Re: The Sultana

Date: April 26, 2004

"Sultana tragedy

When the Sultana exploded and sank in April, 1865, 14 of the men on board were Ashland County residents, and all but one were members of the 102nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

The exception was Pvt. David Grubaugh of Company G., 65th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

The others were: From Company B: Pvt. Adam Bahn, Jr., Pvt. Daniel Fisher, Jr., Cpl. Henry Krebbs, Pvt. James M. Mercer, Cpl. John McCrea and Sgt. Reuben H. Richards. Company D: Sgt. Joseph B.F. Corts. Company K: Pvts. John Cassel, Jr., John F. Hartman, Reuben Leidig, Charles P. Ogden, Jeremiah Singer and George Steinmetz.

Grave markers or memorial headstones for most of these soldiers can be found in several of Ashland County's cemeteries.

ASHLAND -- John Cassel Jr. was just 25 years old when he was killed in a Mississippi River steamboat explosion April 27, 1865.

A Union soldier who enlisted in Company K of the 102nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Cassel had been a prisoner of war. He was finally free and on his way home when the steamboat he was aboard, the Sultana, blew up near Memphis, Tenn.

His name is chiseled on a slab of marble in the Patterson Cemetery, on a ridge east of Savannah.

There are two memorials dedicated to Richland County's Sultana dead in Mansfield's South Park and at the Mansfield Memorial Museum at 34 Park Avenue West.

Cassel was one of 14 Ashland County soldiers who died in what has been termed one of America's worst maritime disasters. More than 1,700 people, most of them liberated prisoners of war, were killed. Fewer people died on the Titanic in 1912.

The Ashland County Historical Society will have a Sultana evening with Gene Eric Salecker, author of "Disaster of the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865" on May 3, starting at 7 p.m. at the Ashland Community Arts Center, 209 Center Street.

The event is free.

Salecker, an Illinois police officer, has written about Civil War naval operations and has produced a book entitled "Fortress Against the Sun," the story of American B-17 bombers in the Pacific during World War II.

Robert Crego, an Ashland County historian, said Salecker's book was printed in 1996 by the Naval Institute Press.

Crego said the Sultana death toll exceeded even that of the Titanic with 1,550 dead and the Empress of Ireland sinking in the St. Lawrence River in 1914 with 1,024 dead.

"The sinking was overshadowed at the time by the grim shroud of sadness cast over the Union states by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14," he said.

Crego said the river steamer was designed to carry 376 passengers, but had been loaded at Vicksburg, Miss., with an estimated 2,250 to 2,300 people, of which about 2,000 were paroled Union military prisoners. Many, he said, had been in notorious prison camps like Andersonville, Ga., and Cahaba, Ala. Of the prisoners, 650 were from Ohio, many of them from Richland and Ashland counties.

As the Sultana sailed north on the Mississippi, Crego said boiler problems were detected and some fast repairs made.

At 2 a.m. on April 27, about seven miles north of Memphis, the boilers exploded. Crego said some soldiers were killed by the explosion, scalded to death by hot steam, burned by red hot cinders or catapulted into the freezing cold river. Most, he said, were too weak from their prison camp experiences to save themselves. The vessel was in the middle of the broad river when the explosion occurred.

News Journal staff report ©2004 News Journal"