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    The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937
    The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937
    The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937
    Ebook183 pages46 minutes

    The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937

    By James E. Casto

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    From the time settlers first pushed into the Ohio Valley, floods were an accepted fact of life. After each flood, people shoveled the mud from their doors and set about rebuilding their towns. In 1884, the Ohio River washed away 2,000 homes. In 1913, an even worse flood swept down the river. People labeled it the "granddaddy" of all floods. Little did they know there was worse yet to come. In 1937, raging floodwaters inundated thousands of houses, businesses, factories, and farms in a half dozen states, drove one million people from their homes, claimed nearly 400 lives, and recorded $500 million in damages. Adding to the misery was the fact that the disaster came during the depths of the Depression, when many families were already struggling. Images of America: The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937 brings together 200 vintage images that offer readers a look at one of the darkest chapters in the region's history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439622988
    The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937
    Author

    James E. Casto

    Retired newspaperman James E. Casto of Huntington, West Virginia, has written four previous Arcadia Publishing books. In 2006, the Cabell County Public Library paid tribute to his efforts as an historian by naming its James E. Casto Local History Room in his honor.

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      Book preview

      The Great Ohio River Flood of 1937 - James E. Casto

      history.

      INTRODUCTION

      As a boy, I grew up listening to my mother, stepfather, and other adults talk about the great Ohio River flood of 1937. They recalled the flood in much the same way other Americans would later remember where they were when U.S. president John F. Kennedy was killed or when the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001. Looking back, I suspect listening to their flood stories may have planted the seed that has grown into this book.

      My hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, was one of the Ohio River communities devastated by the 1937 flood. I was born in 1941, and when I was five or six years old, we moved into one side of a frame duplex that stood on Huntington’s Fourth Avenue, just around the corner from the flooded houses on Fifteenth Street shown in a photograph on page 61. When the talk turned to the 1937 flood, I would look at our little house and try to imagine what it must have been like with the floodwaters lapping at the roofline of our front porch.

      Hell and High Water was the way Time magazine of February 1, 1937, described the flood, and the description could not have been more accurate. The raging floodwaters inundated thousands of houses and businesses, factories and farms in a half dozen states, drove a million people from their homes, claimed nearly 400 lives, and recorded $500 million in damages. Taking inflation into account, that figure would translate into more than $7 billion today. Adding to the misery was the fact that the disaster came during the depths of the Great Depression, when so many American families already were struggling simply to put food on their tables.

      There had been Ohio River floods before, of course. When the first settlers made their way into the Ohio Valley in the early and mid-1700s, they found the river was subject to dramatic changes. When the weather was dry for weeks at a time, it could be so shallow that one early settler described it as a mile across and a foot deep. At some points you could walk across it and hardly get your feet wet. Yet, in periods of heavy rainfall or when a sudden thaw quickly melted the accumulated winter snow from the nearby hillsides, the Ohio River could become a raging torrent.

      Major Ohio River floods were recorded in 1862, 1883, and 1884, when the river washed away an estimated 2,000 homes along its length. Although it hardly seems a laughing matter, people familiar with the Ohio and its history joke about the firehouse in Marietta, Ohio, that was swept away, fire engine and all, by the flood and, six days and many miles later, turned up as part of the Louisville Fire Department.

      The Ohio flooded again in 1901, 1907, and 1913. The high water of 1913 brought with it a flood of public protest. Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt complained that millions of dollars were going to aid the flood victims but not one penny had been spent on flood prevention. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson also was concerned and convened a special commission to study what could be done to tame the river. The commission examined several options, including the erection of levees and the construction of flood-reducing reservoirs. But the outbreak of World War I shelved such plans. And their revival after the war again was sidetracked by the Black October crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression.

      In 1933, the Ohio River flooded yet again, but in the upper end of the Ohio Valley that was just a curtain raiser to the history-making flood of 1936. On St. Patrick’s Day that year, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,—where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers come together to form the Ohio River—saw its worst flood ever. Fed by extraordinary snowmelt and rain, the three ice-filled rivers quickly left their banks, and soon the city’s downtown was under as much as 15 feet of water. It should come as no surprise that when people in Pittsburgh and other towns along the upper Ohio talk about flooding, they generally offer remembrances of what happened in 1936, not 1937.

      Chapter one of this book offers a number of images of early Ohio River floods, and chapter two chronicles the 1936 flood. What then follows is a state-by-state look at the devastation wrought by the 1937 flood.

      Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania towns again were flooded but escaped a repeat of the record-setting crests of the year before. Huntington and other West Virginia communities bore the flood’s brunt in the mid-Ohio Valley. In Ohio, the river that gives the state its name broke all previous flood records. Portsmouth was protected by a floodwall, but fears that the river would come crashing over the wall prompted officials to open the sewers and let the floodwaters slowly creep in. Cincinnati was confronted by the twin menaces of flood and fire.

      In Kentucky, Louisville was perhaps hit harder than any other city along the river. The flood turned Paducah into a ghost town with more than 27,000 of its 33,000 residents carried to safety by a makeshift flotilla of rescue boats. River towns in Indiana were devastated. And at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi River, army engineers had to use force to disband armed farmers determined to prevent them from blasting out a fuse plug to route the floodwaters away from the town.

      The widespread death and devastation inflicted by the 1937 flood proved flood control was no longer something that could be ignored, and the federal government finally began to take meaningful action.

      Again, as had happened earlier in the century, the outbreak of war halted most flood-control efforts. But this time, the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan, and the arrival of peace saw not only the erection of more earth levees and concrete floodwalls along the Ohio River, but also the construction of a major network of flood-control dams and reservoirs on its tributaries. As detailed in chapter nine, these reservoirs, many constructed on tributaries at great distances from the Ohio River itself, are designed to hold water back when flooding threatens and then release it as the rivers begin to fall to a safe level.

      Time and time again, the region’s floodwalls and flood-control reservoirs have proven they are more

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