The steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near
Memphis, killing 1,700 passengers including many discharged
Union soldiers. The accident is still considered the largest
maritime disaster in U.S. history in terms of lives lost.

The Sultana was launched from Cincinnati in 1863. The boat
was 260 feet long and had an authorized capacity of 376
passengers and crew.

        
On April 25, 1865, the Sultana left New Orleans with 100
passengers. It stopped at Vicksburg, Mississippi, for repair
of a leaky boiler.

R. G. Taylor, the boilermaker on the ship, advised Captain J.
Cass Mason that two sheets on the boiler had to be replaced,
but Mason ordered Taylor to simply patch the plates until the
ship reached St. Louis.

   
    
    
   

The only known photograph of the Sultana taken on the last
day of its fateful voyage in Helena, Arkansas on April 27,
1865.

Model of Sultana by artist & Lincoln Shrine docent Ken Jolly.

Ulysses S. Grant (April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885)

Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War leader and 18th president of the
United States, was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant,
Ohio.

The son of a tanner, Grant showed little enthusiasm for joining
his father’s business, so the elder Grant enrolled his son at
West Point in 1839.

Though Grant later admitted he had no interest in the military
apart from honing his equestrian skills, he graduated in 1843
and went on to serve in the Mexican-American War, though
he opposed it on moral grounds. He then left his beloved wife
and children again to fulfill a tour of duty in California and
Oregon.

On April 26, 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving
1.8 million children, began at the Franklin Sherman Elementary
School in McLean, Virginia.

Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated
in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard
double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending
doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo.

One year later, on April 12, 1955, researchers announced the
vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard
part of childhood immunizations in America.

Jonas Salk holding bottles of culture he        
used to develop the polio vaccine.

Today, polio has been eliminated throughout
much of the world due to the vaccine; but,
there is still no cure for the disease and it
persists in a small number of countries in
Africa and Asia.