Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Her grandfather, the Rev. Flood refugees on the levee in Greenville. I mean, not necessarily down South but this was a huge flood across many states. Their intention, apparently, was to lower the level of the river and to save the city of New Orleans. They're tryin' to wash us away. Close Subscribe. Scott Simon will be back next week. The steady rainfall filled streams, bayous, creeks, and ditches in the Delta region and saturated the farmland. By the end of January, major tributaries such as the Ohio River were overflowing their banks. The levee has broken.. 4,500 added to flood zones in Lafayette Parish, What you should know about hurricanes, heavy rain and flood insurance, Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. McNeil was 6 years old in 1927, sleeping above his father's drug store in Melville. Too dark to write, another big storm coming noon. As heavy rainfall in 1926 continued into the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River began cresting in places like Cairo, Illinois, sending tons of water rushing southto Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. As heavy rains continued in the Mississippi River drainage area above Louisiana, more than 20,000 men were put to work sandbagging levees between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. 6George E. Scott to James L. Fieser, May 2, 1927, Hoover Papers. Both caused disruptions of life in southern Louisiana for thousands of people that arguably could be outranked only by the destruction caused during the Civil War. Area code. I lived with her a few years when I was a baby, and I'd go back in the summers. As the water rose on the levee, it was the levee guards duty to fill sandbags and place them on top of the levee in order to stay ahead of the water height. The song is written in the style of a lament, and is performed at a slow tempo. It was the mode of the times for yards to be outlined by carefully clipped privet hedges. Henry Waring Ball Diary, Mississippi Department of Archives and History Mildred Shepherd [Rushing] Diary, Shepherd-Baird family history book written by Mildred Shepherd Rushing. The air is saturated with moisture, and the luxuriance of plant growth is extraordinary. McCain, William D. The Triumph of Democracy 1916-1932 in A History of Mississippi, Volume Two, edited by Richard Aubrey McLemore. My mother is from there, her family is still there. President Bush announced this morning that an additional 7,000 federal troops will be sent to Louisiana to help with relief efforts. Simon & Schuster Photograph of the Evangeline Oak during the 1927 flood. A black and white reproduction of a photograph of a boat with a barber chair in Melville, Louisiana, during the great flood of 1927. Was he a good manager of this 1927 flood relief effort? Everybody in a bad humor except Jane, the cook. "The merchants worked all day through the night trying to scaffold up their store goods. SinceHurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans and the parishes to its south, there have been inevitable comparisons between the two disasters. It was a strictly political power play. That nobody would care if they were to disappear tomorrow. Also touched upon is the callous response of the federal government, depicted here via a fictional visit from President Calvin Coolidge and "a little fat man," where Coolidge's reaction to the devastation is a detached statement that, "isn't it a shame what the river has done to this poor cracker's land. It filled the air with stench, and in the sun it laid baking and cracking like broken pottery, dung-colored and unvarying to the horizon.'. A 12-inch fall is reported for Cairo. (This piece initially aired on Sept. 9, 2005, on Morning Edition.) (You can unsubscribe anytime), Courtesy of Center for Louisiana Studies at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, The Evangeline Oak during the 1927 flood. This would give the flood a shortcut to the sea and drop the river level at New Orleans, at the cost of flooding further south. For more on Katrina's aftermath, go to our Web site, npr.org. Some prominent English surnames include Chapman, Kershaw, Young, Reed, Langley, Tate and Buller. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, accession no. Jolie Holland covered "Louisiana 1927" on Hummingbirds & Helicopters Vol 1: A Benefit for South Texas, a benefit album released after Hurricane Harvey in 2018.[2]. Advanced Search About Data Blog. Some people got away alright. Mr. BARRY: Well, it's a good question. It's used to discharge water into Lake Pontchartrain, relieving pressure on Mississippi River levees around New Orleans. Instead, they amounted to $35 million, and there wasnt enough money to go around. Photograph of map by Princella W. Nowell. Thelma Sturgeon Smith from Alto in Richland Parish, recalled in 1981 that her family was living in Franklin Parish southwest of Winnsboro near the Oak Grove Baptist Church in May of 1927. I have, you know, only speculative answers. The river rose all day and the river rose all night. Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. The Flood of 1927 was described by US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country. It inundated 16,570,627 acres (about 26,000 square miles) in 170 counties and parishes in seven states, driving an estimated 931,159 people from their homes. Each caused widespread dislocation of large numbers of people for many months. The majority of the area was originally settled by French Canadian colonists and former colonial marines (coureurs de bois) from such outposts as Fort Toulouse and Fort Kaskaskia and later included 19th-century French-speaking soldiers and immigrant families. Perhaps the only other natural disaster in the United States that comes close to the level of devastation of Hurricane Katrina was the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. Mr. JOHN BARRY (Author, "Rising Tide"): You're welcome. Another flood control structure and spillway was built in the 1950s at Morganza to divert water from the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya River Basin, relieving pressure on levees from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Shelter from the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast, "Jolie Holland to Release Compilation Album Benefit Post-Harvey Recovery", Lonely at the Top: The Best of Randy Newman, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Louisiana_1927&oldid=1147989520, Song recordings produced by Lenny Waronker, Articles needing additional references from September 2018, All articles needing additional references, Articles with MusicBrainz work identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 3 April 2023, at 11:30. The Flood of 1927 showed that levees alone would not solve the problem of flooding on the Mississippi River and forced the federal government to reconsider its flood control policy. Example: Yes, I would like to receive emails from 64 Parishes. Some six hundred prefabricated cabins were sent to St. Martin Parish and more like them elsewhere to temporarily replace destroyed housing.". The water, higher and stronger than any previous flood, soon engulfed a large portion of the Mississippi Delta, covering some two million acres of land in its final reach. A new break appeared in the Bayou Rouge levee in Avoyelles Parish on May 14, and a levee on Bayou Courtableau between Port Barre and Washington in St. Landry Parish failed the same day. Mayor of Greenville John Aloysius Cannons notes show the confusion among the people as the event happened on April 21, 1927. Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination. President Coolidge came down in a railroad train. WERTHEIMER: That's . Mr. BARRY: He did a magnificent job in managing the logistics of feeding, delivering aid, shelter to 700,000 people, and half of whom were living in tents. Red Cross volunteers served about 50,000 meals a day in Lafayette alone, Mouton wrote. When the water finally subsided, the Red Cross provided seed, tools, and rations to farm families facing the daunting task of surviving the winter and starting a new crop in the spring. Jackson was the pharmacist, Edwin H. Myrick,in the 1981 report,recalled. : PI/ 1992.0002.039, The Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad Station in Helm, Mississippi, on April 29, 1927. "The fire whistle and the Standard Oil plant shrieked a warning as levee guards sped through the streets, firing pistols and rifles and shouting 'crevasse, crevasse.'". Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. Mr. BARRY: Well, it's a good question. The event, called simply the Great Flood of 1927, would change Louisiana forever. Mr. BARRY: Yeah, that's correct, and the idea is very comparable to simply pulling the plug out of the bathtub. They're tryin' to wash us away. In 1927, New Orleans was the most vital economic city in the South by far, and it was run entirely by bankers who didn't not even bother to consult elected officials; they simply decided they were going to dynamite the levee to reassure their correspondent banks in New York, London and Boston that they would never allow the Mississippi River to threaten the city. A break at either of these places would allow water into the Delta town with the countys largest population of about 15,000 people. Much of Lafayette remained dry. The men feared that if they allowed this labor force to leave they might not return. . The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Please add profiles of those who were born, lived or died in Evangeline Parish, Louisiana. ebrpl . In particular, the narrator lays out the widespread nature of the destruction ("river had busted through clear down to Plaquemines") and the volume of water the flood produced ("six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline"). The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 Album is a visual record of selected Louisiana losses from the 1927 Mississippi Basin flood. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, accession no. Thus, the people struggling to live on a sliver of ground above water, became aggravated about their circumstances. of submerging the alleged grave of Longfellow's Evangeline in thirty feet of flood water, oversaw the birth of triplets in an Opelousas, Louisiana, refugee center.'0 The image was that of an omnipresent Hoover . "Louisiana 1927" is on the brilliant 1974 album Good Old Boys that tells a narrative of people in the south who feel like the rest of the country is laughing at them. Urged to leave, residents boarded trains for higher ground in Opelousas, Bradshaw reported. Nearly one million people were left homeless. WERTHEIMER: Mr. Barry, clearly, we're looking at incredible devastation in photographs of New Orleans and the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines: shattered homes, piles of debris that are completely unrecognizable as whatever they once were.
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