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Missouri Deluged

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 25, 1872

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 40, No. 2.

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Missouri Deluged.

A WALL OF WATER FIVE FEET HIGH—ITS WORK OF DEVASTATION.

[Lawrence County Letter to the St. Louis Democrat.]
A GENTLEMAN just in from the south-west furnishes us some interesting particulars of the recent great flood in that region. He says, the damage to the county can scarcely be estimated. Whole farms in the valleys of Spring River, Center Creek and other smaller streams and branches have been completely washed out. Whole valleys, last week smiling with abundant growing crops of grain and meadow grass, now present the appearance of river beds, the soil having been washed away, leaving nothing but rock and gravel; old orchards were in some cases completely washed out by the roots. Barry, Lawrence, Jasper, and Newton Counties are the worst sufferers.
Near Mount Vernon, in Lawrence County, a woman was washed right out of her house, and carried away by the flood to an untimely death. A number of people barely escaped from their houses before they were washed away.
The track of the flood presents a terrible picture of devastation and desolation. Horses, mules, cattle, and sheep, in great numbers, were carried away. Thousands of acres of land, that was worth from fifty to sixty dollars an acre before the flood, are now valueless. The oldest settlers in that region unite in saying that in the thirty and forty years of their experience, there has never been to exceed one-third the amount of water-fall there that has fallen now.
The gentleman who furnishes this information, who was himself an eye witness to the devastation of the flood, says that it was impossible to say, as in most cases of rise of water, so many feet in so many hours or minutes, but a great wall of water, five feet in height, like an immense wave, seemed to roll down the valley of Spring River, sweeping everything before it. In some instances it floated several hundred yards of railroad track off its bed and carried it into adjoining fields. All the culverts on the Atlantic and Pacific railroad for 25 miles are washed out, and the track broken in a great many other places.