A flood of memories: How rising water imperiled Shiloh wounded

View of U.S. Naval Station at Mound City during the Civil War. (Library of Congress) 

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Days of heavy rain in late April 1862 sent the Ohio River over its banks at Mound City, Illinois, flooding a brick warehouse turned hospital and imperiling wounded soldiers from the Battle of Shiloh.

"Mound City is entirely underwater," the Chicago Tribune warned, noting that pools of stagnant water could breed malaria and kill patients. “If we do not remove the wounded quickly, our men will die like sheep.” [1]

“A wild waste of waters,” a witness called the surreal scene near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. [2]

“Old Father Mississippi is on a bender,” another newspaper warned. [3]

“MOUND CITY HOSPITAL SUBMERGED!” shouted a headline in an Ohio newspaper. [4]

A 1912 image of a building in Mound City
used as the U.S. Naval Hospital. The warehouse
was destroyed by fire in 1976.
(A History of Southern Illinois)

Floodwater crept into the hospital’s first floor, scrambling caregivers, who placed 24-year-old Otto Heimberger, 22-year-old Charles Kimbell and four other soldiers from Battery A of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery onto cots and slipped them through second-floor windows to safety.

The flooding briefly turned the hospital into a rescue operation within its own walls, as caregivers carried patients to higher floors or elsewhere and later moved them by boat and rail. But the facility continued operating as Union casualties poured in along the river.

Heimberger had arrived by steamer around April 20, nursing a leg wound from the battle’s first day, April 6. His fiancée soon joined him, watching him “with incessant solicitude and love." [5]

“Many anxious hearts here await tidings of their condition,” wrote the hometown newspaper about Kimbell and another gunner from the battery. [6]

Mound City had been transformed by the war into a Union hospital complex, supply depot and naval base supporting the Mississippi Squadron. Steamers and flatboats crowded the docks, ferrying wounded soldiers ashore. Carts and stretcher-bearers moved through the streets while brick buildings, warehouses and hastily erected tents served as hospital wards and storehouses for medical supplies.

Headlines in The Cleveland Leader
on April 21, 1862.

About two weeks after the battle, “upwards of one thousand wounded officers and soldiers” were receiving care in Mound City — more than doubling the town’s pre-war population of 900. In all, the town accommodated roughly 1,500 beds for patients.

Amid the surge, soldiers assigned to hospital duty moved through the wards alongside surgeons and nurses. A 15th Illinois soldier, designated to aid patients, described one hospital as a “splendid building.” The previous day, he had helped move 900 soldiers into it. [7]

“We are detailed to take care of the poor fellows, and shall probably remain some time,” he wrote in the aftermath of Shiloh. “You cannot think of the various ways men are shot in; most of ours are arm and leg wounds.” [8]

Another witness found the wounded in “every conceivable form.” Yet despite the rising waters, “an air of comfort” pervaded the hospital complex. [9] “Admirably arranged” and “well ventilated,” a Wisconsin newspaper called the complex, adding it provided “abundant and excellent” care. [10]

After his arrival at Mound City, Kimbell pleaded with surgeons not to amputate his wounded leg. He and the others in his regiment — “all Chicago boys,” according to the Tribune — had suffered leg wounds while hauling a cannon off the battlefield.

After arriving via Paducah, Kentucky, Kimbell’s father persuaded doctors to cancel the operation, and they reluctantly complied. (Charles survived, living until 1905.) The elder Kimbell even paid to send three other “Chicago boys” home, and the Illinois Central Railroad placed them in one of its best cars.

Not all were as fortunate.

Union vessels at Mound City. (Library of Congress)

Private Charles Augustus Brier of the 14th Wisconsin reached Mound City with a severe gunshot wound to the knee. Pneumonia soon followed, killing the 18-year-old from Webster’s Prairie on April 26.

“[W]e look around and behold a lovely family circle broken — a father in tears, a mother in anguish, brother and sisters bowed in sorrow and sadness,” William Thompson, a Baraboo, Wisconsin, businessman, wrote about Brier in a letter published in the local paper. [11]

Reflecting on the private's death, Thomson added:

An aerial view of flooding at flood-prone
Mound City in 1937. (Chronicling Illinois)

“Who then shall be held responsible for the sacrifice of the thousands of our young men, who have gone forth in the hour of our country's peril, to save us and our posterity from the otherwise fearful doom which awaits us? But the record has been made! Thus fell Charles Brier, of Baraboo, Wis., at the battle of Shiloh, in the 19th year of his age; and died at the Mound City Hospital, April 26, 1862.” 

After leaving the Mound City hospital, caregivers loaded Heimberger, Kimbell and other wounded onto a northeastbound flatboat, navigating the flooded docks and churning riverfront. Attendants later transferred them to an Illinois Central Railroad train, placing stretchers across the tops of the last car’s seats for the journey to Chicago, where friends met them and cared for them in private homes. [12]

Despite that care, Heimberger — one of more than 13,000 Union casualties at Shiloh — died on May 16, shattering his fiancée and a “large circle of friends.” The next day at 2 p.m., Chicago Light Artillery soldiers and members of the Cigar Makers’ Association attended the former fireman’s funeral at 220 East Van Buren Street, a short walk from Lake Michigan. [13]

These dramas began at Shiloh. In Mound City — a nondescript river town remade by war — they played out under the most trying circumstances and often ended in tragedy. 

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SOURCES

[1] Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1862
[2] Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1862
[3] Salem [Illinois] Weekly Advocate, April 24, 1862
[4]  The Cleveland Leader, April 21, 1862
[5]  Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1862
[6]  Baraboo [Wisconsin] Republic, May 7, 1862
[7]  Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1862
[8]  The Woodstock [Illinois] Sentinel, April 23, 1862
[9] Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1862
[10] Wisconsin State Journal, April 19, 1862
[11] Baraboo [Wisconsin] Republic, May 7, 1862
[12] First Illinois Light Artillery Volunteers, Chicago, Cushing Printing Co., 1899, Page 48
[13] Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1862