"We stretched those bags from Grayling Lane down South Grand to Oxen Dam," he recalled. Steamboats carried many of the white wives and young children away to Vicksburg or Memphis. The population density was 53 people per square mile (21/km2). . A refugee camp was established on the levee at the end of Washington Avenue in Greenville. Discuss North Carolina politics. The 1927 flood also helped propel Herbert Hoover to the presidency a year later. The levees were not breached; river water did not rush in. Now, I dont have to take that Latin Exam. And I threw my book into the air hitting the porch ceiling . Much of Lafayette remained dry. One day after the waters had dropped to a depth of about a foot, Teddy (who was three years old) wanted to wade using Daddys knee boots. The Louisiana Digital Library (LDL) is composed of collections from many different institutions. The federal government did not pay a single penny for the clothing, food or shelter of any one of those 700,000 people. There is a passage in your book where you described what it looked like when the river--the Mississippi River--finally subsided back into its banks, and I wonder if you could just read part of that for us. Many people of Evangeline are primarily of French, English, and Spanish descent from Louisiana's colonial period. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, accession no. Was he a good manager of this 1927 flood relief effort? This unit belongs to the 139th RSG (regional support group). Area code. In Louisiana alone, 10,000 square miles in 20 parishes went underwater. It was from this poem that founding father Paulin Fontenot was to propose the namesake of "Evangeline" for this parish, allegedly foreseeing an emerging American tourism centered upon the Acadian saga. Public Schools in Evangeline Parish are operated by the Evangeline Parish School Board. It prevented a second wave of rising water in June and with the aid of large pumps the town was drained. : Bonnes Nouvelles, 1993-, Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions: Facts vs. Fiction Before And Since Cajunization, John laFleur II, Brian Costello w/ Dr. Ina Fandrich 2013. Louisiana suffers flooding of historic proportions, and many see Officials on May 18urged evacuation of a large area that included Port Barre, Leonville, Breaux Bridge and Arnaudville. WERTHEIMER: Were there any prominent politicians who vanished without a trace because of the way they handled the flood? Other towns in the area also were not spared. The newspaper continued to operate, banks did business, and telephones and electricity remained turned on. Lafayette served as host to around 26,000refugees in Red Cross centers established in May of 1927, Mouton reported in 1983. Some twenty thousand people were housed in Lafayette alone. They're tryin' to wash us away. "Louisiana 1927" is a 1974 song written and recorded by Randy Newman on the album Good Old Boys. Also touched upon is the callous response of the federal government, depicted here via a fictional visit from President Calvin Coolidge and "a little fat man," where Coolidge's reaction to the devastation is a detached statement that, "isn't it a shame what the river has done to this poor cracker's land. The floodwaters, however, would still cover the greater portion of the Delta for many more months. : PI/1992.0002.020, Intersection of Washington and Shelby streets in downtown Greenville. More than 10 inches fell. The water, higher and stronger than any previous flood, soon engulfed a large portion of the Mississippi Delta, covering some two million acres of land in its final reach. "The merchants worked all day through the night trying to scaffold up their store goods. You know, the Greenville public schools actually--while other Mississippi counties seriously debated whether they wanted to teach African-Americans to read--in Greenville African-Americans were being taught Latin. The flood drove many tenant farmers, most of whom were African American, off their land and, in many cases, out of the region. As word spread about the mistreatment of Black people in the levee camps, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who served as chairman of a special committee to coordinate all flood relief efforts, created the Colored Advisory Committee to look into the allegations and named Robert Moton from the Tuskegee Institute to head it. "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.'". Washtubs, work benches, household furniture, chickens and domestic animals went floating by.". Coordinates: 3044N 9225W / 30.73N 92.41W / 30.73; -92.41, United States presidential election results for Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, Last edited on 22 February 2023, at 14:35, Learn how and when to remove this template message, National Register of Historic Places listings in Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, https://web.archive.org/web/20091026030323/http://geocities.com/old_time_time/many.htm, "Census - Geography Profile: Evangeline Parish, Louisiana", "Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990", "Census 2000 PHC-T-4. A night of incessant storms, wind, lightning, thunder and torrents of rain. It swept everything before it. There is a passage in your book where you described what it looked like when the river--the Mississippi River--finally subsided back into its banks, and I wonder if you could just read part of that for us. 57. Adding to their anger, a natural breach of the levees subsequently eased pressure on the New Orleans levee; the blasting had been unnecessary. White people were housed on the fifth floor, Black people on the sixth. Despite the valiant effort,levees in northeast Louisiana began to fail. By the end of January, major tributaries such as the Ohio River were overflowing their banks. The river rose all day and the river rose all night. The Flood Control Act of 1928 authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build levees, diversions and spillways for flood control. It rained real hard and it rained for a real long time. Mocking birds often nested in the arch. When the waters of the Great Flood of 1927 receded, officials estimate some 26,000 square miles across seven states were flooded;700,000 people left their homes and 250-500 people lost their lives. They're tryin' to wash . The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History. Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination. ebrpl . Some people got away all right. 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. When the water finally subsided, the Red Cross provided seed, tools, and rations to farm families facing the daunting task of surviving the winter and starting a new crop in the spring. Search within institutions . fpoc . Ewing, Jasper G. Flood damageLouisiana. Refugees had to file a claim to receive compensation under a complicated system that divided payments into various categories, provided that no partial payments could be made, and without legal representation. . Simon & Schuster Here's the latest on Hurricane Katrina. Courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History, accession no. Year: 2003 2:57 69 Views Become A Better Singer In Only 30 Days, With Easy Video Lessons! An entire crop year was lost. Thousands were left homeless for weeks, even months.. And the American people did not accept this. 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. 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. WERTHEIMER: And some of them were evacuated, but not everybody. It was the mode of the times for yards to be outlined by carefully clipped privet hedges. 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. "Louisiana 1927" is a 1974 song written and recorded by Randy Newman on the album Good Old Boys. The parish was named Evangeline in honor of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's narrative poem, Evangeline. The river rose all night. The Red Cross and local relief organizations set up tent cities and makeshift housing in Marksville, Mansura, Baton Rouge, Opelousas, Crowley, New Iberia, and elsewhere. hnoc . Eventually, Bayou Teche overflowed its banks, flooding communities like Breaux Bridgge, St. Martinville and New Iberia, though not to the extent that communities to the north suffered. 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. W.G. The Mississippi was at flood stage for months. And another reason, frankly, may be a certain intellectual prejudice. Sung from the perspective of a nameless resident of the area recounting the flooding of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes during the flood, "Louisiana 1927" features lyrics that depict the devastation of the residents of those parishes in the aftermath of the flood. Criticism over the handling of Katrina contributed in large measure to the decision by Gov. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. And they didn't write about it. Unidentified Additional Data Subscribe One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00 Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00 Flowers and plants beaten to the earth, little half-drowned chickens in baskets in the kitchen, house leaking in many places. The National Safety Council estimated deaths in the Yazoo- Mississippi Delta alone at 1,000. The cost of the damage has been estimated to be between $246 million and $1 billion, $4.2-$17. 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. The financial leaders from New Orleans estimated that claims against a fund set up to compensate the victims would be between $2 million and $6 million. Martin Parish line on May 19; Breaux Bridge and St. Martinville in St. Martin Parish two days later; then New Iberia and Jeanerette in Iberia Parish; and Franklin and Morgan City in St. Mary Parish. Perhaps the only other natural disaster in the United States that comes close to the level of devastation of Hurricane Katrina was the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. Overview. Though New Orleans had been spared, other parts of southern Louisiana were still in trouble, particularly in the Atchafalaya River and Bayou Teche basins to the west of the city. SinceHurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans and the parishes to its south, there have been inevitable comparisons between the two disasters. Irma Yarborough, a native of Columbia in Caldwell Parish,recalled in the 1981 News-Star-World that on May 7, a dam on a tributary of the Ouachita in Arkansas sent water rising rapidly in Columbia. A new recording of the orchestrated version is included on the Katrina charity album, Our New Orleans, on Nonesuch Records. The boys rescued the chickens and placed them on a scaffold out of the water. Many English Americans as colonists came from the Eastern United States to settle in the newly purchased Louisiana Territory often married into Acadian families. 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. 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. New Orleans received 11.16 inches of rain in Februarycompared to an average of 4.4 inches for the monthand steady rainfalls thereafter. As heavy rainfall in 1926 continued into the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River began cresting in places like Cairo, Illinois, sending tons of water rushing southto Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Some people got away alright. Contact John Sharp (John.Sharp@Louisiana.Edu) for more information about use and reproduction. The Pentagon says an additional 10,000 National Guard troops will be going there and to Mississippi. Louisiana, Louisiana. All had been promised full compensation for their losses, but the lucky ones would get an average of only $274 each, and thousands of them would get nothing. Each caused widespread dislocation of large numbers of people for many months. Copyright is retained in accordance with U.S. You know, the Greenville public schools actually--while other Mississippi counties seriously debated whether they wanted to teach African-Americans to read--in Greenville African-Americans were being taught Latin. Great Flood of 1927 - 64 Parishes I lived with her a few years when I was a baby, and I'd go back in the summers. The threat continued to worsen, however, and state government officials believed the levees would inevitably break. 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.'. WERTHEIMER: Herbert Hoover was President Coolidge's secretary of Commerce in 1927, so he was the man in charge of rescue operations. : PI/CI/G74.4, no. Close Subscribe. Ville Platte, Louisiana, the seat of Evangeline Parish, was itself so named by one of Napoleon Bonaparte's former soldiers, Adjutant Major Marcellin Garand (1781-1852), of Savoy, France. Photograph of the Evangeline Oak during the 1927 flood.