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In the late nineteenth century, Americans increasingly settled and farmed the major river valleys of the country—the Mississippi, Ohio, and Sacramento, among others. More densely populated floodplains soon resulted in increasing damages from floods. The rivers also remained essential transportation corridors, a way for goods and people to move across the vast interior of the country, even as railroads expanded their reach.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been involved in improving navigation on the rivers since 1824, but flood prevention, accomplished by building levees and reservoirs to protect property from floods, was primarily left to local governments and private landowners. Some of the best federal engineers, including Andrew Humphreys and Henry Abbot, realized that navigation and flood prevention were closely related; water that was too low or too high made traveling on the river unreliable.
By 1879 growing pressures for navigation improvements and flood control measures prompted Congress to establish the Mississippi River Commission (MRC), a seven-member organization responsible for executing a comprehensive plan to construct navigation works and to “prevent destructive floods” on the lower Mississippi. Creation of this river basin authority marked the federal government’s growing commitment to the development of a reliable inland waterway system.
But a Republican-majority Congress was not ready to appropriate significant funds for flood control alone, especially for the heavily Democratic areas along the southern Mississippi. Meanwhile, major floods continued to occur. Levees failed, lands flooded, and refugees sought relief across the lower Mississippi valley in 1882, 1897, 1908, 1912, and 1913. On the other side of the country, the rapidly developing Central Valley of California experienced major inundations from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers in 1862, 1867, 1881, 1890, and again in 1907.
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A refugee camp on a levee at Arkansas City, Ark., during the 1927 Mississippi River flood.
Much of the delta was underwater for weeks. Office of History
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The First Flood Control Act
Finally, in 1917, a more progressive Congress passed the first flood control act, which authorized federal funding for $45 million of levee construction on the lower Mississippi and a paltry $5.6 million for diversion channels to redirect floods on the Sacramento River. Nevertheless, for the first time, Congress had specifically appropriated funds for flood control, and for the first time, Congress formally recognized flood control as a shared federal responsibility with local partners. The two regions that received funding also represented a political alliance of advocates for the wise use of natural resources and the reclamation of lands that were not living up to their agricultural potential because of frequent flooding.
However, the next two decades brought the largest and most damaging floods some regions had experienced since European settlement. In 1922, as levees closed off the remaining outlets of the river upstream, the Mississippi reached its highest stage ever recorded at New Orleans, and in the spring of 1927, the largest and longest-lasting flood on the Mississippi to date tore through some of the MRC’s newer levees, overflowed 11 million acres of land in the delta, and displaced more than 750,000 people. As Lucy Somerville, a young lawyer in Greenville, Miss., wrote in Woman’s Press that June:
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♦In the past we have called those visitations of water ‘overflows.’ This one we call a ‘flood.’ In the past an overflow was not unmitigated evil, it left a fertile deposit on the land…the water was calm and the people had lots of fun paddling about, inconvenient but no terror, or lives lost. But this time, a great mountain of water swept down upon us in a roaring raging torrent carrying death and destruction with it. Unless we can feel protected against such a thing happening again we shall begin to fear the river and life on the banks of the great Mississippi will become a misery indeed.♦
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The 1927 flood in Greenville, Miss. Office of History
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On the heels of that disaster, and with surging political pressure from states up and down the Mississippi valley, Congress passed the second major federal flood control act in 1928. This act established a comprehensive flood protection program for the lower Mississippi—levees, outlets, and massive spillways—and, for the first time, provided federal funding appropriate to the scale of the problem on both the Mississippi and Sacramento rivers, without any requirements for states and localities to share in those costs other than providing the land and rights-of-way. The 1928 flood control act authorized $325 million for the Mississippi ($6.1 billion in 2025 dollars), which was the largest public works appropriation in American history at the time. And the act authorized the Mississippi River and Tributaries (MR&T) project, which, although originally envisioned as lasting only a decade, ended up becoming the Corps’ largest and most protracted civil works project. While its specific components evolved over decades, parts of the MR&T took a century to complete.
Over the next several years, as America fell into the Great Depression and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration unleashed a torrent of federal funds to build public works and put the unemployed back to work, other rivers, ones not fully included in the flood control plans from 1917 and 1928, also experienced catastrophic inundations. In March 1936, 10-30 inches of rain fell across much of the northeast. Rivers from Maine to Maryland and west to Ohio broke flood records. Pennsylvania was the hardest hit state, with 84 deaths, some 82,000 buildings destroyed or damaged, and more than 240,000 people seeking relief from the Red Cross. Even in Washington, D.C., flooding was quite visible as large parts of the National Mall were under water and laborers desperately stacked sandbags to protect nearby federal buildings.
Flood control goes national
In that moment, Congress finally moved to make flood control a nationwide mission for the Corps of Engineers. If any concerns remained about the federal government paying for flood control—with local governments contributing only the cost of the land—the photos of flooded cities and the largesse of the New Deal swept them away. In June 1936, the third major federal flood control act declared flood control “a proper activity of the Federal Government,” expanding federal responsibility well beyond the Mississippi valley and authorizing widespread infrastructure projects, especially reservoirs, across major watersheds in the northeast. For example, the 1936 act specifically authorized nine reservoirs in the Allegheny River basin to mitigate future catastrophes such as the one that had left downtown Pittsburgh underwater that spring. But the act also opened the door to flood control in many places that had not received much federal attention previously, from Los Angeles to Little Rock.
Later flood control acts—in 1938, 1941, and 1944—would institute cost-benefit analysis, apply comprehensive planning for whole watersheds, authorize recreation at Corps reservoirs, and end most requirements for states to share in the costs of flood control. The result was an era of hundreds of “big dams” that transformed the landscape of the nation and decades where many areas experienced a dramatic reduction of the big floods of the early twentieth century.
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250th Anniversary
September 2025. No. 13. |
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