April 1865 was a significant month in our nation’s history. Confederate Army Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Army Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9 at Appomattox, Va., ending the Civil War. On Good Friday, April 14, President Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed by a stage actor named John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Booth escaped the theatre after the shooting and died in a shootout on a farm in Port Royal, Va., 12 days later on April 26.
On April 27, the nation suffered the worst boiler accident in history and it was doubtful you ever heard about it. The steamship SS Sultana, enroute from Vicksburg, Miss., to St. Louis, exploded and took more than 1,800 lives. To this day, it is still the worst maritime loss of life, exceeding even the number of victims lost when the HMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk on April 15, 1912. The news coverage of the Sultana accident was overshadowed by the assassination of President Lincoln and the end of the Civil War.