Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Flood control
On the wall of Rob Rash’s office in West Memphis are framed photos of presidents of the St. Francis Levee District dating back to 1893. That was the year the district, which became one of the most powerful economic and political entities in the state, was established.
Rash, an engineer who serves as the district’s chief executive officer, is keenly aware of the organization’s colorful history and strong influence on east Arkansas. Districts such as this one were created as the forests of the Delta were cleared in the late 1800s. The districts were empowered to raise funds needed to build and maintain levees, thus allowing row-crop farming where there once had been vast stands of bottomland hardwood trees.
The state created the St. Francis Levee District to cover Craighead, Crittenden, Cross, Lee, Mississippi, Phillips, Poinsett and St. Francis counties. Railroad construction following the Civil War made it easier for timber companies capitalized by Northern investors to come into the region to clear trees. Land was then drained, and levees were built. Cotton was king, and this was the most prosperous area of the state.
There was a levee breach during the Great Flood of 1927. Thanks to the hard work of district employees during the next decade, there wasn’t a breach during the Great Flood of 1937. Water, however, still backed into the area.
“Following congressional passage of the Flood Control Act of 1928, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River Commission took this district’s levees and built on top of them,” Rash says. “People don’t realize that we’re the largest levee district in the country in terms of levee miles. We’re responsible for 411 miles of levees.”
Rash oversees three maintenance crews that serve eight counties.
“The original levees in this area were built by local people,” Rash says. “The Corps can sometimes forget our local people. One of my jobs is to remind them who we’re here to serve. A lot of other levee districts across the state quit collecting taxes from landowners and doing maintenance long ago, but we never did.”
Joining us on this morning is Steve Higginbothom of Marianna, a former state senator who has farmed in Lee County for decades. He is the district’s president. Prior to moving to Marianna in January 1978, he lived at Helena, where he graduated from high school before attending the University of Arkansas. Like Rash, he understands the district’s rich history and its importance to the Delta.
“Your district is only as strong as its weakest link,” Higginbothom says. “Our job is to ensure there are no weak links.”
District levees protect almost two million acres. There are 19 elected board members, one for every 100,000 acres.
“Believe it or not, about 95% of our turf battles these days are centered around hunting rights,” Higginbothom says.
The district has 21 employees. Rash, who has a degree in civil engineering from the University of Memphis, is widely regarded up and down the Mississippi River as being among the best in the business at what he does.
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break When the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay
— Led Zeppelin
“From an engineering standpoint, it works,” he says. “It’s not perfect, but it works. We have more than 100 years of outstanding maintenance awards here. I like to think we’re the gold standard throughout the country. I can promise you that our board doesn’t allow us to operate inefficiently.”
Rash, Higginbothom and I get in a truck and travel atop the main levee south of West Memphis. The district’s maintenance area extends to eight miles north of Helena. At one point, a tower rises in the distance. It’s the Gold Strike Casino near Tunica on the Mississippi side of the river.
Interns open and close gates for us as we proceed south and discuss a region where floods are the major markers of history.
“The 1930s were difficult for almost all Americans, but for Arkansas farmers, the Great Depression started with the 1927 flood, a disastrous event along the Mississippi River and its tributaries,” the late historian C. Fred Williams wrote in his history of Arkansas agriculture. “By June, water covered more than 6,000 square miles and all but destroyed the row crops. That year also saw a precipitous drop in housing construction and a downturn in the forest industry.
“Just as rural Arkansans were adjusting to their losses from the flood, another natural disaster struck. The drought of 1930-31 became almost as legendary as the flood. Rainfall had typically been an ally for farmers, but from April 1930 to January 1931, measurable precipitation was far below average. In August 1930, the official reporting station in Little Rock recorded its 71st consecutive rainless day. While not as severe as the Dust Bowl conditions of the mid-1930s, for Arkansas the drought’s effects were still devastating.”
Thousands of Arkansans gave up on farming and headed to the upper Midwest for factory jobs.
“Public assistance proved too limited and restricted, and families were forced to seek their own remedies,” Williams wrote. “For some, this meant moving from their cherished farmstead. Some moved out of state; others gave up farming and relocated to the larger towns in the region. Still others migrated from upland counties to Delta counties and initially hired out as day laborers on the area’s cotton plantations. At six cents a pound, standard wages for first picking in 1930, a hard worker could make $6 to $18 a day.”
As small farmers gave up, Delta plantations grew. That meant plantation owners and the levee boards on which they served increased in power.
“Some effort had been made at ditching and draining the Delta’s wet spots before World War II, but inadequate equipment limited those efforts,” Williams wrote. “Before the war, cotton’s low tolerance for heavy, wet soil presented farmers a challenge in maneuvering their fields amid the forest and finding elevation high enough to avoid overflow. By World War II, most of the acceptable cotton land was in cultivation.
“Cotton acreage continued to increase until 1955, but growth was much smaller compared with that of rice and soybeans, and farmers focused on those crops. The crops were aided in part by new technology, which made it possible to drain and dredge swampland. Wartime technologies produced giant, self-propelled, rubber-tired scrapers that could transport 14 cubic yards of dirt, and they were highly mobile. This equipment made it possible to bring land into cultivation.”
In 1954, Congress passed the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act. It was designed “to improve land already cleared for either crops or pasture” by concentrating on streams that were prone to flood. There were 12 watershed districts formed in Arkansas during the next 15 years. All but one were in the Delta.
“The 11 flood-control projects resulted in more than 400 miles of stream channelization and brought 4.7 million acres into drainage districts,” Williams wrote. “After 1970, federal officials modified the program and took steps to limit the acreage being developed for agriculture. But by that time, the Delta’s 4.4 million acres of forestland had been reduced to 1.8 million acres and half of the original 7.7 million acres of swampland were in drainage districts.”
By the early 1970s, the transformation of the Delta from a forested region to a row-crop region was complete. With farming dominating the economy, levee and drainage districts remained important.
The St. Francis Levee District’s influence had been felt as early as 1913 when it played a key role in George Washington Hays’ election as governor. A special election was called that year to fill the vacancy created when Gov. Joe T. Robinson was elected to the U.S. Senate.
“Hays relied on the support of remnants of former Gov. Jeff Davis’ faction of the Democratic Party,” Richard Niswonger wrote in the book “Arkansas Biography: A Collection of Notable Lives.” “His opponent, Stephen Brundidge, drew his strength from the towns and cities. Hays allied himself with the politically powerful Eugene Williams, treasurer of the St. Francis Levee District board, a group that was a major influence in Delta politics.
“Brundidge accused Hays of backroom dealings with the levee board. When the spring primary election seemed to be extremely close, Phillips County, a Delta county influenced by the levee board, held back its votes until the outcome in the rest of the state became evident. Then Phillips County registered a large vote for Hays. Despite charges of vote manipulation in east Arkansas, Hays easily won in the fall general election.”
Hays left office in January 1917. He later practiced law in Little Rock and his hometown of Camden. He died in September 1927 in Little Rock and is buried at Camden.
The levee district’s statewide political influence later waned, though it’s still a force to be reckoned with in northeast Arkansas.
“Many early districts found it physically and politically difficult to construct adequate levees to halt the overflow of the Mississippi River,” Donna Brewer Jackson writes for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Some people believed that building levees interfered with natural development of the land. Hunters in particular resented being told to vacate land they had hunted and fished for years. … Those who lived or ran stock on islands in the Mississippi River feared that levees would raise the level of the river and flood them out.
“There were attempts in some areas to cut levees and sabotage plans. But the majority of people benefited from levee-building districts. For example, prior to adequate levees in Mississippi County, about 5% of the alluvial land was in cultivation and another 5% was capable of cultivation. Almost 90% of the county was regarded as a hopeless mosquito and malaria-infested swamp.”
Once land was drained, instances of malaria fell rapidly. Jackson says doctors treated as many cases in a year as they once had treated in a week.
“It took many years for levee systems and drainage canals to be successful in keeping the water out,” she says. “Opposition by many landowners and Northern-owned lumber companies, who were averse to paying drainage taxes, hindered levee building for a time. In addition, many of the early levees were poorly constructed and were susceptible to collapse when pounded by violent floods. Through perseverance and sheer luck in many cases, districts became successful and enabled Arkansas to become one of the most productive farming states in the nation.”
The Great Flood of 1927 caused the system to be revamped on both sides of the Mississippi River. Herbert Hoover, the U.S. secretary of commerce at the time of the 1927 flood, said devastation was worse than it should have been due to the tinkering of humans.
“Despite unusually heavy rains, it was the levee system itself that resulted in floodwaters being poured into the Mississippi River Valley all at one time since tributaries had no room to expand due to the levees,” Jackson writes. “In the modern era, there has been a great deal of rethinking on the issue of levees and drainage districts. The fertility of the soil surrounding the Mississippi River and its tributaries has for millennia depended upon cyclical flooding of rivers.”
In the St. Francis Levee District and elsewhere in the Delta, the ageold battle of man versus the Mighty Mississippi and its tributaries continues to play out.