With all the attention on the rising Mississippi River, I thought it would be a good time to give you some historical facts about this mighty waterway.

Well, let’s start before there was a levee. Flooding has always been a problem and one such flood hit New Orleans and lasted from December 1734 until June 1735. This flood would destroy the entire city of New Orleans. Before the Civil War, a land owner whose property fronted the Mississippi River was responsible for building a levee in front of his property to protect it from rising river water. This did not work very well and was poorly enforced. In the 1850s the Mississippi Legislature authorized creation of levee construction and maintenance. Levee officials could now order plantation owners along the Mississippi

River to turn over their slaves for use in shoring up levees during floods and emergencies. Also, in the 1850s the officials thought 2,000 miles of levee constructed on both sided of the river would cost $40 million and would stop future flooding.

In 1858 and 1859, another flood occurred, and this would be the largest to date and would destroy everything in its path. Levee construction stopped during this Civil War. In November 1865 property owners acquired the authority from the Mississippi Legislature to form a board of Levee Commissioners that would later be known as the Mississippi Levee District. The newly formed board now had power to tax land, to place a duty on cotton and to issue bonds for funding new levee projects. The federal government offered assistance to levee boards from 1882 to 1917 and then took over the building of the levees in 1917.

Floods continued to destroy the river building efforts with major overflows in the years 1874, 1882, 1883, 1897, 1903, 1912 and once again in 1927. The flood of 1927 had the most dramatic impact of all the floods. Secretary of Commerce at the time and later president of the United States Herbert Hoover called this flood the disaster of all times. Some 23,000 miles were flooded,

and over 70,000 people were forced from their homes. Property damage was over $400 million. This disaster forced the passage of the Flood Control Act by Congress in 1928. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been active on the river since the 19th century by clearing obstruction on the river. To date, the corps has spent billions of dollars on flood control. So the next time you look at the levee and the Mississippi River, just stop for a moment and think about how man has spent hundreds of years trying to control this body of water and how much heartache flooding has caused the people of New Orleans.

Wayne Norwood is a lieutenant with the St. John the Baptist Sheriff’s Department and owner and operator of the Louisiana Treasures Museum.