Mound City, Illinois

Mound City sits at the southern tip of Illinois where the Cache River meets the Ohio, just five miles north of Cairo. Founded at the abandoned settlement of Trinity in eighteen fifty-four and incorporated three years later, it was an ordinary river port before the Civil War changed everything. In eighteen sixty-one the Union Navy seized the town's marine railway and dry dock and turned Mound City into the headquarters of the Mississippi Squadron, the inland brown-water fleet that would open the western rivers for the Union cause.

Three ironclad gunboats, including the U.S.S.

Cairo, were built here. The only repair facility for eighty warships operated from these docks. A vast hospital complex treated thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers alike, staffed in part by nuns from Notre Dame.

More than eight thousand people rest in the national cemetery that still stands at the edge of town.