The largest and most expensive building project in the Arkansas Delta’s history has been, and probably will remain, the Mississippi River levee system that protects the land and its residents from annual overflow. In 1850, the U.S. Congress gave the public domain overflow and swamp lands that lined the river to the Mississippi Valley states, and Arkansas received around eight million acres that it could sell and from which the proceeds were to be expended in the construction of levees and drainage systems. By 1860 the State had constructed an almost continuous levee along the Mississippi’s west bank. Construction paused during the Civil War but resumed in 1874. Five years later, Congress established the Mississippi River Commission MRC, and responsibility for construction and maintenance of the levee was given to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In 1881, federal law ruled that the levees were to be constructed and repaired as aids to navigation, not for the sole purpose of protecting private property from overflow. This restriction was lifted in 1892, and at that time the MRC took the position that the levee system then in place would adequately protect the Mississippi valley from inundation. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 thirty-six of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties were under water, however, forced a complete reappraisal of flood control along the river, and popular support helped push through reform legislation. The entire levee was rebuilt stronger and taller and in some areas was repositioned.
But floods in Arkansas are not solely a Mississippi River phenomenon. In 1937, for example, when that river crested, other waterways could not drain into it, and eleven rivers, including the Arkansas and White, overflowed, covering seventeen counties and affecting more than forty thousand families. Among the shelters set up for the victims, the tent camp at Forrest City St. Francis County accommodated more than fifteen thousand people and their livestock.
Federal Flood Control Acts have been revised several times since. The Mississippi’s west bank system extends from Allenville, Missouri, on the Little River Diversion Channel, generally southward to the vicinity of Venice, Louisiana.
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