Tuttle Creek Dam
Kansas
The great earthen wall north of Manhattan is Tuttle Creek Dam, and it was born out of catastrophe. On July thirteenth, nineteen fifty-one, the worst single day of flooding in Kansas history sent the Big Blue and Kansas Rivers roaring over their banks. Manhattan's business district stood in eight feet of water, and damage across the state ran past seven hundred million dollars.
The Army Corps of Engineers proposed an enormous dam to tame the Big Blue. But the project would drown some fifty-five thousand acres of fertile farmland and displace or erase several towns, including Randolph, Garrison, and Cleburne, uprooting about three thousand people. Opponents fought it bitterly, calling it Big Dam Foolishness, and held off construction for two years.
The dam was finished anyway in nineteen sixty-two. Whole communities now lie beneath the reservoir, but the Corps estimates the dam has since prevented more than three billion dollars in flood damage downstream.
