Those who were less experienced immediately began fleeing the area by train and continued to do so until the tracks became unusable. Mr. BARRY: OK. (Reading) `In the entire flooded region, 50 percent of all animals--half of all the mules, horses, cattle, hogs and chickens--had drowned. A major result of the 1927 flood, which had an impact in eleven states, was the National Flood Control Act of 1928 passed by the U. S. Congress. All were closed by the end of August that year, Mouton wrote. Adding to their anger, a natural breach of the levees subsequently eased pressure on the New Orleans levee; the blasting had been unnecessary. ebrpl . The parish was created out of lands formerly belonging to St. Landry Parish in 1910. "We thought it was a cattle stampede. They're tryin' to wash us away. The flood took its toll on the trees and shrubs. The Louisiana Digital Library (LDL) is the front door to Louisiana's digital cultural heritage. Lucy Somerville [Howorth], The Mississippi Flood of 1927 published in June 1927 edition of Womens Press. That music inspired Lauren Ashlee Messina's dance-based piece "Louisiana Flood Stories: 1927," which runs at the Contemporary Arts Center on July 8-9. We were somewhat late in turning on the alarm, as we could get no one at the Levee Board with the proper authority to say where the break was., Sixteen-year-old Mildred Shepherd was studying for her Latin exam when she heard the fire alarm. 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton
WERTHEIMER: That's . Mr. JOHN BARRY (Author, "Rising Tide"): You're welcome. Males had a median income of $30,386 versus $16,793 for females. PHOTOS: Flood damage at Lafayette Parish schools, USA's infamous 'Tornado Alley' may be shifting east. WERTHEIMER: Now the city fathers of New Orleans made a decision to take down a section of the levee 13 miles south of the city. WERTHEIMER: Now when the flood hit Greenville, Mississippi, you write in the book that people, blacks and whites together, took refuge on the highest ground they could find, which was the levee. Mayor Cannon and several leaders decided to stop the continuing flow of water into Greenville and to prevent the common occurrence of a June rise, the second assault of water, from entering the town. Popa Ed Lenzs hedges was clipped to form an arch over the walk way to his front door. Join us for this ride! But in the late 1800s, the Mississippi River Commission adopted a levees-only policy, which entailed the construction of levees that ran almost the full length of the river. Copyright is retained in accordance with U.S. hide caption, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. WERTHEIMER: When you think about the scope and scale of the 1927 flood, I wonder why it is that it hasn't passed into the sort of legend that most schoolchildren remember, like--as they do the Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster About 100,000 people in Acadiana fled their homes during the Great Flood of 1927, Savage reported in 2002 for the 75th anniversary. [2] [3] Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. About 27.20% of families and 32.20% of the population were below the poverty line, including 39.10% of those under age 18 and 31.00% of those age 65 or over. All Rights Reserved. Nearly a million people were homeless. The enormous size of the crevasse at Mound Landing is shown in this 1928 map prepared by the Mississippi Levee District. He used a boat to carry goods from the store to their house, which was on higher ground. They promised reparations to the people they flooded out, and they stiffed them. Mizelle, Richard M., Jr. They promised reparations to the people they flooded out, and they stiffed them. 69.0% were White, 28.3% Black or African American, 0.3% Asian, 0.3% Native American, 1.0% of some other race and 1.1% of two or more races. That nobody would care if they were to disappear tomorrow. 15 The worst Good Friday I ever saw. The levees were not breached; river water did not rush in. "About daylight, 5:30 or so, we heard them shooting," he recalled in the 2002 report. The Mississippi was at flood stage for months. Subscribe. Mr. BARRY: That's correct. He said "I was born in Los Angeles, but I went to New Orleans when I was, like, a week old. Photograph of the Evangeline Oak during the 1927 flood. fpoc . Mama woke me up and said the levee had broken.". It was a strictly political power play. In the days that followed, water from the levee breaks spread to the south. Adding to the excitement was a man on horseback going pell-mell down the street yelling, Go to the levee! Nobody seemed to step back, at least then, and really looked at the whole thing. He's also a resident of New Orleans and Washington, DC. You know, tens of thousands of whom were living on tops of levees, some of which were only eight feet across with the river on one side and the flood on the other. Nearly a million people were. To find the contact who can help you, find the field called "Contact Information" next to the image of interest to you. Unidentified Additional Data Subscribe One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00 Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. And another reason, frankly, may be a certain intellectual prejudice. All rights reserved. As of the 2020 United States census, there were 32,350 people, 12,172 households, and 7,739 families residing in the parish. Here's the latest on Hurricane Katrina. According to various estimates, there were between 250 and 500 flood-related deaths. Lafayette served as host to around 26,000refugees in Red Cross centers established in May of 1927, Mouton reported in 1983. GNIS feature ID. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. In Mississippi there were two levee areas of special concern. Though it and its tributaries were lined by levees, they were filled to overflowing, and part of the Mississippi River sought this shorter, straighter course to the sea. about 500. New York: Knopf, 1941. As a result, huge tracts of lowland, called spillways, were set aside in south central and southeastern Louisiana. And that was because of the elite, aristocratic planter class, who did feel a certain noblesse oblige toward their sharecroppers, but they didn't let that interfere with a fairly ruthless sense of dollars. Refine results. : PI/ 1992.0002.103, Flood refugees evacuated to tent city on the hills of Vicksburg, Mississippi. In Mississippi it directly affected an estimated population of 185,495. That their way of life is disappearing. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 Laid Bare the Divide Between the North and the South. Part of that was because nobody realized how much would be washed away. Currently, there are 25 participating institutions in the LDL. "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. Mr. JOHN BARRY (Author, "Rising Tide"): You're welcome. That same system brought heavy rainfall to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, an alluvial plain located in northwest Mississippi. "She said, 'Run and go on the levee,'" she recalled, adding she "jumped out the bed in my night clothes," forgetting her favorite doll which was recovered later in the mud. By the next day, most of Port Barre was under about 6 feet of water and on May 20, the bridge over Bayou Fuselier at Arnaudville collapsed right after refugees from the flood had crossed it, The Advertiser reported. In Melville, another town on the Atchafalaya River in St. Landry Parish, officials concluded it was hopeless to continue trying to shore up the levees. MORE: What you should know about hurricanes, heavy rain and flood insurance. Privacy Policy. User login. A break at either of these places would allow water into the Delta town with the countys largest population of about 15,000 people. Andrews, pastor. A few Acadians such as Franois Pitre and his wife settled the area between Evangeline and St. Landry parishes, preferring the rich pre-American and pre-Civil War era Cajun planter's lifestyle over that of the humble and isolated existence of their Acadiana cousins. Our side of the street featured a hedge beginning at MP&L Co. corner and continuing to the corner of Clay and included Uncle Clarences and Aunt Rubys property. Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 And How It Changed America. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 which left 700,000 people homeless in Louisiana and Mississippi. WERTHEIMER: When you think about the scope and scale of the 1927 flood, I wonder why it is that it hasn't passed into the sort of legend that most schoolchildren remember, like--as they do the Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake. Louisiana, Louisiana. I'm Linda Wertheimer. The population density was 53 people per square mile (21/km2). Their intention, apparently, was to lower the level of the river and to save the city of New Orleans. : PI/ 1992.0002.039, The Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad Station in Helm, Mississippi, on April 29, 1927. Until the American Red Cross arrived, families, mostly African-Americans, slept in makeshift tents of quilts and materials brought along in their escape from their homes. More than 10 inches fell. 25.71% reported speaking French or Cajun French at home, the highest percentage of any Louisiana parish.[13]. 25.80% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11.90% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. 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"). Mr. AARON NEVILLE: (Singing) What have happened down here is the wind have changed. 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.'. On April 27, 1927, 66 members of the Louisiana National Guard's Company B left Lafayette for New Roads in Pointe Coupee Parish to help strengthen levees on the Mississippi River, Locke Mouton of the Acadiana Area Red Cross wrote in theJuly 24, 1983, Daily Advertiser. Overview. A special celebratory parade was held July 4, 1927. WERTHEIMER: Now the city fathers of New Orleans made a decision to take down a section of the levee 13 miles south of the city. Example: Yes, I would like to receive emails from 64 Parishes. That flood dumped as much as 30 feet of water on land from Illinois and Missouri down to the Gulf of Mexico. He's also a resident of New Orleans and Washington, DC. Mocking birds often nested in the arch. "Louisiana 1927" is a 1974 song written and recorded by Randy Newman on the album Good Old Boys. WERTHEIMER: And some of them were evacuated, but not everybody. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, accession no. All rights reserved. 90 years ago, the Great Flood of 1927 changed Louisiana Families and farm animals sought refuge on rooftops, raised railroad beds and levees. He joins us now from his office in Washington. The parish was created in 1910. On May 12 or 13, the levee at Bayou des Glaises near Cottonport in Avoyelles Parish, north of St. Landry Parish, failed. They felt that it was wrong, and looking at this, I think, created a real change in the way Americans as a people viewed the role of the government's responsibility toward individuals. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, accession no. The flood caused more than $400 million in losses; 92,431 businesses were damaged and 162,017 homes flooded. Parrish, Susan Scott. 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. I think one is that it was so big and covered so wide an area, it was a little bit like a dog trying to bite a basketball. Hundreds of sturdy barns, cotton gins, warehouses and farmhouses had been swept away. The racial makeup of the parish was 70.42% White, 28.57% Black or African American, 0.23% Native American, 0.14% Asian, 0.01% Pacific Islander, 0.18% from other races, and 0.46% from two or more races. 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. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the parish has a total area of 680 square miles (1,800km2), of which 662 square miles (1,710km2) is land and 17 square miles (44km2) (2.5%) is water.[4]. . Local officials called in the National Guard to keep order. WERTHEIMER: That's Aaron Neville singing Randy Newman's song, "Louisiana 1927.". Steamboats carried many of the white wives and young children away to Vicksburg or Memphis. "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.'". Levee guards were on duty and the stack of sandbags were almost even with the rising water when the levee at Mound Landing in lower Bolivar County gave way on the morning of April 21, 1927. In earlier times, this would not have been the problem it was in 1927; the Mississippi River and its tributaries once overflowed into natural drainage areas. 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. The refugees were caught between a system of legalities they did not understand and marshes still filled with water that kept them from going home. 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. A new recording of the orchestrated version is included on the Katrina charity album, Our New Orleans, on Nonesuch Records. Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. McNeil was 6 years old in 1927, sleeping above his father's drug store in Melville. White people were housed on the fifth floor, Black people on the sixth. Many English Americans as colonists came from the Eastern United States to settle in the newly purchased Louisiana Territory often married into Acadian families. Many black tenant farmers, driven from their land by the flood, moved north to cities like Chicago and Detroit, Bradshaw wrote. The flood killed the hedges and they had to be removed.. On the fields, in the forests, in streets and yards and homes and businesses and barns, the water left a reeking muck. The Flood of 1927 inundated nearly 26,000 square miles in 170 counties and parishes in seven states, driving an estimated 931,159 people from their homes. And the American people did not accept this. Username * Password * Request new password; Evangeline Oak during the 1927 flood. Used by permission of Dr. Ted Shepherd. See our upcoming events and sign up to attend. Citizens either rowed down the streets and avenues or walked on the raised walkways that were built in front of the commercial areas. Parishes set up rehabilitation committees to find food and shelter for the displaced families. The boys rescued the chickens and placed them on a scaffold out of the water. A State Divided: HB2 And Transgender Rights, Committee on Inclusion Diversity Equity Accountability, WUNC Public Radio, LLC Board of Directors, FDIC weighs changing the deposit insurance system after another bank failure, Here's what happens if Hollywood writers go on strike, Navigating the housing market when it's unclear when it will improve, Saving endangered bunnies from floods in California, Supreme Court needs a code of conduct, says judicial ethics expert, AI could help reduce military suicides, nonprofit hopes. A boat was tied up at the Jones Pharmacy Drugstore where W.L. Unidentified, One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. Evangeline Parish is also served by the Diocese of Lafayette with one school: Additionally, Evangeline Parish is served by one unaffiliated private school: Evangeline Parish is served by one institutions of higher education: The 1086th Transportation Company of the 165th CSS (Combat Service Support) Battalion resides in Ville Platte, Louisiana. McCain, William D. The Triumph of Democracy 1916-1932 in A History of Mississippi, Volume Two, edited by Richard Aubrey McLemore. The event, called simply the Great Flood of 1927, would change Louisiana forever. The Louisiana Digital Library platform has been developed by LSU Libraries on behalf of the Louisiana Digital Consortium. Was he a good manager of this 1927 flood relief effort? B.H. Their squalid living conditions and work requirements were first reported through the Associated Negro Press and by the end of May had spread to the White press. Downtown West Monroe wasn't as fortunate as backwater from the Ouachita River flooded that area. You know, history was largely written back in the '20s, I think, by people who looked askance at the South because of the blatant racism, and they really didn't care that much about what happened in the area that was most severely hit, which was Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. WERTHEIMER: Herbert Hoover was President Coolidge's secretary of Commerce in 1927, so he was the man in charge of rescue operations. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 46, Flood refugees in Yazoo City, Mississippi, on May 13, 1927. Frank M. Yarborough, who lived with them, "gathered up the few chickens left in the yard and put them in a coop on one end of the porch. "And it held.". With a sea of water in the commercial and residential areas of downtown Greenville, the town resembled Venice, Italy, with its canals. 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. hnoc . And the American people did not accept this. Ranking Tables for Counties: 1990 and 2000", Louisiana's Technical and Community Colleges, "Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evangeline_Parish,_Louisiana&oldid=1140935995, Bayou Chicot Elementary School (Grades PK-8) (Ville Platte), Chataignier Elementary School (Grades PK-8) (Chataignier), James Stephens Montessori School (Grades PK-6) (Ville Platte), Mamou Elementary School (Grades PK-4) (Mamou), Vidrine Elementary School (Grades PK-8) (Ville Platte), Ville Platte Elementary School (Grades PK-4) (Ville Platte), W. W. Stewart Elementary (Grades PK-4) (Basile), Basile High School (Grades 512) (Basile), Pine Prairie High School (Grades 912) (Pine Prairie), Ville Platte High School (Grades 512) (Ville Platte), Evangeline Central School (Grades 412) (Ville Platte), Sacred Heart School (Grades K-12) (Ville Platte), Christian Heritage Academy (Grade K) (Ville Platte). Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. The devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927 has deservedly entered the realm of legend and lore, being one of the most costly natural disasters in American history.
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