The Saint Charles Battle Monument

This granite shaft remembers what some historians call the single deadliest shot of the entire Civil War. On the seventeenth of June, eighteen sixty-two, a Union flotilla pushed up the White River to resupply an army threatening Little Rock. Confederate gunners hidden on the bluffs at Saint Charles opened fire.

One shell tore into the federal gunboat Mound City and punctured its steam drum. Scalding steam burst through the gun deck in an instant. Of the crew aboard, more than one hundred were killed, and most of the survivors were badly scalded, many scalded or shot in the water as they tried to escape.

The monument, raised in nineteen nineteen, lists the dead and is believed to be one of the few in the country honoring both Union and Confederate soldiers together, crowned by an inverted cannon barrel.