10/05/2026
April 15, 1927. Good Friday. Flood fighters are gathered at the Mississippi River levee above New Madrid, Mo, at a place called Dorena. The fight has been ongoing for weeks. The rain has been falling for months. A hole opens up in the levee. John Clifft, an eyewitness, described the water as shooting out through the levee like a pipe. Eight white men and 30 African Americans gather at the site. They begin throwing sandbags into the hole. But it continues to grow. One of the levee guards fired his r***e into the air, the signal that the levee was about to fail. Another yelled out “Crevasse! Crevasse!” Everyone fled. Then, at 4:30 a.m. on Holy Saturday, April 16, the river burst through the levee. The Great Flood had begun.
In the aftermath of the Great Flood, much of the blame was placed on the Mississippi River Commission and its infamous “Levees Only” policy. But the story of levee construction on the Mississippi River preceded the 1927 flood by more than two centuries.
French colonists began construction on the first Mississippi River levee in 1717. When completed in 1726, the levee surrounded the city of New Orleans and resembled a siege work designed to entrap an enemy. The levee stood only around four feet tall.
In the decades that followed, the French and Spanish extended the levee line as far north as Baton Rouge on the east bank and Point Coupee Parish on the west bank. South of New Orleans, the levee extended approximately 12 miles downstream.
This was the state of the Mississippi River when the United States made the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory doubled the size of the Nation, but the contents of that territory were largely unknown.
In the decades that followed, Army Engineers explored, surveyed, and mapped the lands west of the Mississippi River. Settlers began moving westward. The waterways became their highways. But the lands along the great river remained wild swamps.
Local levee construction exploded between 1828 and 1844. During this time, settlers extended the levee line along the west bank of the Mississippi River some 250 miles, all the way up to the mouth of the Arkansas River. Local levee districts formed, states began collecting taxes to fund levee construction, and new settlers rushed to fill the now protected alluvial lands between the Ouachita Mountains and the Mississippi River.
