The first of March and unsettled weather always brings to my mind the horrific story of the Eliza Battle. She was the steamboat that burned and sank during an ice storm on a freezing flooded Tombigbee River on March 1, 1858. In the early morning hours of that day, about 33 of the Eliza Battle’s almost 100 passengers and crew froze to death or drowned in the frigid waters of the Tombigbee. The disaster made newspaper headlines as far away as New Zealand.
Two years ago I wrote of the touching story of Mary Taylor and Phillip Saunders of Warsaw, Alabama. Their story of love and disaster was recorded in several newspapers including the Birmingham Age-Herald and the Macon Beacon. It was one of those unforgettable, almost too good to be true stories that sometime come out of the worst disasters. I recently came across the apparent original source of the story. It was an article written for the Mobile Register in 1893 by Lela Bacon Dickson of Tupelo, Mississippi.
According to Dickson, Samuel Taylor owned a huge plantation on the banks of the Tombigbee River near Warsaw, Alabama, an old river town southeast of Macon. “The beautiful and accomplished Mary Taylor (was) the only child and heir of this vast inheritance.” Everyone assumed that she would marry Phillip Saunders, her childhood sweetheart. However, that was not the case, for she fell in love with and on April 30, 1857 she married another. Saunders though heart-broken accepted his loss, but still maintained his affection for Mary.
At dawn on the day after the wedding, the wedding party — including the rejected Saunders — “assembled on the river wharf at Warsaw and boarded the steamer Eliza Battle, destined for Mobile to attend the Carnival (or Mardi Gras) festivities.”
As the Eliza Battle steamed south there was a “light-hearted and gay” air about the boat. That night was one of “revelry” and “toasting” to the young bride when suddenly the cry of “fire” rang out. “Fire raged above and below and the smoke in thick wreaths mounted higher and higher.” The captain ordered the passengers to the bow and a lifeboat there — but the boat was gone.
The passengers had no choice but to take to the freezing water and swim to flooded trees or attempt to climb on “floating cotton bales”. (The Battle had been carrying 1400 bales of cotton.) With no alternative to the fire but the cold river, the new bride and groom embraced and leaped together into the freezing swirling water. Both sank, but Mary appeared again on the surface gasping for air. Saunders saw her and dove in, grasping her hand. He swam with her to a tree, where he pulled her up and tied her to a limb to await rescue.
It was several hours before help arrived, but both were saved. For several weeks after they were rescued, Mary “lay lingering between life and death” and Saunders tended to her needs. After her recovery, she entered a state of depression over the loss of her husband and would have no part of society or Saunders.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Saunders enlisted in the Confederate army. His love for Mary had never abated, and he had never married. He was always found in the thickest of fighting and rose to the rank of colonel. During the fighting around Vicksburg, he was seriously wounded while heroically saving the life of another. His wounds were life threatening and he was carried home in hopes of recovering. It was then that a carriage arrived “and a lady, with stately grace, still beautiful although past the bloom of youth, was ushered into the presence of him whose faithfulness had won at last.”
Oops, it may really be too good a story to be true — or at least totally accurate. Some inaccuracies in the original story bothered, and so I called Carolyn Kaye who is as fascinated by the Eliza Battle story as I am and is the best genealogist I know. I picked apart the story separating known fact from fiction and she started tracking the people in the story.
There are a lot of factual errors in the story as written. The disaster occurred on March 1, 1858, not April 10, 1857. The boat would have arrived and departed Warsaw in the afternoon not early dawn. The wedding party was not going to Mardi Gras, as it had ended with Ash Wednesday the week before. When the Eliza battle caught fire there was no party going on and the passengers were asleep. The lifeboat was at the stern of the Battle, not at the bow and was not missing but surrounded by fire.
However, there are enough minute but accurate details of the disaster — such as the vivid descriptions of the suffering of the survivors before rescue and the mention of the steamer carrying survivors and bodies to Warsaw — in the story to show the writer had read or had a first hand account of what had happened.
In her research Carolyn came to the same conclusion as I did: She found no record of a Mary Taylor or Phillip Saunders in the Warsaw area or of a Phillip Saunders from west Alabama serving in the Confederate army at Vicksburg. However, Lila Bacon Dickson was born in Greene County, Alabama, in 1832 and was the granddaughter of one Samuel Taylor.
Is the story of Mary and Phillip true? It is, for sure, based around a real disaster of which the author had first hand knowledge. The question remains, though, is her story just a romanticized account or did Dickson simply confuse or change some names of an actual account? Whether completely true or not, it is a great story.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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