Rain Slams the South
The rain began on the night of January 1, 1937.
For people throughout nine states — all south of the Ohio River — the new year started with the sound of raindrops drumming roofs and windows and barns and streets. This wasn’t a drizzle or a light shower.
Beginning New Year’s night and continuing the next day, a hard rain fell on much of Kentucky; Tennessee; northern parts of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi; eastern Arkansas; western parts of the Carolinas; and southwestern Virginia.
The downpours covered the basins of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, both of which flowed into the Ohio River near Paducah, Kentucky. Bennett Swenson would report about the unusual January rainfall in the February edition of the Monthly Weather Review.
“The amounts [of rain] were slightly in excess of 4 inches at some points,” Swenson would write.
Two places named in Swenson’s report were Savannah and Selmer, Tennessee, only 20 miles apart on U.S. Route 64. In a 24-hour period, 4.55 inches of rain soaked Savannah while 4 inches fell on Selmer.
Swenson worked in the River and Flood Division of the Weather Bureau. At the time, the Weather Bureau was part of the United States Department of Agriculture.
(In a 1938 photo, Swenson is seated at his government desk with a phone to his ear. His short, wavy hair is combed straight back. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and a sharply creased suit and necktie. His appearance is as tidy as the reports he writes.)
Rain-drenched Savannah was on the Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the Ohio River, draining an area of 40,000 miles. The Tennessee flowed southwest from Knoxville into northern Alabama, then turned north, returning to Tennessee, and continued through Kentucky until it reached the Ohio River at Paducah.
Originating in Harlan County, Kentucky, the Cumberland River flowed 688 miles through northern Tennessee and Kentucky, emptying into the Ohio River about 20 miles east of Paducah.
“This [rain] occurred on rising rivers,” Swenson would write, “and quickly brought both the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers to flood.”
Families from eastern Arkansas to southwestern Virginia saw water streaming from the heavens. Perhaps not four inches in 24 hours like some Tennesseans, but still an unusual amount of precipitation, including in excess of three inches in these locales:
Greenville, Greenwood, Swan Lake and Tupelo in Mississippi
Crossett and Fordyce in Arkansas
Albertville, Florence and Tuscumbia in Alabama
Gillsville in Georgia
Caeser’s Head in South Carolina
In addition, rain totaling more than two inches in a day soaked places across the South too numerous to mention.
The storms swelled creeks and rivers that would eventually flow into the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, but mostly the Ohio. And yet northern points of the Ohio River basin, an area measuring 204,000 square miles, were relatively dry in the first days of 1937. There was some rainfall in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but nothing like the downpours south of the Ohio River.
Early winter rain was a normal occurrence throughout the Ohio Valley and the South. Yet the atmospheric conditions forming three miles above the earth were anything but normal.
Another government employee, C.L. Mitchell of the Washington Forecast District, would report in February that “an abnormal barometric pressure distribution prevailed over most of the northern hemisphere.”
If folks living in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys detected or sensed anything “abnormal” in the first days of January, it would have been due to intuition or divine guidance or some other explanation. But it would have nothing to do with a forecast or warning from the Weather Bureau.
At the time, a thorough explanation of the cause and impact of a massive weather event only came after it happened.
Two years later, in 1939, River and Flood Division chief Merrill Bernard told a congressional committee that the Weather Bureau “cannot … forecast the amount and location of rain in advance of its fall.” Bernard added, “We can decide that we are to have rains of a certain character, but we haven’t quite reached that point where we can bring them into a quantifiable forecast.”
What was known in the moment: 1937 had begun with rain. What was yet to be known: there would be more January rain in the Ohio River basin than any living person had ever seen.
Start at the beginning of The 1937 Flood Journal or access the archives.
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