Digital Snapshots

The Great Flood of 1927 was one of the greatest natural disasters of the twentieth century. The flood inundated some 27,000 square miles and drove approximately 600,000 people from their homes in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Estimates of the economic damage wrought by the flood varied from $246 million to $1 billion, while the loss of life ranged from 246 to upwards of 1,000 men, women, and children. The sheer destructive power of the flood was captured in a series of photographs commissioned by the Illinois Central Railroad, copies of which are housed in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. These photographs do more than illustrate the misery that the flood brought to the Delta, they reveal a story of railroads and race, one that lay at the very heart of the region’s history.

It is fitting that the Illinois Central would compile a photographic history of the Great Flood, as the histories of the railroad and of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta were all but inseparable. The Illinois Central helped build the plantation economy of the Delta, which emerged as the nation’s premier cotton-producing region around the turn of the century. Beginning in the 1880s, the Illinois Central encouraged the creation of large, sprawling cotton plantations by selling its land for low prices on long credit. In the years that followed, the Illinois Central became a prominent “booster” of the Delta, recruiting settlers to the region and spurring its economic development. The railroad purchased timber for crossties from Delta farmers, then it hauled away the dense forests that once carpeted the region. Once cotton cultivation overran the Delta, the Illinois Central carried its harvests to entrepots throughout the Mississippi River Valley, making the Delta’s planters some of the wealthiest men in the South.

The floodwaters that surged across the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta did not spare the Illinois Central.  On July 13, 1927, the New York Times reported that the railroad had suffered some $2 million in property damage and was anticipating reduced cotton revenues during the coming year. Not surprisingly, the photographers hired by the Illinois Central focused much of their attention on the flood ravaged railroad. For example, a photographer near Helm, Mississippi, captured track that had buckled when its roadbed became waterlogged. Another showed swamped boxcars that had become makeshift shelters and storage facilities near Cary, Mississippi. Because railroads were perched on elevated roadbeds, the tracks that crisscrossed the Delta and the adjoining depots became places of refuge for displaced Mississippians. In Egerton, photographers caught people sitting atop boxcars while cars, livestock, and refugees gathered onto nearby tracks.

It was, perhaps, no accident that people sought refuge along the railroads. The railroads and their workers had been in the forefront of rescue and relief efforts. In Greenville, for example, LeRoy Percy urged railroad officials to rush emergency supplies into the Delta and to marshal empty boxcars that could be used as makeshift shelters. In congressional testimony about the flood, chief engineer A. H. Blaess of the Illinois Central praised the heroism of his company’s engineers, brakemen, and track gangs. “In sandbagging track, driving bridges through raging torrents, raising track in water…diving under the flood to throw a submerged switch, [and] working long hours under the broiling sun or in driving rain,” the railroaders of the Illinois Central exhibited an almost indescribable “spirit and morale.” A congressional report on flood relief efforts documented the heavy load carried by the Illinois Central. The railroad ran 311 rescue trains, transported 46,381 refugees, hauled almost 800 carloads of distressed livestock to dry ground, carried almost 1,300 carloads of supplies, and provided 1,674 cars to be used as living quarters—all free of charge. The railroad even provided medical assistance to people in the Delta.[i] By the time that flood ended, historian Pete Daniels reckoned that the Illinois Central and other railroads had donated some “$1.5 million in free transportation and free use of the cars for refugees’ homes.”[ii]

As the photographers worked their way across the Delta, they captured one of the nation’s worst humanitarian crises since the Civil War. The plantation economy that enriched both the Illinois Central and the Delta planters was built upon the exploitation of black sharecroppers, who constituted almost 90 percent of the population of some areas. In the wake of the flood, the Delta’s sharecroppers scrambled onto their rooves, onto the railroad embankments, and onto the levees. Some 325,554 people crowded into 154 tent cities that the Red Cross had established throughout the Mississippi Valley. The 1927 flood collection captures the racial disparities in the often-crowded camps. One image snapped at the Birdsong Camp in Cleveland, Mississippi, on April 29, 1927, shows black people eating from four rows of tables under the supervision of white relief workers. Another photograph taken at Birdsong Camp throws more light on conditions on the camp. In this picture a line of black men, women, and children stand on a ramshackle walkway in front of their tents, all under the eyes of a white supervisor. Conditions were often crude. A few weeks later, a photographer caught a glimpse of the misery inside a camp when he snapped a photograph of a black family huddled around the fly of their tent at a muddy tent in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

When the floodwaters receded, the foundations of the Delta’s economy began eroding. During the First World War, black southerners had escaped the region, looking for economic opportunities and a respite from Jim Crow in the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast. That Great Migration continued after the flood. Once again, the Illinois Central played a role in shaping the Delta, this time as an escape route. As historian James C. Cobb notes, “In addition to its role as the conduit for letters from relatives and friends already gone, the Illinois Central Railroad itself became a seductive symbol for the superiority of northern life.”[iii] The railroad that had helped make the Delta, now helped its plantation empire unravel.