Don Goin, a member of the Kankakee Valley Civil War Roundtable and former resident of Iroquois County, will speak on maritime disasters of the Civil War.

Goin has presented before on the explosion of the Sultana. The Sultana was a paddlewheel steamboat, exploded and sank on the Mississippi River. An estimated 1,600 passengers, many of them just released captives from prisoner of war camps in the South, died.

Goin’s presentation will be followed by storyteller Brian “Fox” Ellis, whose presentation on “Civil War Ghosts and Legends” is courtesy of the Illinois Humanities Council Road Scholars Speakers Bureau program.

Mr. Ellis will take listeners back in time with true stories and legends to the bloody battlefields, gruesome field hospitals and haunted graveyards of America’s Civil War. Mr. Ellis will appear as Mathias Stritt, a German immigrant who was one of the first to enlist in Peoria, Illinois, and later marched with General Sherman as he burned Atlanta and marched to the sea.

For more information, please contact the Iroquois County Genealogy Society at (815) 432-2215 or visit iroquoiscountyhistoricalsociety.com.