By E. T.
With disaster comes destruction, and whether that disaster is manmade or natural, it is going to take hard work, from the government and citizens, to repair the damage done. After numerous disastrous floods, including the great Ohio River flood of 1937, U.S. Congress passed the flood control act of 1936. This act allows projects such as dams, levees and other flood control measures to be completed throughout the country when needed.
The flood of 1937 affected four states along the Ohio River: Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. On January 5, the weather took an odd turn and water levels began to rise. A short week later, flood warnings were being issued throughout the region. On January 18, the river overflowed its banks and the real flooding began; homes closest to the river started flooding, mostly the basements of the homes. Radio stations went to non-stop coverage of the flood, broadcasting commercial free for weeks; these broadcast were mostly messages being sent to rescue crews. Finally, on February 5th, the water levels fell below the flood stage for the first time; nearly a month after the disaster began. [1]
Evansville was hit the hardest in the state of Indiana. The town had been having unusually warm weather for the time of year and on the night of January 9, the wind shifted, bringing the temperature down some twenty degrees. The following day brought large amounts of snow and ice to southern Indiana and within the next week flood warnings were being posted. January 18 is when weather experts began to fear that conditions similar to the flood of 1913 would surface, or that they would be even worse.[2] Martial Law was declared in the county of Vanderburgh, where Evansville is located, on January 24 and on that same day the water level reached its peak, a whopping fifty-four feet, well above records of the 1913 flood.[3]
As the water levels began to recede, the destruction it left behind began to resurface. A heavy layer of silt laid over everything that was under water, sewers were disturbed and the levees were broken. Vanderburgh County’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers, all four thousand of them, were sent to help victims of the flood on February 5. John K. Jennings was the WPA’s administrator at the time. He stated that any flood relief workers would have at least 60 days of work ahead of them to rehabilitate the damage done to the city. The flood affected a great deal of the landscape, but the social aspects of life in Evansville were not affected by this damage. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a levee in 1939 that protects the city from water levels up to fifty-seven feet. [4]
Evansville has a long, colorful history leading up to the flood of 1937. Hugh McGary, Jr., founded Evansville, Indiana in 1812. However, the town did not really “take off” until the mid-1830s. This was due to the speculation of a canal being built to connect the city to the banks of the Ohio River. By 1840, there were 2,000 plus residents in the new town. The canal ended up being a financial threat to the state, delaying the projects completion until 1853; the same year the Evansville Railroad had opened. The town gained status in 1856 as its port business began to boom. Along with its new port business, Evansville served as home to fertile farmland and natural resources like coal and wood. The wood served most purpose to the town’s economy, using the wood as fuel for steamboats as well as for construction, furniture and agricultural implements. The 1850 census shows that Evansville had officially been named a city and its neighboring community to the west, Lamasco, held about 4,700 residents. Jobs revolving around the river trade, the railroad, and the processing of grains, hogs, and wood drew in thousands of people to call the new city their home. Evansville’s roots are made up of citizens from southern Germany and the upper southlands of America. In the mid-1850s, elementary and secondary schools started to show up and were supported by taxpayers. Also, around this time, the city was still considered a “walking city”; this simply means that workers and students walked to their jobs and schools. Main Street was filled with pedestrians and horse powered vehicles. At this time firemen and police officers were volunteers. [5]
A decade later, the city showed many signs of early industrialization; there were over eighty factories employing around a thousand wage earning workers. The primary industry in the city was flour milling, accounting for five eights of the capital income. The Evansville port exported sacks of corn, hogsheads of tobacco, and barrels of flour and pork. Just before the civil war began, Evansville was home to twelve thousand plus people; of whom, most were German born and many other were religious---Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Evangelical, Baptist and Roman Catholic. Evansville’s population doubled between 1870 and 1890, and then doubled again by 1920 making the total population about 85,000 persons. There are two reasons for this rapid growth: one is the attraction the city created with the jobs the city so newly possessed and two, there were now higher birth rates and lower mortality rates. The change in these rates are explained by the building of public sewer systems, the creation of boards of public health, the growth of professionalism in the medical field and the construction of three hospitals in the city between 1872 and 1893. By 1870 there were 281 factories in Evansville. Flour was no longer the leading industry, instead, furniture making was now number one followed by the production of steamboat engines and men’s clothing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, sixty percent of the city’s population was employed in manufacturing and by 1920; those numbers had risen by 4,000 people. [6]
During the First World War, tobacco, flour, and furniture employed the largest number of workers. Around this time women finally started becoming wageworkers and in the year of 1915 about 9,000 Evansville women were employed. Another change brought to Evansville’s local economy was the rise of corporations; this rise took down many local businesses. The rise of consumer goods was another sign of local economic change in the city. Prominently significant in this rise was the arrival of American businessman, Edward Mead Johnson, in 1915. Johnson founded the company, known today as, Johnson & Johnson with his two brothers, Robert and James. He later left the company with his brothers and started his own company, called Mead Johnson & Company, which produces an infant nutritional product, Dextri-Maltose. Johnson purchased the old Evansville Cotton Mill and transformed it into a factory for his company. [7]
Urbanization and industrialization not only changed the economic structure of the city, but they changed the landscape, the social, and the cultural make up of the city. As the city boundaries expanded, this city became less compact and urban land was used for more specialized reasons. This expansion was made possible by annexation and mass transit like streetcars and automobiles. Because these mass transits were now able to travel farther, the development of residential subdivisions emerged quickly. Now the city’s work places and homes became more and more separated due to the growing white-collar class. The white-collar class felt the need to escape the noise and pollution of the downtown and this lead to a more distinct division of class in Evansville. The city’s neighborhoods began to reflect many aspects of ones social status: income, transportation, employment, religion and race. The population of blacks in Evansville was at a rapid growth rate until the early 1900s, it stabilized between 1910 and 1940. Many of the poor whites lived near Pigeon Creek as fishermen and the wealthy business owners and managers lived on the southeast side of town down by the river, eventually giving their region the name Riverside. Albion Fellows Bacon was one of the very few who were aware of the conditions that many of the newcomers faced when coming to Evansville. She noted these conditions in her pioneering studies, which eventually led to local, and state housing legislation. Evansville was now seriously separated by race, so separated that in 1915 two communities, who rarely saw one another, had been created within the city, a white community and a black community. Still, the black community created their own organizations and clubs, which helped them deal with the struggles of division and urban society. [8]
The majority of the city’s population came from the German-Americans. The use of German language was so common in the city that in 1915, a German newspaper titled the Demokrat was sent out to about 5,000 citizens. Also, the elementary and secondary schools taught German as a second language. The German-American clubs sponsored and annual celebration known as German Day and was surprisingly the second most popular city event, Independence Day was the first. By 1915 there were several hundred churches, clubs and other organizations in the city’s directory. The different classes even found different ways to spend their leisure time. Wealthy whites spent their free time in the opera house or in the private park down the street from their home while poorer, newcomer families spent their time in church and the local saloon. [9]
In the years of World War I leading up to the post-World War II era, the city of Evansville experienced many changes just like most American cities. For starters, the population, once again, nearly doubled. By 1930, the city was home to over one hundred thousand persons. This population growth, like the large population growth between 1870 and 1920, was affected by the increasing quality of medical care, but this population growth spurt was also affected by the large migration of Kentuckians during World War II. The make up of the city’s population also changed, but only slightly. The number of trueborn Evansvillians was nine in ten by 1950. [10]
In the 1920s, state highways began undergoing construction and Evansville was included on the route of U.S. highway 41 that connected Florida to Wisconsin. This meant new businesses for Evansville such as gas stations along the highway and roadside hotels. Also in the 1920s came a serious shift in what the city would mainly produce. Instead of furniture and steamboat engines, Evansville’s main industries were now automotive parts and refrigerators. The big name in the refrigerator manufacturing business at the time was William McCurdy. McCurdy formed a corporation, the Servel Corporation, which manufactured gas-powered refrigerators. In the late 1930s, around the time of the great flood, two more major corporations moved into Evansville to manufacture refrigerators. The city of Evansville had become the refrigerator capital of the country. [11]
Other things shaped Evansville’s economic transformation in this era as well. In the mid-1930s, the Hoosier Cardinal Corporation established the new concept of injection molding for plastic parts. In the late 1930s, merging of multiple coal companies resulted in the loss of jobs and a growing dependence on strip mining. On the other hand, parts of the economy that had been extremely important in the earlier years were now declining in importance to the city’s economical growth, such as the production of furniture and the number of steamboats to come through the port. Steamboats were becoming less important to the economy because railroads and automobiles had become more prominent. Many jobs related to the railroads had disappeared due to the competition they faced from cars, buses, and trucks. [12]
In Evansville, 1933, one in four citizens was unemployed. When the Second World War came around, the federal government provided war-related manufacturing jobs and seventy-five percent of the city’s workers were employed again. New businesses also arrived to the city during this time, such as Missouri Bridge and Iron, which created even more jobs for the city’s unemployed. A great help to the city’s revenue, thirty miles south of Evansville, was Camp Breckinridge; soldiers from the camp traveled to Evansville every weekend. Assembly-line jobs were the main employment during World War II and the number of white-collar jobs increased because the need for managers rose along with the number of semi-skilled employees. Because the city’s two main industries were refrigerator and automotive related work, its economy was awfully sensitive to the national business cycles. Evansville had less unemployment when the city’s economy was wealthy and suffered more when the city’s economy took a hit. In 1950, the city had become the wealthiest it had ever been; only three percent of its workers were unemployed. [13]
By 1950, Evansville society was transformed at the surface. More schools were built, the city built a Methodist college and they even opened up a new school for the blacks in 1928, which included housing and was for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Just from the 1920s to 1936 the city showed tremendous improvements; city parks were added, a new airport was built on the north side of the city and the building of the Dress Plaza on the riverfront showed great signs of improvement from the local government. Evansville’s hospitals improved with quality service and expansions, and the upbringing of a new museum added to the cultural awareness. Although, they may not all be on the surface, Evansville still held some traditional roots in 1950. Segregation was still strongly practiced and the card game “clabber”, unique to the Evansville region, was still played by many. Evansvillians learned a great deal from the social and economic disasters they went through. The skills they learned from these tragedies helped them survive and come out on the other side of the Great Flood of 1937.
[1] "Ohio River Flood, 1937," The Lilly Library, http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/wpa/flood.html
[2] "Industry Will Help to Rehabilitate Ravaged City," Hammond Times, February 15, 1937.
[3] "Ohio River Flood, 1937,"
[4] "FDR creates the WPA," A&E Television Networks, History.com. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-creates-the-wpa
[5] Darrel E. Bigham, An Evansville album: perspectives on a river city, 1812-1988. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
[6] Darrel E. Bigham
[7] Darrel E. Bigham
[8] Darrel E. Bigham
[9] Darrel E. Bigham
[10] Darrel E. Bigham
[11] Darrel E. Bigham
[12] Darrel E. Bigham
[13] Darrel E. Bigham
