The Big Ditch — When a Flood Swallowed Main Street

Silver City was laid out in a valley that channels heavy summer rains toward a single drainage corridor running through the center of town. For the first years of the city's existence, that drainage was manageable, a seasonal stream that crossed Broadway near the heart of the commercial district. Then, on July twenty-first of eighteen ninety-five, a catastrophic flash flood tore through the valley.

Eyewitnesses described a wave twelve feet in height and three hundred feet wide that carried everything movable in its path. The New York Times reported that half the business district of the city was washed away. The water cut a channel through the center of town that in places was more than fifty feet wide.

Buildings that had stood on the banks collapsed as the ground beneath them eroded. The original Main Street was effectively destroyed. Silver City rebuilt on different streets and higher ground, and the old corridor was simply left open.

Subsequent floods deepened and widened the channel over the following decades, dropping parts of it as much as fifty-five feet below where the street had once run. The town eventually accepted the canyon in its midst and cleaned it up, planting cottonwood and willow trees in the sandy floor and opening it as a linear park about a mile long. That park is today called the Big Ditch.

It runs through the heart of Silver City as an unintended monument to the power of the monsoon and the limits of boomtown planning.