Flood Control in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta

Abstract

Studies of the numerous flood control projects which have been carried out in the eastern and southern United States frequently fail to give any idea of the accumulated cost of the work under investigation or of the many individual and group efforts responsible for initiation and development of the reclamation program. This is particularly true of projects in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley where flood control works have been supported for more than 200 years, and where costs and responsibility have been borne, at one time or another, by individuals and by every level of government from the county supervisors to the Congress of the United States. The absence of adequate records covering the life of public works projects deprives administrators of data essential to judgment of the need for and efficiency of projects under their jurisdiction. It also, in the case of flood control, makes it difficult for the social scientist to trace and understand the important changes in public thinking which prompted the gradual shift of responsibility for flood control from purely personal hands to local organizations, then to state, and, finally to almost full federal responsibility and control. In the case of Mississippi Valley projects, public knowledge often appears to be limited to developments carried out after the passage of 1928 federal flood control legislation. There can be no doubt that the federal flood control acts of 1917 and 1928 were of the highest importance to the Mississippi Valley but they did not mark the beginning of flood control efforts there. While there is little possibility of developing a schedule of costs covering the full history of flood control efforts in the alluvial valley of the Mississippi, there are a number of opportunities to develop cost records and to trace important steps in the evolution of responsibility for flood control in the individual basins of the valley. In the Yazoo-Mississippi basin, particularly, the formidable files of the Mississippi Levee District at Greenville and the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Levee District at Clarksdale make possible the development of an almost complete history of individual, local, state, and federal efforts to protect the Yazoo bottoms from Mississippi overflow.2 In this paper, emphasis will be placed upon flood control in the Mississippi Levee District,3 as the records of this district are probably the most complete