness until rescuers arrived hours later.1 Three of these survivors, Otto Bardon, William Christine, and Philip Horn, were from Wooster, and wrote accounts of their experience, which can be read here.
1 “Shocking Steamboat Disaster – Explosion of the Steamer Sultana,” Wooster Republican, March 4, 1865.