Sultana Heritage Festival this weekend

Sultana Heritage Festival this weekend

Marion to host annual gathering, rain or shine

news@theeveningtimes.com

Although rain is in the forecast for this weekend, there will be plenty to do both indoors and outdoors at the 2nd Annual Sultana Heritage Festival.

“We’ve made arrangements for all exhibitors and events to be inside or under tents,” said Marion Chamber of Commerce Director of Member Services & Events Tracy Brick. “The owner of the building next to the museum has graciously allowed us to use part of that building. So we’re going to tent off Washington Street. So we will be in the dry.”

The festival commemorates the 1865 sinking of the steamboat Sultana which is the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. History.

The event will kick off Saturday at 9 a.m. with a cannon demonstration by Bankhead’s Battery, Inc.

and will fire the cannon four more times during the day.

The lecture series will follow at 9:30 at Trinity in the Fields Church with Nancy Hendricks who will be dressed in full Civil War costume and will speak about the women who were on the Sultana.

“A lot of people don’t realize that there were civilians and family and women who were on there,” Brick said.

Louis Intres, an Arkansas State University history professor and Sultana scholar who was recently named by the city as Director of the Sultana Museum, will speak from 10:4511:30 about Reuben Hatch. Hatch was the Chief Quartermaster at Vicksburg who accepted bribes to overload the Sultana with returning prisoners of war.

Hatch was never tried for the disaster and had a long history of corruption, but was saved by the intervention of President Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

“That’s going to be really interesting because Hatch was the villain in all of this,” Brick said.

The series will resume after a two hour lunch break at 1:30 when keynote speaker Dr. James Armistead of the Naval War College who will speak about the aftermath of the disaster.

“He is going to talk about all of the legal issues and lawsuits and court cases,” Brick said.

The series will conclude with Jake Koch from Andersonville Prison National Historic Site at 2:45 who will speak about the Union prisoners who were aboard the Sultana and were held in captivity in the notorious prison.

“He’s going to talk about Andersonville and what happened there and tie it in to the Sultana,” Brick said Outside there will be Civil War period music by Lee Miller and the 52nd Regimental Band, and several living history re-enactors.

Donald Harrison will be in costume as Mr. Wolverton from Adamsville, Tenn.

who was on the Sultana at the time of the explosion and was a member of the 6th Tennessee Cavalry and was later imprisoned at Cahaba.

Dyan Bohnert will perform a medicine woman show. Bohnert started the show after researching a hand written cookbook left to her by her Apache grandmother and is a concoction of recipes, remedies, stories, utensils, and history.

Author John T. Wayne, grandson of screen legend John Wayne, will be on hand to autograph copies of his books and to offer his own take on the Sultana Disaster.

“I’m interested to hear what he has to say,” Brick said. “He has some ideas about it being a conspiracy.” The Sultana Camp No.1 Sons of the Union Veterans will also be on hand, as well as Bethel Cemetery Restoration Group which is restoring a historic cemetery in Crawfordsville, and the Delta Cultural Center.

There will also be food trucks from Funkee’s Cafe, Easy Sliders, and Indian Joe’s Chuck Wagon.

And for the kids, each child will be given a card with a drawing of the Sultana and can go around to the different vendors and collect stickers which spell out “Sultana.”

The festival will conclude with a Civil War era church service inside Trinity in the Fields at 4:30.

The event is free to the public.

“I think we have a great lineup of things to do,” Brick said.

By Mark Randall