The Flood That Remade the River

March was the cruelest month in Springfield in nineteen thirty-six. An unusually hard winter had packed the Connecticut River valley with snow. When warm rain arrived in mid-March, the frozen river could not absorb what was coming from above.

The ice broke into blocks, some as large as automobiles, and those blocks, pushed by the surge, became battering rams. By the morning of March nineteenth, fifteen thousand Springfield residents were homeless. Eighteen miles of city streets were underwater.

The grist mills, the warehouses along the river, the neighborhood streets closest to the water, all of it submerged under a river that had turned into something else entirely. The Connecticut River crested at thirty-two feet above flood stage. Bridges across the region were knocked from their foundations.

Dams failed. Houses swept downstream whole, turning slowly in the current. In Massachusetts alone, the flood killed ten people and left fifty thousand homeless.

The dollar damages, in nineteen thirty-six terms, exceeded two hundred million. The disaster forced a reckoning with how America managed its rivers. Congress authorized a comprehensive system of flood-control dams across the Connecticut River watershed in the aftermath.

Those dams, Knightville, Tully, Birch Hill, and others, changed the character of every tributary that feeds this reach of the river. The floods still come, but nothing since nineteen thirty-six has come close to what the river did in March of that year, when it stopped being a river and became, for a week, a different geography entirely.