Tennessee history for kids
New Sultana Museum 36 years in the making
In April 1865, the steamboat exploded on the Mississippi River a few miles north of Memphis, killing 1,167 people – the vast majority of them Union prisoners of war on their way home after the Civil War.
This column is connected to the Sultana, but it tells a different story. It explains how a group of history buffs have made Americans more aware of the story and are responsible for a 20,000-square-foot Sultana Disaster Museum about to be built in Arkansas.
The story starts on April 26, 1987, when the Knoxville News Sentinel ran a notice pointing out that the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable would meet that afternoon at the Sultana monument at the Mount Olive Cemetery. The guests of honor were two elderly people whose fathers had been on the Sultana.
“I honestly didn’t know if anyone would show up,” recalls Norman Shaw, who called the meeting in the first place. “But, lo and behold, I go out there and there were about 50 people.”
Shaw took down names and phone numbers and promised he’d organize a bigger event with lectures about the Sultana the following year.
This was the beginning of what is now known as the Sultana Association of Descendants and Friends.
Starting in 1988, they met in Knoxville every April – that being the month of the tragedy. The meetings grew in attendance.
“This was before the internet,” Shaw said. “We publicized these events by mailed newsletters and word of mouth.”
Over the years, these meetings drew several people fascinated with the Sultana. One was Memphis attorney Jerry Potter, who was researching a book about the tragedy. Another was former Chicago-area police officer and middle school teacher Gene Salecker, who was researching another book about the Sultana and who had been collecting artifacts related to it for years.
A third was Louis Intres, an Arkansas banker who grew up hearing the Sultana story. “I was raised by Leo Blakely, who piloted steamboats on the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers,” Intres explained.
In 2002, the annual meetings began rotating from Knoxville to other places such as Memphis and Vicksburg, Mississippi. Then, in 2008, Louis Intres left banking and went back to school to get a Ph.D. in history. He later became a professor at Arkansas State University.
“My new job allowed me to study the tragedy and devote time to it,” he said.
Eventually the group started talking about the idea of a museum.
As a first step toward that goal, Intres convinced administrators at Arkansas State to host an exhibit in 2011 that largely consisted of artifacts from Salecker’s Sultana collection.
“About 3,000 visitors came to see that exhibit – 90 percent of whom had never heard of the Sultana before,” he recalled.
Enter Marion, Arkansas, Mayor Frank Fogleman. Since Marion is close to the site of the Sultana explosion, Fogleman asked if his town could host similar exhibits in 2012 and 2013. This led to the creation of a 501(c)(3) organization called the Sultana Historical Preservation Society.
On the 150th anniversary of the disaster in 2015, it opened a modest Sultana Disaster Museum in a small building on the Marion town square.
Among its displays: a model of the boat; signs that explained the series of events that led to the explosion; and photos of hundreds of its victims and survivors – most of whom had been gathered by Salecker.
Since 2015, the museum has drawn visitors from every state and 14 foreign countries. Along the way, the Marion Advertising and Promotion Commission did a feasibility study that predicted that at least 50,000 people would visit a larger, first-class Sultana museum.
In recent years, new people have been added to the board, such as retired Arkansas Judge John Fogleman (a cousin of Frank Fogleman). John and others started raising money, a process made more challenging by the COVID pandemic.
The first seven-figure private donor was HSB – whose history as the Hartford Steam Boiler Fire and Insurance Company is closely related to boiler explosions. The most recent was Memphis-based FedEx.
The new Sultana Disaster Museum will be about 20 times larger than the existing museum.
It will be staged in what was once the gymnasium of Marion High School, with a 3,500 square foot wing added to it.
“The centerpiece will be a model of the front part of the steamboat,” John Fogleman said. “It will contain displays on prison camps such as Andersonville and Cahaba, displays on how a steam engine works, and displays on the rescue. The museum will also include a theater that will show a documentary done on the Sultana disaster.”
If all goes well, it will break ground this fall and open in 2025.
The museum, and the story behind it, exemplifies a point about any good cause: There’s only so much one person can do – call a meeting, write a book, etc. Put together half-a-dozen resourceful people devoted to a cause, and they can do something far greater.
Bill Carey is the founder of Tennessee History for Kids, a nonprofit organization that helps teachers cover social studies.
