Louis Intres tapped to head Sultana Disaster Museum

Louis Intres tapped to head Sultana Disaster Museum

‘ To be able to work toward establishing a museum is extremely exciting to me’

news@theeveningtimes.com

As a young boy growing up in Fort Smith, Louis Intres was captivated by the stories he heard from his next door neighbor Leo Blakely.

Blakely was one of the last of the old time steamboat captains on the Mississippi River.

It was from Blakely that Intres first heard about the steamboat Sultana.

“He came from a long line of boat builders and riverboat captains and pilots,” Intres said. “He taught me about the river and intrigued me with stories about the romance of the river. And one of those stories he told me about was the Sultana and how it had two shipments of gold aboard when it exploded and sank in the river. I just always remembered that story and it stuck with me.” Intres, a history professor at Arkansas State University and retired banker, will now have a chance to pass the story of the Sultana on to a larger audience as director of the Sultana Disaster Museum in Marion.

The city has hired Intres to run its small temporary museum and help raise the funding that will be needed build a larger permanent museum.

“To be able to work toward establishing a museum is extremely exciting to me,” Intres said. “I applaud Marion for them wanting to tell the story and give the Sultana its place in history. The Sultana Museum in Marion will be a destination place for museum enthusiasts, for Civil War enthusiasts, American history enthusiasts, scholars, and people hearing about the story for the first time.”

The Sultana was a Mississippi River paddlewheel steamboat that exploded about seven miles north of Memphis in the early morning hours of April 27, 1865 killing more than 1,800 people, most of which were Union soldiers who had been held as prisoners of war and were returning home. The sinking of the Sultana is the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history — bigger than the Titanic struck which sunk after striking an iceberg in 1912. Many early residents of Marion helped rescue survivors and the boat’s remains are buried under a soybean field in Marion.

The city opened a small museum on Washington Street in 2015 to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the disaster and is proposing to build a permanent museum next to the Wool- folk Library.

The Haizlip Firm, which has been hired by the city to design the museum, is proposing a 100,000 square foot building which will cost about $2.8 million.

A consultant has estimated that the museum could attract

as many as 30,000 to

40,000 visitors a year.

Marion Advertising and Promotions Commission has agreed to spend $400,000 to help build the museum and another $75,000 a year to help defray operating costs over the next ten years.

Mayor Frank Fogleman said he is excited to have Intres lead the effort because

of his knowledge of

the Sultana and unique background as a banker and fundraiser.

Intres was a banker in Oklahoma and Arkansas for 38 years before changing careers to academia, and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for education charities and Arkansas State University athletics. He is finishing his Ph.D. in Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University where he also teaches undergraduate U.S. History courses.

“He brings a unique and attractive skill set,” Fogleman said. “He certainly has a depth of knowledge about the Sultana and deep interest in history, and yet he has been a banker and has done fundraising before. I think it was a fortuitous find for us and that he will be a very good fit for what we are trying to do here.”

Intres regularly lectures about the Sultana to historic and civic groups and has amassed a collection of thousands of historic documents relating to the boat and the disaster.

He will oversee a $40,000 to $50,000 budget and will be responsible for enhancing the current museum, fundraising, grant writing, working with the architects to develop the new museum, and to continue to raise awareness of the Sultana with other historical attractions, the public, and school groups.

“He is being hired to eat, drink, and sleep Sultana,” Fogleman said. “I expect him to further our cause and make our present effort better and to help further refine what we want to do with the new.”

Intres said Marion has a unique opportunity to tell a neglected piece of history that will at the same time draw visitors to the city.

“It’s a great story,” Intres said. “It’s an American story. But it is also Marion’s story. It is the last great tragedy of the Civil War and it deserves its place in history right up there with all of those great battles that everyone recalls. It is also in the heart of the Mississippi River Delta with all of those states and cities with great river and Civil War stories.

And Marion is right in the heart of it.”

By Mark Randall