1927 flood changed course of state, U.S.
It hit NLR on Easter Sunday
Growing up in North Little Rock, and later as head of the city’s History Commission, Sandra Taylor-Smith has heard and studied many tales about the “Great Flood of 1927” that spilled Arkansas River waters into the city’s downtown and low-lying neighborhoods.
The city was one of many hit by that year’s flooding, which ultimately affected 36 Arkansas counties, covered 2 million acres of the state’s farmland, and was later labeled by the National Weather Service as Arkansas’ top 20th-century weather disaster.
“It hit here on Easter Sunday,” which was April 17, Taylor-Smith said in an interview ahead of the flood’s 90th anniversary. “Growing up here, you’d hear stories from the elder people who talked about the 1927 flood. A lot of people had very vivid memories of that flood.”
The disaster led to the Flood Control Act of 1928, which strengthened
“The waters kept rising and rising. There was 5 feet of water on Washington Avenue [downtown].” CARY BRADBURN, North Little Rock historian
flood-prevention efforts along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The flood also had social and political ramifications, and led to a dramatic population shift among blacks, who left the Delta for northern cities.
It was the most devastating flood on record for the Mississippi River Valley. It affected seven states, but the worst destruction was in Arkansas, according to several historical accounts.
Almost twice the amount of farmland flooded in Arkansas as did in Mississippi and Louisiana combined. The Mississippi River spread to 60 miles wide in some places south of Memphis as a system of levees burst all along the river and its tributaries, according to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.
The Mississippi River was at flood stage for 153 days, the encyclopedia said, and floodwaters backed up into the already swollen Arkansas, White and St. Francis rivers.
Between 100 and 127 people died in Arkansas, according to historical accounts, and 200,000 more were left homeless. In all seven states affected by the flooding, about 750,000 people were left homeless and about 250 died. More than 23,000 square miles were submerged by floodwaters, according to historical accounts.
“This flood was a devastating thing,” said Thomas Jacques, assistant director at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena-West Helena. “Particularly, it was what really brought the Great Depression [of 1929] to Arkansas early.”
The flooding harmed farming income in Arkansas, certainly, Jacques said, but it also displaced people.
“Not only those directly involved in rural occupations, but this hit the towns of eastern Arkansas heavy, too,” he said. “Many of those towns were in bottomland areas. And those with the least were hit the hardest.”
Flooding began in the Midwest from the early melting of Canadian snows and heavy rains that saturated the ground from the summer of 1926 through the 1927 spring.
Some of the deeper floodwaters from that spring remained in parts of the state through the summer of 1927.
Record rainfall hit Arkansas that April — 16-20 inches in some areas, according to a National Weather Service rainfall map.
The rising water reached its apex April 29, according to a May 1, 1927, article in the Arkansas Gazette, which said the “great problem” was providing relief for “the state’s 60,000 refugees and the prevention of disease.”
Newspaper photos from the flood period show widespread devastation: In Clarendon in Monroe County, water reached the roofs of houses; Main Street in Gillett in Arkansas County was flooded; Arkansas City residents lived in boxcars and tents while their Desha County town was flooded from April through August, the Arkansas encyclopedia said.
“Practically all southeast Arkansas is in the grip of the flood and the general situation still is acute,” the May 1 Gazette article reported. “Many persons are marooned, and the rescue and relief problem is enormous. … Clarendon, Arkansas City, Lake Village and McGehee have inundated. Numerous cities including Little Rock, Fort Smith, Van Buren, Dardanelle, Batesville and Pine Bluff have been partly flooded.”
Little Rock recorded more than 10 inches of rainfall in the first half of April 1927, when the precipitation level had already reached almost 11 inches above normal by April 1, according to a Gazette article in 1977 about the flood’s 50th anniversary. On April 20, 7 inches of rain fell in a 12-hour period, according to a 1967 Arkansas Democrat article for the flood’s 40th anniversary.
Being at a lower elevation across the Arkansas River from the capital city, North Little Rock got the brunt of the flooding in Pulaski County. The river crested at 34.4 feet at North Little Rock by April 21, 1927, 10 feet above statutory flood stage, according to a 1957 article in North Little Rock’s local newspaper, The Times.
By comparison, during the 2016 flooding in Little RockNorth Little Rock, the river crested at 24.9 feet.
“The waters kept rising and rising,” North Little Rock historian Cary Bradburn said of the 1927 flood. “There was 5 feet of water on Washington Avenue [downtown].
“There was also a torrential rain midweek during the flood,” in the days after Easter, Bradburn said. “So there was the combination of the flood and the rain that put North Little Rock underwater in a lot of areas.”
The Baring Cross Bridge, built in 1873 across the Arkansas River between Little Rock and North Little Rock, became so unsteady from the raging river that the Missouri Pacific Railroad “moved a train of 15 freight cars loaded with coal” in hopes that the weight would secure the bridge, according to A History of North Little Rock: The Unique City by Walter Adams.
By April 21, the southern portion of the bridge collapsed into the river, taking the railroad cars with it. The bridge was rebuilt by 1929, Bradburn said.
In 1927, North Little Rock’s downtown business district extended to the river, and the floodwaters covered everything as far north as Broadway.
“There were two full blocks of businesses between there and the river,” Taylor-Smith said. “There was a whole lot of commerce to be flooded.”
A photo of Twin City Bank, at Second and Main streets in 1927, just north of Washington Avenue, showed sandbags outside the bank, which remained open. Customers arrived by boat, Taylor-Smith said.
Bradburn said: “Life just sort of carried on. A lot of businesses continued to operate with the floodwaters there.”
The Cotton Belt Railroad helped the community by taking boxcars down the tracks along Arkansas Avenue for residents to load with belongings from their flooded homes, said former City Treasurer Mary Ruth Morgan, whose parents lived at 516 Arkansas Ave. when the flood hit.
Morgan was born in December 1928, and remembers her mother’s vivid stories about the flood.
“Mother said they stopped the boxcars and they told [residents] to put anything in the boxcars you wanted to save,” Morgan recalled last week. “The Cotton Belt didn’t charge them. They loaded up the boxcars from all the neighbors on that side of the street [the river side]. They pulled the boxcars away, and [residents] didn’t know where they put them, but they took them somewhere to high ground.
“When the water receded, Mother talked about how horrible the inside of our house was,” she said. “And when they got it fairly cleaned out, the Cotton Belt moved the boxcars back and helped them unload it all back into their houses and didn’t charge them. I thought that was quite unusual.”
Things didn’t go nearly as well for sharecroppers in the Delta. Several historical accounts and books tell of black people from the region being stranded atop levees, forced to work in poor conditions on damaged levees, and given less and lower-quality food than white people who were affected by the floods.
“The implication was there were a lot of planters who were concerned that if they rescued their laborers from the levees that they would leave, so they left them there for extended periods,” the Delta Cultural Center’s Jacques said.
After the flooding, blacks began what historians have called “The Great Migration” to northern cities, causing a large population shift from the South.
With little or no federal aid provided by the administration of Republican President Calvin Coolidge for flood-devastated areas, many black people switched their allegiance from the Republican “party of Lincoln,” bringing about long-term social and political changes in the country, according to the Britannica Online Encyclopedia.
Blacks from the Delta took trains to wherever they went north, settling in major cities such as Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit, Jacques said.
“Those were areas where racism was seen as being less overt, and there were job opportunities,” Jacques said. “You mix that with the further mechanization of agriculture, and it all creates the great losses of population that you see happen over the decades following.”
Things didn’t go nearly as well for sharecroppers in the Delta. Several historical accounts and books tell of black people from the region being stranded atop levees, forced to work in poor conditions on damaged levees, and given less and lowerquality food than white people who were affected by the floods.