Author David Welky researched the great flood of 1937 which affected both the Ohio and Mississippi River systems. Having lived in both Cincinnatii and Memphis, I was perhaps more familiar with the flood than others. Welky utilized newspapers, government publications, archives, and manuscripts throughout the affected regions to piece together the first documented history of the disaster. The outcome is a highly readable and intriguing account of the flood as it makes its way along the two river systems from Pittsburgh to the Gulf of Mexico. Shawneetown, Illinois faced perhaps the greatest devastation in terms of percentage of any of the towns discussed and rebuilding there was thwarted by other problems including a disaster in the form of a tornado. The electronic book has linked end notes that make it easy to check references while reading. The book is well-indexed, making it easy for those looking for specific aspects of the flood to locate those. ( )

I’ve read and heard a lot about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which devastated the Lower Mississippi River Valley, displacing hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people, killing more than 200 and causing millions in property damage. Many historians believe it was this flood that spurred the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to midwestern industrial cities like Chicago and Detroit, which has had a profound effect on the nation’s history. Bill Bryson wrote about the 1927 flood in his book [One Summer]; Randy Newman wrote a sharp-edged satirical song about it (Louisiana 1927). It was a seminal moment in American history.

That flood, however, is not what this book is about. Instead, Welky examines the Thousand-Year Flood of 1937, so-called because the likelihood of such a catastrophic event was thought to be one in one thousand, or .1 percent. In many ways, it was just as destructive and expensive as the 1927 flood, but for some reason has received much less attention. As the book’s subtitle (The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937) indicates, this flood occurred primarily in the Ohio River Valley, from Pittsburgh, Pa., to where the Ohio meets the Mississippi at Cairo, Ill. Large cities, like Cincinnati and Louisville, were swamped under feet of water. So were small towns like Paducah, Ky., and Shawneetown, Ill. Each of these municipalities dealt with the flood’s immediate effects and aftershocks in different ways with widely differing results. Cincinnati and Louisville emerged stronger than ever; Louisville in particular experienced a real revitalization of business and cultural development. In contrast, Shawneetown floundered without strong leadership and ended up a sadly reduced and divided community. Cairo, which managed to avoid being inundated by floodwater thanks to the deliberate destruction of a levee across the river in Missouri that allowed floodwater to displace hundreds of sharecroppers, nevertheless failed to seize the opportunity to remake itself and instead continued on its path toward oblivion and irrelevancy. And of course, outside of the cities lived hundreds of thousands of poor farmers and sharecroppers who lost everything and had to live in refugee camps and tent cities. One of the saddest images in the book is the fact for many of the poorest folks, the meager rations of gruel, beans, and sowbelly actually represented an improvement in the food they could afford to eat at home.

Welky first lays the foundation by recounting how the Ohio River Valley was settled, and how the decisions made while the area was still considered frontier had a direct bearing on what happened more than a century later. He effectively mixes personal stories drawn from contemporary accounts and records with an examination of the official response to the disaster, at the local, state, and federal levels. On the one hand, swift and effective relief work was performed by an unprecedented public-private partnership of the Red Cross and the Works Progress Administration. Once the immediate situation was in hand, President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal administration tried to use it to consolidate the notion of federal management of floodplains, waterways, and disaster response, but with limited success. And of course, the entry of the United States into the second world war in 1941 also distracted attention from the need for a comprehensive conservation and environmental plan that would manage both land and water effectively. It’s in this section of the book, after the floodwaters have receded and the political infighting begins, that some readers may find the book start to drag. But it’s worth persevering to the end, as Welky revisits each of the cities and towns he focused on in the beginning to see how the flood’s effects were being felt throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st.

This is not the smoothest “narrative nonfiction” I’ve ever read but it’s quite accessible to lay readers. And the ebook version I read (from the consistently high-quality University of Chicago Press) has functioning endnote links that make flipping back and forth quite easy. The ebook also includes a full index, with the page listings also hyperlinked back the text. All in all, it’s a very well-done edition.

Highly recommended for those interested in natural disasters and their effects on the people and governments who survive them. ( )