July 2, 2012
Great Flood of 1927 in the Mississippi


"...The people of the Delta fear God and the Mississippi..."


                                                        -David Cohn

Gentle Reader,

The Great Flood of 1927 was devastating in the Delta.  Here are some basic statistics about the damage that the flood had on the land.  However, these stats don't begin to account for the human toll and how this flood experience changed the Delta forever...

*one of most powerful natural disasters of the 1900's

*followed several months of unusually heavy rains in late 1926 and early 1927

*river was over 80 miles wide at some locations, at the height of the flood

*after the failure of the levee at Mounds Landing, Mississippi, the river flowed with the force of Niagara falls

*resulted in flood of an area the size of Connecticut

*ten feet of water covered towns up to 60 miles away from the river

*the area around Mounds Landing was covered with 100 feet of water

*affected an area of 27,000 square miles

*over 130,000 homes were lost

*700,000 people displaced

*246 flood-related deaths reported

*property damage estimated at 350 million dollars, which would be about 5 billion dollars today

We visited the 1927 Flood Museum in Greenville, which is in the same town as the synagogue.  It's a small museum, but very powerful in the depiction of the human suffering and the community spirit that flourished as people tried to survive and help others survive.  A cooperation in the time of severe crisis was very evident in the documents and photographs.  One cannot help but remember the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf region while at this museum...

 "It was like facing an angry dark ocean.  The wind was fierce enough that that day it tore away roofs, smashed windows, and blew down the smokestack -- 130 feet high and 54 inches in diameter -- at the giant A.G. Wineman & Sons lumber mill..."

from Rising Tide by John Barry

I saw a whole tree just disappear, sucked under by the current, then saw it shoot up, it must have been a hundred yards away.  Looked like a missile fired by a submarine...

-one man working on the levee recalled, decades later

from Rising Tide by John Barry

 "

John Barry, in his book Rising Tide, says the following about the Flood of 1927:

"...The river threatened their society too... and they would do whatever was required to preserve it...  It began as one of man against nature.  It became on of man against man.  for the flood brought with it also a human storm.  Honor and money collided.  White and black collided.  Regional and national power structures collided.  the collisions shook America...On the levee in downtown Greenville, the men watched the river rage for a few more minutes.  the rain stung.  The river was, literally, awful.  Yet they took a certain pride in its awfulness, in the greatness of the river.  Confronting it made them larger.  For a few more minutes, frozen by it, they stood there. .. They would not go home for hours; some would not go home for days.  they had work to do..."

We learned about Senator Percy during our seminar on The Great Flood of 1927, about his tremendous influence on driving the KKK out of the Mississippi Delta region.  We also learned about the family saga and how events that followed pitted father against son in tragic ways.  Being teachers, we talked about how this story lends itself to a portrayal in tragic proportions, and we even tossed around the idea of having students research the events related to the Percy family and then dramatize them as a "blues opera."  Has potential....!

Namaste,

Marianne