The Great Mississippi Flood Breaks the Levees

Heavy summer rainfall across the central basin in 1926 initiated months of swelling along the tributaries of the Mississippi River. By late autumn, waterways in Kansas and Iowa reached maximum capacity, and by Christmas Day the Cumberland River at Nashville rose past fifty-six feet. The engineered levee system along the main channel, established under policies championed by the Mississippi River Commission since the late nineteenth century, sought to confine the flow between raised earthworks. Over the winter and into the spring of 1927, this massive volume of water crested against barriers that could no longer contain it.

The disaster peaked in the Lower Mississippi Valley near Mound Landing, Mississippi, and Arkansas City, Arkansas. Levees collapsed in at least 145 locations, submerging roughly 26,000 to 27,000 square miles across several states to depths of up to thirty feet. Arkansas suffered the heaviest geographical devastation, with fourteen percent of its entire territory inundated by floodwaters. South of Memphis, the river expanded across the floodplain to a width of eighty miles. Estimates of the death toll range from the Red Cross count of 246 to about 500, and losses were put at more than $400 million in direct damage and about $1 billion including relief and lost productivity.