The Nineteen Thirty-Seven Flood, When the Ohio Swallowed Evansville

January of nineteen thirty-seven began with cold rain falling on snow-saturated ground across the entire Ohio River watershed, from western Pennsylvania through the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee. The rivers rose. And they kept rising.

The Ohio River at Evansville crested at about fifty-three point seven feet, nearly nineteen feet above flood stage, a record that stood for decades. The lower portions of the city simply disappeared. The riverfront, the warehouse district, the bottomland neighborhoods were underwater for weeks.

Photographs from the period show familiar downtown streets as canals, with rowboats threading between the upper stories of buildings, men in rubber waders standing on the second-floor balcony of the courthouse. The water came up gradually enough that most residents had time to move to higher ground, and the death toll in Evansville itself was relatively limited compared to other Ohio Valley cities. But the destruction of property was immense.

The nineteen thirty-seven flood was not a surprise to anyone who understood the Ohio River's history. It had flooded before, badly, and would do so again unless something was done. The Army Corps of Engineers had been studying the problem for years.

Within a few years of the flood, construction began on the Evansville floodwall, a concrete and earthen barrier that now runs along the riverfront, separating the city from the river it was built beside. The floodwall solved the immediate problem. It has held through every subsequent high-water event, including years when the Ohio has again approached record levels.

But it also changed the city's relationship with the river permanently. The levee that once bustled with steamboat commerce, the riverfront that was the face of the city, was now separated from downtown by a wall. The river is still there.

You just cannot see it from the street anymore.