American History Tellers - The Great Mississippi Flood | When the Levee Breaks | 1

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

In the winter and spring of 1927, record-setting rain fell across the central United States. The Mississippi River swelled to capacity, and by April, the water breached major levees. It was the start of the most catastrophic river flood in American history.When the flood threatened the town of Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, white plantation owners pulled tens of thousands of Black workers from the cotton fields and sent them to the river. An army of hundreds of men worked day and night, piling sandbags to battle the raging waters. But soon, despite their efforts, the Great Mississippi Flood would unleash destruction on the Delta.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersPlease support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's the morning of April 21st, 1927. You're standing on the levee at Mound Landing, 18 miles north of Greenville, Mississippi, in a torrential downpour. You and your brother Henry are sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. But yesterday, your landlord put you and Henry on a bus and forced you to come here to the levee. You've joined hundreds of other black men,

furiously working to raise the height of the levee and prevent a flood. The two of you are passing heavy sandbags down a line of men, desperately trying to fill a breach. Water is almost level with the levee wall. Henry wipes a mix of sweat and rain from his brow. I swear, these sandbags must be getting heavier.

You rub your aching shoulders and nod. They probably are. Everything is soaked. A worker standing opposite Henry heaves a sandbag into his arms. He bends from the weight of it. Ready? Henry hurls the sandbag toward you and you catch it, then pass it to the next man in line. But you're not sure all your efforts are doing much good.

Look out at the water to see sandbags rushing down the river, colliding with branches and dead livestock. These sandbags are getting washed out of the breach as quickly as we throw them in. I'm not sure how much longer we can keep this up. You take a second to stretch your stiff back, but you know you can't pause for long. All up and down the levee, National Guardsmen surround you, forcing you to work your stiff back. But you know you can't pause for long. All up and down the levee, National Guardsmen surround you,

forcing you to work at gunpoint. It's clear they're here to make sure no one abandons their position. Come on. You better keep going. As you take a step, you notice how loose the earth beneath you feels. The whole levee is starting to vibrate and the force of the river rushing against it.

Do you feel that? There's no way this levee is starting to vibrate and the force of the river rushing against it. Do you feel that? There's no way this levee will hold. We should make a run for it now before it's too late. Henry hurls another sandbag into your arms. Are you crazy? You'll get shot if you try to escape. He nods toward the National Guardsman behind you. You turn around to see the Guardsman tighten his grip on his rifle.

There's no way off this levee. The vibration of the levee turns into violent shaking. The breach is getting bigger. It's gonna collapse! You grab your brother by the elbow and pull him away from the breach. The two of you run down the levee, fighting through a throng of men who are now fleeing alongside you. The raging torrent is demolishing the levee and swallowing up everything in its path. You were supposed to save your community from the floodwaters,

but now, with the whole levee collapsing, all you and your brother can do is run for your lives. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine

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Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. From Wondery comes a new series about a lawyer who broke all the rules. Need to launder some money? Broker a deal with a drug cartel? Take out a witness? Paul can do it. I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers.

Our history, your story. On our show, we'll take you to the events, the times, and the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. We'll put you in the shoes of everyday people as history was being made, and will show you how the events of the times affected them, their families, and affects you now. In the late summer of 1926, unusually heavy rain fell across the American heartland. Water on the Mississippi River, the nation's central artery, rose to record levels. By the following spring, major levees began to burst, sparking the most catastrophic river flood in American history. In total, the floods submerged 27,000 square miles in seven states, destroying crops, paralyzing transportation and industry,

and washing away hundreds of farms and communities. By the time the floodwaters receded, as many as 1,000 Americans were dead, and some 700,000 were left homeless. One of the communities in the flood's path was the bustling agricultural town of Greenville, Mississippi. When water began breaching a levee 18 miles north of town, local Black men were forced at gunpoint to try and hold back the rushing torrent, risking their own lives. The flood would expose the fault lines between one powerful white plantation family and Greenville's majority black community. It would also make careers

and shatter reputations from Mississippi all the way to Washington, D.C. What became known as the Great Mississippi Flood transformed landscapes and lives and left a trail of racism, exploitation, and betrayal in its wake. A century later, it still stands as a cautionary tale of greed and injustice. To help tell this story, we've enlisted actors Ace Anderson and Cat Peoples to voice characters you'll hear throughout the series. This is Episode 1 in our three-part series, The Great Mississippi Flood, When the Levee Breaks. In 1841, a 20-year-old cotton planter named Charles Percy packed up his family's Alabama

plantation and headed west. Percy had set his sights on the Mississippi Delta. The almond-shaped flatland was situated between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers in the northwestern corner of the state. Regular spring flooding was part of the Mississippi River's natural cycle and made the Delta soil some of the most fertile in the world. Percy was part of a wave of white planters who headed to the Delta to stake a claim on land recently seized from Choctaw Indians. In the early 1830s, federal and state officials expelled Choctaw tribes from their homelands to open up the fertile land for cotton cultivation. And once he found himself there, Percy's family used 90 enslaved workers to clear the dense, mosquito-filled forests and build a vast plantation near Deer Creek, Mississippi. It took the workers nearly a decade of toil and intense Mississippi heat before the

project was completed. For Charles Percy, it was the start of a new cotton empire, one that would generate profit and power for generations of Percys to come. But in 1851, Charles died, and the family plantation went to his younger brother, William Alexander Percy, known as W.A. Over the next decade, the booming trade in slave-grown cotton reached new heights, fueling prosperity in the Delta and bringing plantation owners like the Percys tremendous wealth. But regular flooding posed a constant threat to these plantations. So Delta planters built levees along the banks of the river. These earthen mounds were meant to contain floodwaters and prevent them from overflowing into cotton fields. The labor was mostly done by enslaved men who compacted soil into sloped walls along the riverbanks. By the end of the 1850s,

there were more than 300 miles of levees in the Delta, some as tall as four stories. But when the Civil War broke out, Union troops destroyed Delta towns and levees. W.A. served as a colonel in the Confederate Army. But when the war ended in 1865, W.A. came home to start a mission to help the region recover. He moved to the new town of Greenville on the eastern banks of the river, where he built a law practice and focused on steering the Delta's economic rebirth. His first task was to rebuild the country's crumbling levees. To oversee their construction and maintenance, W.A. convinced the Mississippi governor to create a levee board and put him in charge of it.

But the end of slavery after the war created a labor shortage in the Delta. Desperate to hold on to his workers, W.A. installed a new labor system on his plantation, known as sharecropping. Sharecroppers tilled the landowner's soil in exchange for a small share of the harvest. Others became tenants, renting small plots of land to farm. Both practices were widely adopted across the South in the aftermath of the Civil War, and while sharecroppers were technically free, they were often trapped in an endless cycle of debt. Landowners advanced them seed, fertilizer, and tools, but all of it on credit. Meanwhile, sharecropping created

massive wealth for Percy and other plantation owners in the Delta. But the Mississippi River remained an ever-present threat. Major floods devastated the region in 1865, 67, and 74. It was clear that local levee-building efforts were not enough to contain the river and protect the plantation economy. But the Mississippi River was far from just a local concern. It was an essential waterway of American agriculture and commerce. It fed farmlands and moved goods from the north to the south. So by the 1870s, the federal government began to take responsibility for it. In 1879, Congress created the Mississippi River Commission to manage the river and oversee flood control. Over the next several years, the commission's army and civilian engineers debated flood control strategies.

Army engineers pushed the government to build higher, more advanced levees throughout the lower Mississippi River, declaring that levees alone could contain the threat of floods. But civilian engineers disagreed. They insisted that compressing the water between walls would only strengthen its power, creating the potential for even more destructive floods. Instead, they proposed building artificial outlets and spillways to give floodwaters somewhere to safely escape. In the end, it was the Army engineers that won out. In 1885, the Commission adopted a levees-only policy. Over the next several decades, the government expanded the network of levees along the lower Mississippi in a 1,100-mile stretch from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. But W.A. Percy didn't live to see many

of the levees built. In 1888, he died, and a new Percy rose up to take the reins, his then 28-year-old son, Leroy. By the turn of the century, Leroy oversaw both a thriving law practice in Greenville and 20,000 acres of cotton plantations. He sported a handlebar mustache and prematurely gray hair. His influence stretched from the Delta to the halls of power in New York and Washington. He was a hunting partner of Teddy Roosevelt. He had friends in the Senate and Supreme Court, and he served on the boards of major banks and railroads. Then in 1910, the Mississippi State Legislature chose Leroy to fill a vacant seat on the U.S. Senate. But just two years later, he lost this seat to a white supremacist who attacked Leroy's progressive positions on race.

Black laborers were the foundation of Leroy's wealth and power, and he was determined to keep them in the Delta. So he pushed local banks to grant mortgages to Black families and fostered decent conditions for his tenants. Black people made up 95% of the Delta's agricultural labor force, and Leroy knew that his cotton empire surrounding Greenville would collapse without them. By the 1920s, Greenville had a population of 15,000 people. It was the largest town in Washington County, known as the Queen City of the Delta, with movie theaters, restaurants, and 12 miles of paved streets. Greenville was unique among

southern towns for its relative racial tolerance. Because of Leroy's efforts, black children in Greenville received better schooling than that which was available in most southern towns. The town had black mailmen, black policemen, and a black justice of the peace. But in 1922, Greenville became a target of the Ku Klux Klan. On March 1st, the Klan staged a recruitment rally at the Greenville Courthouse. After a Klansman spoke, Leroy Percy stood and walked toward the podium. He began with a few jokes, mocking the Klan, but soon his tone turned serious. Leroy declared,

I know the terror this organization embodies for our Negro population. I'm here to plead against it. Friends, let this Klan go somewhere else. Let them sow dissension in some community less united than ours. After Leroy spoke, a white banker rose and proposed a resolution denouncing the Klan, and the crowd cheered in its favor. Leroy's speech dealt a heavy blow to the Klan's efforts to recruit in Greenville and won him the loyalty of the town's black community.

Local black leaders signed a letter declaring, If we had Mr. Percy in every county of the state, there would be no Klan, and the less fortunate people would not be terrorized. But even as Leroy celebrated his victory over the Klan, he couldn't ignore another threat to his empire. Every day he went to work in Greenville that spring, he could see that the river was rising. It had been nearly four decades since the Mississippi River Commission set a flood control policy that depended solely on building levees. Since then, the commission had not only refused to create artificial outlets and spillways, it had also closed natural ones.

And then, by April 1922, storms had swelled the river to capacity. Leroy sent his black laborers to the levees protecting Greenville. They filled and stacked sandbags to reinforce the walls. The levees held, but the water topped the banks of connecting tributaries. Six Delta counties were flooded. The water also broke through multiple levees in Louisiana. Watching these disasters unfold, one engineer became convinced that the miles of levees built along the river disguised a fatal flaw in the flood control system. Imagine it's a sweltering morning in August 1922. You're walking into a hotel cafe in New Orleans. You're a civilian engineer, and today you're meeting with General Lansing Beach,

an Army engineer with the Mississippi River Commission. You spot him in the corner, reading a newspaper. General Beach, thank you for agreeing to meet. Beach folds up his newspaper and takes a sip of his coffee. You have five minutes. I deal with enough engineers every day. You take a seat. General, I have some major concerns I believe need attention. I've done some calculations about the flood last spring. I want to make sure that nothing like it ever happens again. It won't? We have nothing to worry about. 70,000 people were left homeless

in three states. I call that reason to worry. Those people were the victims of breaks in substandard levees. We're repairing the last of the old levees, and we're almost at the finish line. Just a few more years, and we'll have mastered the Mississippi. But don't you see? The problem is the levees themselves. They're causing the river to rise. Not this again. Your commission sealed off all the natural outlets and it's making things worse. The water has nowhere to go. The numbers speak for themselves. Back in 1850, the levee 40 miles above New Orleans was less than two feet high. Now that same levee has to be 20 feet high in order to contain a flood. So what if we raised the levees? This is an old debate and one that's long been settled. Levees work. This most recent flood proves it. This flood doesn't

prove anything. It carried far from record volume. If it had been as large as the floods of 1912 or 1882, it would be a completely different story. You need to let this water out. Build spillways to release the pressure. Beach narrows his gaze. In case you've forgotten, I'm a general. I don't take orders from civilians. Right, you're a general, not a scientist. And science is telling us that we must try something new if we're going to save lives.

Beach shakes his head and picks up his newspaper again. I said I'd give you five minutes. Your time is up. You get up to leave, stunned speechless by the general's arrogance. You fear that this stubborn adherence to levies will cost lives. But you remain determined to find allies to protect New Orleans from disaster. As floods continued to devastate the lower Mississippi Valley, a civilian engineer named James Kemper tried to raise the alarm. He warned elites in New Orleans that the city desperately needed to build an emergency spillway, and he wanted the support of powerful local leaders.

But members of the Mississippi River Commission refused to listen. They believed the 1922 flood showed once and for all that the levee system worked. They argued that the only problem was old, substandard levees in need of repair. So the Commission doubled down on the levees-only policy, making plans to close the last major outlet in the lower Mississippi River. General Lansing Beach was a member of the commission, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, and wedded to the levees-only policy. In August 1922, he declared, if it were my property, I would rather blow a hole in the levee if conditions became serious and let the water take care of itself

rather than pay to build a spillway. Four years later, in June 1926, the Army Corps of Engineers declared victory over the river. They announced that the levees were finally in good enough condition to eliminate the threat of destructive floods. Even so, that year, Congress created a board to try to resolve the still-ongoing debate between levees and spillways. This spillway board planned to visit New Orleans in the spring of 1927. But their efforts would come too late. The battle to tame the river had taken

its toll. The water was rising, and soon it would reach heights that no one had ever imagined, putting the lives of thousands in jeopardy. This is the emergency broadcast system. A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next?

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You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. In August 1926, heavy black clouds rolled over the skies of the upper Midwest, and violent rain began to fall. For days, it pelted down on South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Soon, the storm moved east, to Iowa and Missouri, then to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Lightning crackled over the darkening skies, and the gusts of wind rattled

trees and buildings. Finally, the rain stopped, and for two days the sun shone. But then another storm rolled in, and after that another. The rain was relentless. It filled streams and rivers to capacity. On September 1st, dozens of streams overflowed their banks, and within three days, floods washed out towns from Kansas to Indiana, killing four people. A few days later, another storm followed, claiming seven more lives. And still, the rain did not stop. In mid-September, a swollen river flooded towns in Kansas, gutting homes and businesses and killing five more people. In Illinois, floodwaters

rammed a tree through an oil pipeline, sparking a fire that appeared to set the waters themselves ablaze. The Mississippi River watershed covers 40% of the continental United States, reaching all or part of 31 states. From the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Alleghenies in the east, hundreds of streams and rivers flow into the Mississippi. And the unrelenting storms dumped massive amounts of water into these tributaries. As they swelled in October 1926, so too did the Mississippi. Gauges along the river measured where the water reached flood stage. Typically, in October, the gauge in Vicksburg, Mississippi, 80 miles south of Greenville, hovered just above zero. But that fall, the water topped 40 feet. At the end of October,

the rain finally stopped. But just a few weeks later, new storms swept across the Mississippi River watershed. On December 13th, the temperature in the northern Great Plains dropped more than 60 degrees in less than a day, and heavy snow began to fall. Helena, Montana received almost 30 inches, and as the storms moved south and east, the intense precipitation caused more floods. In Nashville, the Cumberland River topped the city's 56-foot levees. The Tennessee River flooded Chattanooga, killing 16 people and forcing thousands to spend Christmas homeless. The town of Cairo, Illinois, sat at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

From Cairo, the river flowed more than 1,100 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The watershed below Cairo was known as the Lower Mississippi Valley. On New Year's Day, 1927, the river rose above flood stage in Cairo, months earlier than normal. Over the next few weeks, gauges throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley, all the way to New Orleans, reached flood stage and would stay there for the next 153 days. In New Orleans, most Mardi Gras events were canceled.

A local newspaper described one rain-drenched parade reporting cornets, trombones, bass horns filled with water from the driving rain. The chairman of the Mississippi River Commission downplayed the rising waters. In February, he tried to reassure residents, insisting, No serious trouble with floodwaters is expected this spring, unless more rain than usual falls in the upper valley and tributaries. But that rain soon arrived, along with blizzards which blanketed the Rocky Mountains and the Ozarks in March. At the same time, a heavy downpour continued in the south. Beginning on March 17th, three tornadoes struck the lower Mississippi Valley, killing 45

people and damaging several levees. Towns and levee boards all across the lower Mississippi Valley, killing 45 people and damaging several levees. Towns and levee boards all across the lower Mississippi River were on high alert. In mid-March, the Mississippi governor mobilized the National Guard to watch over the levees. Desperate residents sometimes tried to dynamite levees on the opposite side of the river to direct flooding water away from their own towns. In Arkansas, guards shot four men, trying to plant more than 100 sticks of dynamite on a levee. Extreme weather had caused the deluge, but human action made it worse.

For decades, industrial loggers had leveled forests along the tributaries and the main river, destroying a natural impediment to floods. Developers exacerbated the problem by draining wetlands, mowing prairie grasses, and planting acres of corn and wheat. Industrial-scale agriculture made the region more profitable, but it also caused the river to become more unpredictable. And for nearly 40 years, the Mississippi River Commission had focused its levee-building efforts

along the 1,100-mile stretch from Cairo to the Gulf, the most powerful and dangerous part of the river. There were no breaks in the levee line, no spillways or reservoirs for rising water to escape to. So as the rain fell, the waters of the Mississippi continued to rise, and communities across the Mississippi Delta were desperate to shore up these levees,

and they would stop at nothing to get the manpower they needed to do it. Imagine it's March 1927. You are a shoe repairman in Greenville, Mississippi, walking to your store in Southside, one of the black neighborhoods in town. It's been raining for weeks, and today is no different. As raindrops bounce off your hat, you pull your coat tighter around yourself, eager to get inside and get warm and dry. As you walk into the street, a patrol car rounds the corner and stops in front of you.

An officer gets out and approaches. You there! Get inside the car. Time to get to the levee. I don't understand, officer. Look around you. You ever seen this much rain? It's only a matter of days before the water tops the levee unless everyone does their part. Officer, I have a business to run. You point at your shop across the street, but the officer looks at it and shakes his head. Shoe repair? Who's getting their shoes repaired in weather like this? Your only business is at that levee. You have a duty to protect this town. I've heard about what goes on at the levees, and I want no part of it. Those men work all night

in the rain, filling those sandbags. I'm no laborer, officer. I'm a tradesman, and I have a job right here in town. You don't get it, do you? This isn't up for discussion. I can't just leave my family. My kids are at home. They need me. Your family will have a lot more to worry about if you don't get in the car right this minute. I won't ask again. The officer pulls a pistol from his belt, points it at you. You throw your arms up. The officer places his hand on your back and shoves you toward the patrol car.

You sit down in the back seat in your soaked clothes and shiver as you stare out the window at your store. You're furious to be rounded up and forced to work against your will. But more than anything, you're terrified of the task ahead of you. In March 1927, thousands of men in the Delta were sent to the levees to strengthen their defenses. The levee guards were mostly white, and the levee workers were entirely black. In many towns, including Greenville, police forced black residents to join the dangerous work along the levee workers were entirely black. In many towns, including Greenville, police forced black residents to join the dangerous work along the levees.

Leroy Percy and other planters also mobilized their mostly black labor force. They pulled tens of thousands of workers from the cotton fields, housing them in camps on the levee and barges on the river. Convicts from Mississippi's Parchman Prison were also brought in to fight the rising river. Meanwhile, sheets of driving rain fell on the men as they worked to reinforce the levees with thousands of sandbags. It was back-breaking work. Two men would hold a sandbag, and a third would shovel wet earth into it and tie it closed. Rain made the sandbags heavier than normal, weighing as much as 100 pounds, and all day the workers carried these sandbags up the levee, carefully stacked them on top, and walked back down to start again,

their boots sinking into the mud, making each step a grueling effort. The weather was also unusually cold. Temperatures dropped into the 30s, even as far south as the Delta. The men huddled around fires when they had a few minutes to spare, but work continued for hours on end. But so too did the rain. April brought torrential, record-setting downpours. One Greenville resident wrote in his diary, I have seldom seen a more incessant and heavy downpour. Still, the Mississippi River Commission insisted the levees would hold. Army Major Donald Connolly declared,

The government levees are safe. We do not expect a break anywhere along the line of our levees, although some of the private levees may give way. The situation is well in hand. But by the second week of April, one million acres in seven states were already underwater. The floods had driven more than 50,000 people from their homes. Still, Major Conley maintained that the levees would hold.

On April 12th, he declared, We are in condition to hold all the water in sight. But the worst storm was yet to come. On Good Friday, eight inches of rain fell on Greenville. 300 miles to the south, New Orleans recorded 15 inches of rain in just 18 hours. The storm pelted several hundred thousand square miles with record rainfall. The signs of a looming disaster became unmistakable. That day, the Memphis Commercial Appeal declared, the roaring Mississippi River, bank and levee full from St. Louis to New Orleans,

is believed to be on its mightiest rampage. Considerable fear is felt over the prospect for the greatest flood in history. But despite the dire warnings, on the afternoon of Good Friday, the chief engineer of the Mississippi Levee Board threw a party at his home in Greenville, inviting Leroy Percy and other prominent local leaders. The guests stood at the windows as they sipped cocktails, watching the wind and rain violently batter the glass. Musicians performed for the party, but when booming thunder shook the house, the music stopped and all fell silent. Percy urged the group to rush to the closest levee. Two dozen men put on their boots and raincoats and piled into their cars and drove to the concrete levee that stood on the western edge of downtown.

The men stood on the slope and stared out at the raging river. The levee was holding, but the water was also rising fast. Trees, fences, boats, and drowning animals had been swept up into the current. As Leroy watched them swirl past, he feared that his whole empire, everything he and his family had built, might soon be destroyed. Dracula, the ancient vampire who terrorizes Victorian London. Blood and garlic, bats and crucifixes, even if you haven't read the book, you think you know the story. One of the incredible things about Dracula is that not only is it this wonderful snapshot of the 19th century, but it also has so much resonance today. The vampire doesn't cast a reflection in a mirror. So when we look in the mirror,

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It was the first government-built levee to break. For years, the Mississippi River Commission had boasted that their levees could withstand anything. And up and down the river, Americans had trusted the commission. They believed their homes and communities would be protected. But soon, the water crashing through this breach flooded 175,000 acres of land. The Great Flood had begun. Very quickly, terror spread throughout the lower Mississippi Valley. The volume of water flowing down the river was unprecedented. Residents feared the raging current would cause more breaches, and for hundreds of miles they continued fighting to

reinforce the levees with sandbags. 300 miles south of Dorena, Leroy Percy held an emergency meeting with the Greenville Levee Board and the head of the Mississippi National Guard. Elsewhere around his office, phones rang constantly and organizers rushed in and out, arranging manpower and supplies for shoring up the levees. Percy and his fellow board members made plans to pull more workers from the fields and bus in convict labor from nearby Parchman Prison. Over the next several days,

in Greenville and other towns up and down the Delta, police patrolled black neighborhoods to round up men and force them to work on the levees. Men who refused were often beaten, jailed, or even shot. Soon, 30,000 men, nearly all of them black, were building up the levee walls in the Delta. Greenville was protected by the three-story concrete levee that stood directly between the river and downtown, as well as an earthen protection levee that ran just north of the town and high railroad embankments to the south and

east. But the most critical and vulnerable section of the levee system was 18 miles north at a place called Mound Landing. Just upriver from this point, two other large rivers, the Arkansas and the White, fed into the Mississippi. Both were also well above flood stage, and their waters swelled the Mississippi to three times its normal volume. And at Mounds Landing, the river also took a sharp 90-degree turn, exposing the levee to the full force of all of that additional water. Below Mounds Landing lay the entire southern half of the Mississippi Delta. Everyone knew that a breach at Mounds Landing would send water rushing into the low-lying fields of the Delta, threatening every town and farm in its path, including Greenville and its 15,000 residents.

So for several days, workers on the levee raced against the rising waters. But the storms continued. On April 19th, tornadoes swept through Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, killing 31 people. The following day, those same storms reached the lower Mississippi Valley. There were no tornadoes, but the gale-force winds whipped the surface of the river into a froth. Waves pounded the levee like ocean surf.

And then, on the night of April 20th, the waters neared the top of the levee at Mounds Landing. 450 black workers furiously piled sandbags to try to raise its height another six inches. Temperatures were in the low 40s, and waves washed over the men as they worked. The workers could feel the levee trembling from the force of the water. It rose an inch every hour that passed, a rate of two feet a day. Then at 6.30 a.m., a small break appeared in the levee. Water 12 inches deep and 24 inches wide poured through the breach. National Guardsmen rushed to a plantation nearby to gather

even more workers. By 7 a.m., 1,500 men were working to repair the breach. The water gushing through had grown to a torrent. The task was impossible. Many men tried to escape rather than risk their lives fighting a losing battle, but the National Guardsmen raised their rifles and threatened to shoot. Left with no other choice, the men filled and piled the sandbags at gunpoint, but as quickly as the men threw them into the breach, the roaring waters washed them away. Then, thirty minutes later, at 7.30 a.m., the levee started violently shaking. The men could feel the earth shifting beneath their feet. They started running in all

directions. But it was too late. Abruptly, the levee collapsed. The raging water pushed out a large section of the levee, several hundred feet wide, carrying workers away with it. At least 100 men drowned. Faced with impending disaster, Army Engineer Major John Lee sent a telegram to the head of the Army Corps warning, Levee broke 8 a.m. Crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta. The break at Mounds Landing released a deluge of water double the volume of Niagara Falls. The force of the water widened the breach until it was three-quarters of a mile across. It gouged a channel into the soft delta soil a mile long and a hundred feet deep. It was the largest levee break to ever occur on the Mississippi. As the water moved south, it spread out, slowed down, and grew shallower.

But it still caused terrifying destruction. It covered entire farms and plantations under brackish water ten feet deep. It uprooted trees, houses, and fences, and carried away livestock. Church bells and fire whistles rang out throughout Washington County, warning people of the advancing catastrophe. And downriver in Greenville, residents prepared for the worst. Imagine it's the night of April 21st, 1927, in Greenville, Mississippi. It's been 12 hours since you heard word of the break at mound landing. You and your husband David are sitting in your kitchen,

debating what to do. You're a teacher, and your husband is a dentist. You're terrified that if the floodwaters top Greenville's protection levy, the life you've built will be washed away. We're running out of time. We must leave before it's too late. You tap your foot anxiously. David puts his hand on your thigh to steady you. We can ride this out.

I know we can. That water's coming from miles away. I'm confident the protection levee will hold. And the railroad embankments will help us too. I'm not so sure. Planters have been sending their men to the levees all week. Their efforts will work. They have to. His smile falters at the sound of the wind picking up. It just keeps getting stronger. You walk over to the rattling windows, staring out at your neighbors running down the street with their belongings on their backs. The truth is we don't know when the water will reach town. It could be just minutes

away. Or it could pass us entirely. Besides, where would we even go? If we were going to leave town, we should have caught a train days ago. If the town floods, the tracks won't be usable. You're the one who wanted to stay. But that was before. I wanted to be here for my students. But now... A tree crashes through the house next door.

David gets up at the sound and rushes to join you at the window. Look at this madness. I can't stand to wait any longer. We need to seek shelter. A look of dread darkens David's face. For the first time, he seems to share your fear. You're right. We need to be in a stronger building. Somewhere taller.

We can run for the courthouse. I'll gather our quilts and pack a loaf of bread. I'll open up the doors and the windows. If we let the water flow through, it might not wash away the whole house. He opens the windows as you gather a few precious belongings. You look around quickly, taking in the scene,

wondering how much of your home will be left when this is all over. David snaps you out of it. Come on, we've got to go now. Holding hands, you run out into the street and join the throngs of people fleeing for higher ground. You quicken your pace, but you fear it's already too late. On April 21st, news of the mound landing break quickly reached Greenville.

The flood was spreading out across the land and moving south, heading straight for town. The residents descended into panic. People ran for the Greenville courthouse and took shelter on rooftops. Crowds jammed grocery stores, searching for last-minute food and supplies. Trains out of the city were packed, mostly with white families who could afford the train and with places to go. Meanwhile, police rounded up more black men to secure the Greenville protection levy. Leroy Percy was at home with his family. He and his son Will had spent all day furiously calling New York bankers

and railroad executives for aid and transportation. And as night fell, the mood grew more tense. The levee break that everyone had feared had finally come to pass. Now the flood was heading straight for Greenville, spreading terror and destruction. Cotton fields throughout the county were inundated, and soon the deadly water would submerge the town itself. But to protect their town and their empire, the Percys would do whatever it took.

From Wondery, this is Episode 1 of The Great Mississippi Flood from American History Tellers. On the next episode, the flood reaches Greenville, displacing thousands of residents and sparking a desperate search for survivors. A rising star of the Percy family confronts a massive refugee crisis, and in Washington, the destruction forces President Calvin Coolidge to act. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. If you'd like to learn more about the flood, we recommend Rising Tide, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Berry. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. Music by Lindsey Graham. Voice acting in this episode by Ace Anderson and Cat Peoples. Written by Ellie Stanton. Edited by Dorian Marino. Our senior producers, Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis from Wondering. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts.

But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors

spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet,

head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself.