The Great Flood

It was a bad spring for flooding in East Arkansas. April rains were common in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, and that water flowed south, inundating almost 980,000 acres of farmland at an estimated cost of $175 million. Extension agents reported damage to row crops in 21 of the state’s 75 counties.

The counties impacted the most in terms of acres flooded were Poinsett (194,900), Greene (138,000), Prairie (125,000), Lawrence (80,000) and Randolph (60,000 acres). As bad as the floods in East Arkansas were, they pale in comparison to the Great Flood of 1927, an event that changed this state forever.

As Arkansas marks the 90th anniversary of that catastrophic event, interest in the flood remains high. That was evident at noon on a Wednesday earlier this month when several hundred people filled the Ron Robinson Theater in downtown Little Rock to watch The Great Flood, a riveting film-music collaboration between Bill Morrison and guitarist/ composer Bill Frisell.

When the silent documentary was released in 2014, a review by Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times called it “a beautiful exploration of the Mississippi River flood of 1927 that almost demands to be enjoyed using high-quality headphones. Its soundtrack is an artwork in its own right, one worth savoring as you would a fine recording.” The reviewer went on to describe the film as a “documentary that is more like visual poetry” with a score that “meshes with the images so evocatively that it seems as if they were born together. … With just the occasional bit of text on the screen, Mr. Morrison conveys the destruction and the aftermath.”

The film runs for 80 minutes, but that didn’t bother the weekday crowd, which stayed until the end. Arkansas, after all, was affected to a greater extent by the Great Flood than other states. Those at the theater seemed to understand that you can’t truly understand modern Arkansas without understanding how the events of 1927 began the inexorable decline of the Delta.

Morrison used old film clips from Clarendon, DeValls Bluff, Pine Bluff and elsewhere in Arkansas. The 1927 flood covered almost 6,600 square miles across the state with 36 of 75 counties affected. Nancy Hendricks writes in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: “In Arkansas, more people were affected by the floodwaters (more than 350,000), more farmland inundated (more than 2 million acres), more Red Cross camps were needed (80 of 154 total) and more families received relief (41,243) than any other state. In Arkansas, almost 100 people died, more than any state except Mississippi. In monetary terms, the losses in Arkansas surpassed any other affected state.”

The September 1927 issue of National Geographic described the scene in Arkansas City. The streets were dry at noon one day. By 2 p.m., according to the magazine, “mules were drowning on Main Street faster than people could unhitch them from wagons.” Hendricks describes the scene across east Arkansas this way: “Water poured in and had nowhere to go. Homes and stores stood for months in six to 30 feet of murky water. Dead animals floated everywhere. Rich Arkansas farmland was covered with sand, coated in mud or simply washed away, still bearing shoots from spring planting.”

Just as the state was starting to recover from the Great Flood of 1927, the Great Depression began in 1929. Problems were compounded by the state’s worst drought of the 20th century in 1930-31. That drought affected 23 states. Just as had been the case with the Great Flood, Arkansas bore the brunt of the damage. Rainfall in June and July of 1930 was the lowest on record for those months. July temperatures reached as high as 107 degrees and soared as high as 113 degrees in August. By Aug. 2, Little Rock had gone 71 days without rain. Arkansas’ leading cash crop was cotton in all but five counties (Benton, Carroll, Madison, Newton and Washington), and average yield fell from six to two bales per 20 acres.

T. Roy Reid of the Agricultural Extension Service noted that of the state’s 75 counties, only Benton County would have “sufficient food for its farm population and livestock feed to tide it over the winter.” Indeed, there was a food riot in England on Jan 3, 1931, as more than 500 people demanded food outside a Red Cross office. Though the drought eased in 1931, it remained serious. Historian Ben Johnson of Southern Arkansas University wrote: “Drought-stricken Arkansas became a metaphor for anxieties spawned by the Depression.”

In 1937, there was another huge flood in Arkansas. It inundated 1,037,500 acres of farmland and 756,800 acres of other land. An estimated 40,916 families were affected, and 75 relief camps had to be established in the state. An additional 14 camps were set up at Memphis to serve refugees from across the Mississippi River in Arkansas.

In 1927, political and economic power in Arkansas was centered in the Delta. The poorest counties were in the Ozarks, where rocky land proved unsuitable for growing cotton. Companies such as Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt were still far in the future.

The shift began with the Great Flood of 1927 and continued with the drought of 1930-31, the flood of 1937, the mechanization of agriculture and resulting loss of tens of thousands of Delta residents. Now some of the counties that were among the richest in 1927 are among the poorest, and some of those that were the poorest are now the richest.