Cincinnati in The American Civil War - Civil War Memorialization and Tourism

Civil War Memorialization and Tourism

• The National Steamboat Monument on Mehring Way (near its intersection with Broadway) in Cincinnati commemorates the hundreds of Ohio soldiers who were liberated from Southern prison camps but perished in the Sultana tragedy. An Ohio Historical Society marker at Sawyer Point also recounts the Sultana tragedy, as an estimated fifty Cincinnatians died in the disaster. The ill-fated ship had been constructed in 1862 by the John Lithoberry Shipyard on Front Street in Cincinnati.
• Other markers and monuments are scattered throughout the town. Cincinnati has busts for Robert L. McCook and Friedrich Hecker and statues of Civil War-era composer Stephen Foster and Union general / President James A. Garfield. There are two statues of President Lincoln.
• The Cincinnati Civil War Memorial Hall was erected in 1908.
• Cincinnati's sprawling and well-landscaped Spring Grove Cemetery is the final resting place for 40 former Civil War generals. A prominent member of Lincoln's cabinet, Salmon P. Chase, who became Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, was also interred in the cemetery. Sculptor Randolph Rogers' statue of a Union infantryman on guard, "The Sentinel", was installed in Spring Grove Cemetery in 1865; it was one of the state's first formal Civil War monuments.
• The city's importance as a stop along the Underground Railroad is memorialized at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center on the Ohio River. The placement of the museum on the riverfront is symbolic. Crossing the river from Kentucky to Ohio meant the fugitives were escaping slavery and entering free territory.
• A number of Civil War reenactor encampments are held each year in the greater Cincinnati area, including "Civil War Days" the first weekend of May in Sharon Woods Park.