Marion bringing back Sultana festival for 2017

Marion bringing back Sultana festival for 2017

Chamber looking to build on success of inaugural event

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Marion Chamber of Commerce is making plans for a second Sultana Heritage Festival.

Event Coordinator Tracy Brick said they were pleased with the turn out last year and believe they learned some lessons from the first one that will make this year’s festival even better.

“I think last year’s festival turned out great,” Brick said. “But now that we have done it once, we kind of know what people are interested in and we are tailoring to make it a better show.”

The Sultana was a Mississippi River paddlewheel steamboat that exploded just north of Memphis in the early morning hours of April 27, 1865.

Over 1,700 people were killed, most of them Union soldiers who were former prisoners of war and were returning home from the war.

The Sultana is the greatest maritime disaster in U.S.

history and has close ties to Marion. Several early residents of Marion whose ancestors still live in Marion today helped rescue survivors. The remains of the boat sank near Mound City and are today buried 30 feet under a soybean field.

The city opened a temporary museum located on Washington Street containing documents and artifacts which tell the story of the disaster, and is in the planning stages of building a larger, permanent museum.

Last year’s festival attracted about 250 visitors.

Brick said this year’s event will have a full line-up of speakers who will talk about the Sultana and other Civil War topics, memorabilia, period music, food vendors, and living history re-enactors, but will be shortened to just one day, on Saturday, April 22, and will be moved to the Trinity in the Fields Episcopal Church parking lot instead of courthouse square.

Last year, the lecture series was held inside the sanctuary and the living history and vendors were on the courthouse square.

The lectures were well attended, but a rainstorm turned the courthouse square into a muddy mire.

“That’s one of the reasons we wanted to move it closer to the sanctuary because some of the comments we heard was that it was difficult to get to the speakers and then back across the street,” Brick said. “So if it does happen to rain at least we will be on solid ground and won’t have the problem we did last year with the mud.”

Brick said this year’s date also doesn’t conflict with any other event.

Last year the date coincided with the popular music festival Memphis in May, as well as a big Civil War show in Mansfield, Ohio. The Sultana Descendants Association also held their reunion that weekend and were unable to attend.

“We had quite a few who weren’t able to come last year because of conflicting shows,” Brick said. “So we have chosen a really good weekend.”

Brick said they hope to bring John Fogleman and Frank Barton, whose ancestors helped in the rescue back, as speakers, as well as General Ulysses S. Grant who was played by re-enactor Curt Fields, and the Civil War medicine exhibit. “We’re going to focus more on the speakers,” Brick said. “We feel that is where a lot of the interest was last year. So we will have the lecture series. And we have spoken to those who were here last year and they have all tentatively committed right now. General Grant was very interested when he was here last year about coming back. I don’t know that we will ever had a lot of re-enactors. They like to come more for actual battle sites.

But we will have memorabilia the soldiers used and the outdoor cooking and the woman who did the Civil War medicine.”

The event will conclude with a Civil War era church service.

“We did the outdoor church service last year on Sunday,” Brick said. “It was great, but it didn’t have a lot of attendance. So we feel if we do it as a kind of wrap-up to the festival and more as a memorial service to those who died on the Sultana that we will have a bigger crowd.”

Marion Advertising and Promotion Commission is again providing $20,000 in funding for the event.

Brick said they are looking forward to the festival and expect much bigger crowds.

“I think it is going to be a very good festival,” Brick said. “The interest in Sultana is there and we feel like it is something that will

continue to grow.”

By Mark Randall