The Sultana Disaster Museum

Abraham Cassel was born on August 8, 1829 in Salford Township, Pennsylvania. In 1846, when he was seventeen, his parents and seven siblings moved to Jefferson Township in Richland County, Ohio. The 1850 census lists Cassel as a cooper, or barrel maker. Cassel got married on May 24, 1860 to Sarah Ann McCammon. He was 31 and she was 37. This was Sarah’s second marriage and she brought an eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter with her. Sometime before the nuptials, Cassel went to Reiterman Photography in Findlay, OH and had a wedding picture taken of himself. The couple and their two children moved to Union Township in Hancock County, Ohio, roughly ten miles southwest of Findlay. He now tended a sawmill.

 

Cassel enlisted at the age of 33 at Findlay, OH on August 22, 1861 in Company B, 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry and was mustered into Federal service on September 19, 1861. He was present with the regiment at the Battle of Stones River, TN (Dec. 31, 1862 and Jan. 1-2, 1863), Chickamauga, GA (Sept. 19-20, 1863), and during General Sherman’s campaign to capture Atlanta (May-July 1864). On November 6, 1864, he was captured at Kingston, GA by Confederate troops and shipped off to Cahaba Prison, situated along the Alabama River and about ten miles southwest of Selma. AL. In mid-March 1865, after the Alabama River overflowed its banks and flooded the prison stockade, the Union prisoners were shipped off to Camp Fisk, a neutral exchange camp set up four miles outside of Vicksburg, MS. Eventually, over 4,000 Union prisoners-of-war would arrive at Camp Fisk, all waiting to be exchanged and sent home to the North.

 

On April 24, 1865, Cassel, along with 1,951 men from the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia were loaded aboard the sidewheel steamboat Sultana. Along with other members of the 21st Ohio Infantry, Cassel claimed a spot on the front part of the second or cabin deck, forward of the smokestacks. At 2:00 in the morning of April 27, 1865, while the Sultana was shrouded in darkness and seven miles above Memphis, TN, three of her four boilers unexpectedly exploded. Although startled by the blast, Abraham Cassel made it safely to the water and later wrote, “At the time of the explosion I swam about three miles and was rescued at 10 a. m., more dead than alive.” Picked up by the small picket steamboat Pocahontas, he was returned to Memphis and taken to Washington Hospital, where he was listed as “uninjured.” Eventually released and sent to Camp Chase, near Columbus, OH, Cassel was officially mustered out of the service on May 30, 1865.

 

With the war ended, Cassel went back to working in a sawmill. In December 1873 his wife Sarah died of unspecified causes. He and Sarah never had any children of their own. Less than a year later, in September 1874, Cassel married his stepdaughter, Leora Brown. He was 45, she was only 16. It may have been a marriage of convenience because he could be helped by her in his deteriorating physical condition and she would benefit from a widow’s pension when he passed. In May 1889, Cassel filed for an Invalid Pension, claiming that he could no longer work because of his wartime experiences. He died at age 68 on May 10, 1898 at McComb, Hancock County, OH after suffering for some time from a “complication of diseases.” He is buried in McComb Union Cemetery, McComb, OH.