Water Nears the Top of the Levee
Thursday, January 21, 1937
JEFFERSONVILLE, INDIANA — At 2:40 p.m. WHAS Radio in Louisville warned about high water in Jeffersonville and advised downtown merchants to move goods immediately. Workers piled sandbags up to three feet high along Spring Street between Riverside Drive and Market Street.
A frantic effort was underway to raise the height of the 10-foot levee that protected the city.
The Courier-Journal reported, “Hundreds of workmen threw up an additional four-foot wall as the flooded river, normally half a block away, lapped within a few inches of the levee top.”
Trucks hauled bricks and rocks to the scene for workers to use as fill for the emergency barricade. Meanwhile, on the edge of Jeffersonville, more workers filled and stacked sandbags to protect the city on its west side.
City schools closed, including Chestnut Street School, where Ralph Sagebiel attended fourth grade, and Jeffersonville High School, where the furnace was snuffed out when the basement flooded.
Closed to students, the high school reopened as a shelter to refugees. Citizens also took refuge in the American Legion Hall, the Knights of Pythias Armory and assorted vacant buildings. The Red Cross organized refugee centers and set up an emergency kitchen on a day when at least 250 families had been forced from their homes.
The Quartermaster Depot placed 30 trucks into service, which were added to a working crew of more than 100 city and private trucks. The burgeoning fleet rolled through imperiled streets to rescue families and to haul materials that would reinforce the levee.
Concerned about contamination, the Jeffersonville Health Department ordered all water service to be shut off at 7 p.m. Water service would resume on Friday for an hour beginning at 6:30 a.m. and for another hour beginning at 5 p.m.
More than two inches of rain had fallen in 12 hours.
The downpours caused a four-foot rise up the river at Cincinnati. Down the river at Brandenburg, Kentucky, Mama Bondurant wrote in her diary, “This is a terrible rainy day. The river is rising fast and everybody down the street is moving out.”
J. L. Kendall, a U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist based in Louisville, predicted the Ohio River would climb to 44 feet or higher at Louisville (and Jeffersonville) if rains continued in the Ohio Valley. More rain was forecast, and snow was likely.
“The situation upstream is terribly bad,” Kendall said, “and the prospect for Louisville can certainly be termed alarming.”
A 44-foot stage would nearly equal the devastating 1913 flood, although it was not the worst flood to hit Louisville and Jeffersonville.
The Floods of 1883, 1884, 1907 and 1913
Two titanic floods struck Louisville and Jeffersonville in two consecutive years. A flood in February 1883 that crested at 44.8 feet was the biggest inundation in 50 years. Then, a year later in February 1884, the largest deluge in recorded history arrived in Louisville and Jeffersonville. The Ohio River crested at 47.4 feet.
After the 1884 flood, the federal government built a levee at Jeffersonville to withstand a flood two to three feet higher than the record crest. The levee passed the test when the Ohio River flooded in 1907.
Local historian Lewis Baird declared, “Jeffersonville is today the safest and driest river town from [Pittsburgh] to Cairo.”
In 1913 another major flood entered the Ohio Valley and set records along much of the Ohio River. But not at Jeffersonville, where the levee again held during a crest of 45.21 feet.
However, a gap that opened in the Pennsylvania Railroad fill in nearby Clarksville would have been disastrous for Jeffersonville had inmates from the state prison not hastily repaired the breach.
Arthur Lee Smith, Jeffersonville
Born in 1907, automobile mechanic Arthur Lee Smith did not remember Jeffersonville’s biggest floods, but he knew the Ohio River and recognized the danger in January 1937.
Aware of river conditions more than others, Arthur expected the Ohio to spill over the levee that had protected Jeffersonville for a half century. It’s likely he knew it before this day, when it became apparent to others.
“[I] remember Mike Egan come down and he lived there on Market Street,” Arthur later said. “And he said, ‘Well, we just might as well face it because they’ve got 60 feet of water at Cincinnati and whenever you’ve got 60 feet of water at Cincinnati, you’ve got a big flood stage. And that all has to come here yet.’”
Smith added, “So that’s definitely going to put it over the levee and down, which he was absolutely right. And of course, for those that didn’t pay too much attention to those things, and more or less live and let live, a lot of them got caught short. We realized this and tried to make preparations.”
From Coroner to Mayor
Edwin M. Coots II was the Clark County coroner and owner of E.M. Coots’ Sons Funeral Home.
The family business that began with Edward M. Coots I in Shelbyville, Kentucky, moved to Jeffersonville in 1860. The first Coots was elected Clark County coroner in 1888, beginning a long tradition of family members holding that office.
Coots was advanced in his trade, “one of the first in the funeral profession to learn the art of embalming,” said a newspaper in 1897. After decades on Chestnut Street and Spring Street, E.M. Coots’ Sons Funeral Home moved to its current location on Maple Street in 1927.
As rain fell and the Ohio River climbed the levee, Jeffersonville Mayor Allen W. Jacobs was absent, already gone for three months, recovering from an illness in Florida.
So, as Coots remembered, a man was sent to the funeral home. (A live man.) He delivered a message to the coroner.
One day a gentleman from the State Department of Health came up with a message from the city council. I went down and met with them, and they requested that I be acting mayor of the city because the mayor was out of town. He had become ill and couldn’t get back. The Jacobs family also requested that I serve until the mayor could get back.
Catherine Richardson, whose husband William was on the town council, recalled how leadership emerged during the crisis.
“[He] was disturbed as to what procedure they should take, and the mayor of the city was in Florida at the time. And so the men had to act on their own, which they did.”
Thus began the tenure of Edwin M. Coots II as acting mayor.
Edwin Coots was “a wonderful man,” remembered Arthur Lee Smith. “He and [Charlie] Moser done a lot to keep things in order and keep going. They had things under control.”
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — Across the river from Jeffersonville, having just returned from the inauguration in Washington, D.C., Louisville mayor Neville Miller talked to WHAS Radio listeners from a telephone at a grocery store.
Wearing a rubber coat and rain boots, the mayor sought to calm the public. He said relief work had commenced. An emergency flood committee had been formed. Support would come from the Kentucky National Guard and Quartermaster Depot in Jeffersonville. Lastly, the emergency called for caution but not worry. Miller signed off and left the grocery.
A short time later the store was evacuated.
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