On February 3, 1865, near the end of the American Civil War, two squadrons of the Illinois cavalry attacked Mer Rouge and, according to the historian John D. Winters seized some horses, mules, while also freeing some enslaved African-Americans.
In August 1922, in a case that would attract national attention, members of the Ku Klux Klan abducted two white men--Filmore Watt Daniel and Thomas Fletcher Richard--in Mer Rouge.