The Sultana Disaster

The Sultana stopped in Memphis on its last night. It arrived about 7 p.m. on April 26, 1865, unloaded 120 tons of sugar and left near midnight, leaving about 200 men behind. Designed for 376 passengers, it carried 2,127 people. Three of four boilers exploded around 2 a.m., seven miles north. Recent research puts the dead near 1,164, below the 1,547 once recorded. About 760 survivors were treated in Memphis hospitals, and 31 died there. Quartermaster Reuben Hatch proposed a kickback to the captain for a full load of prisoners, yet no one was ever held formally accountable.

What the plaque says

The Sultana Disaster One of the worst maritime disasters in world history occurred 7 miles north of Memphis on April 27, 1865, when the steamer Sultana exploded and burned with the loss of over 1,547 lives. Built to carry only 376 passengers, the Sultana had over 2,300 on board at the time of the disaster. Most were Union soldiers from Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Virginia, who were on their way home following their release from the Confederate prisons at Andersonville and Cahaba.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.6 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.9 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.0 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• Sun Studio — 1.1 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926 — steps away
• Elizabeth Avery Meriwether — steps away
• Piggly Wiggly — 0.2 mi
• Casey Jones — 0.2 mi