News

Film asks whether we learned lessons from flood of 1916

South Depot Street near the Highland Hotel in Asheville is shown in the flood of 1916. PHOTO BY WILLIAM H. BARNHILL, Pack Memorial Library, Special Collections

By Bill Moss, Published: June 20, 2016

Jennie Jones Giles recalls family stories about her forebears fleeing for high ground as the flood 1916 threatened their cabin on Bright’s Creek in Polk County. Drew Brannon remembers his grandfather’s tales about chickens and livestock floating down the French Broad River near the family farm.

In Bat Cave, catastrophic landslides “removed everything clear and clean in their paths,” W.S. Fallis, of the State Highway Commission, said a month after making an extensive survey of flood damage. “Everything moveable in their path was swept to the river below. Trees were absolutely denuded of every vestige of bark. Rocks were ground smooth. Buildings were carried away in an irresistible rush.”
The imperative of the double-zero is bringing a flood of memories. The N.C. Division of Archives and History has produced “So Great the Devastation,” the name of both an exhibit and a 45-page book on the flood of 1916.
David Weintraub, an award-winning documentary maker, next week debuts his own hour-long film on the flood.
“I’ve done about 80 oral histories and one of the recurring themes is this flood that left an indelible mark on these families and cut branches off some family trees in some cases,” Weintraub says. The documentary looks back and looks forward — and warns that we’ve learned no lessons from the 1916 flood and other big storms.

Boulders tumble down the mountain

Western North Carolina had already endured a rainy summer by early July, notes Giles, a former award-winning reporter and Heritage Museum director who teaches a course on Henderson County history at Blue Ridge Community College.
“Then a tail end of hurricane hit and that caused all the rivers and creeks to flood, which is very normal for here,” she said. “Then we had another period of a lot of rain and then we got hit by the tail end of a hurricane that had come in from Charleston. So we had 10 solid days of rain by that time. There was nowhere for that rain to go since the rivers and creeks were already at flood stage.”
Rainfall totals ranged from 14-16 inches in parts of Hendersonville to 22 inches of rain in 24 hours at Altapass, in McDowell County.
In Transylvania County, “huge boulders that weighed tons were sliding down the mountain and landing in the Toxaway River and those huge boulders are still sitting in the river today,” Giles says in the film. “All those rocks and boulders you see down in the Rocky Broad are a result of the flooding in 1916.”
In Bat Cave, Brown E. Huntley, who woke up to the terrible sounds of the flood at 1 or 2 a.m. Opening the door, he was confronted by “a wall of rock, mud and wood” that pushed the house “right into the clutches of the flood,” French Broad Hustler reported. Huntley lost his wife, Belle, and their adopted children, Bonnie, 7, and Fred Hill, 11, the newspaper reported. (The state Archives and History office reports a third victim in the family, Stacy, 14.)

‘They could no longer farm’

Giles’s grandfather lived on Bright’s Creek in Polk County. She grew up hearing family stories about how the flood affected the people there.
“They were so close to the creek that the water was rising so fast that they feared for their lives,” she said. “They walked all the way to Silver Creek Baptist Church for shelter and ended up staying there. The log cabin could be rebuilt. What they discovered the next spring when they went to plant was that all their topsoil had washed away. They could no longer farm.”
Further up the mountain, in Asheville, the French Broad crested at 21 feet — 17 feet above flood stage. The average width of the French Broad River was 381 feet. At the height of the flood the river was 1,300 feet across. Government reports at the time pegged property damage at $22 million, Giles said. That would translate, according a 2007 report, to $430 million.
Relief did come, from churches and neigbors. Congress appropriated $540,000, including $80,000 for seed. A state relief committee had raised $75,000 in donations three weeks after the flood. As state officials fanned out into the flood-ravaged mountains, they found widespread devastation.
C.E. Brooks, the chair of the state relief committee, informed Gov. Locke Craig via telegram that conditions were “more serious than first reported” in Hendersonville, adding that he had found 25 families “in destitute circumstances.”
While contemporary newspaper accounts reported a death toll as high as 80, the N.C. Archives and History research has confirmed 50. In Henderson County the victims of the 1916 flood were Bonnie Hill, 8, Fred Hill, 11, Stacy Hill, 14, and Belle Huntley, 28, of Bat Cave; and Isaac W. Connor, 77, and Catherine Freeman, 11 months, of Fruitland.

Osceola, Kanuga dams burst

Though not as hard hit as Bat Cave and parts of Edneyville, Hendersonville became an island surrounded by a lake in the flood of 1916 and no one could get in or out of town.
A report in August 1958 by Tennessee Valley Authority’s Division of Water Control Planning documented the biggest floods on Mud Creek, Bat Fork, Devils Fork and King Creek in Hendersonville.
The report cited contemporary accounts from the French Broad Hustler and Western Carolina Democrat on July 17.
“Osceola Lake was the first to go, the dam breaking at 2 o’clock Sunday morning,” the newspaper report said. “Nothing is left of the lake now but a small stream flowing through the center of where the big body of water used to be. The Kanuga Dam went down about 10:15 Sunday morning … and when the water got to Hendersonville the creek rose with amazing rapidity and soon Mud Creek was a veritable Mississippi, carrying bridges, lumber and everything that stood in its way on the crest of the water. the bridge on Kanuga Road at the foot of South Washington Street withstood the force of the water but many other bridges were washed away. …”
“Hicks Garren and Vernon Rogers had a narrow escape Saturday night,” the newspaper reported. “They had gone out after some pigs at the end of Depot Street and the rising water forced them to make to the trees where they clung from one o’clock at night until 6 in the morning when they were rescued by parties in a boat.”
Police stayed busy Saturday night going from house to house along Mud Creek warning residents to get out. “At one place the people were still asleep when Chief Powers came into the house and at that time the water was about two feet deep on the floor in the bedroom.”
“Sixteen-year-old Carl Blythe remembered his mother’s anxiety as floodwaters began to creep up near the town’s sidewalks and roads,” Jessica A. Bandel wrote in “So Great the Devastation,” the state-issued account. “With her home only six blocks from Mud Creek, she had plenty of cause for concern for both her home and her family, sternly warning Carl to steer clear of the water. Against his mother’s wishes, Carl snuck off to a nearby railroad trestle and watched the remains of drowned cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs speed down the creek and lodge against the trestle.”

Family stories survive

Weintraub’s film, “Come Hell Or High Water, Remembering The Flood Of 1916,” took shape over the past year as the calendar turned toward the 100th anniversary.
Eyewitness interviews were impossible.
“That’s always difficult when you’re trying to interview people that are all dead,” Weintraub said. “But there are all these family stories that people recall and we were fortunate to get an interview that had actually been done in the ‘70s of a survivor who was then in her 70s.”
That would be Edna Huntley Pryor, who was 24 when the flood washed away the family home on the Middle Fork section of Bat Cave. A family taped her recollection of the event.
There were floods before 1916 and floods after, Weintraub points out. One hundred years ago, as the rainy summer slogged on, people recalled the flood of 1896.
“When they were cleaning up from the flood of 1916, there was the flood of 1928,” he said. After that there were major floods in 1940, 1977 and 1996. The remnants of hurricanes Frances and Ivan, on Sept. 1 and Sept. 9, 2004, one from the Gulf of Mexico, the other from the Atlantic Ocean, brought high wind, flooding and landslides. As recently as 2013, Henderson County farm agent Marvin Owings observed that “no one alive has seen” a summer so rainy.
In other words, there’s no reason we couldn’t again see a similar merger of weather systems or back-to-back tropical storms. And if we do, the result could be much worse.
“Unfortunately, where one landslide has occurred in the past it’s likely to happen again,” James Fox, the director of the National Environmental Modeling Center at UNC Asheville, says in the film. “But we tend to be building on these scars. There is the larger danger for loss of life and property related to where the landslides are than where the floodplains are.”
The potential for disaster is easy to find. Just look up.
“Local people never built on top of the mountain, I guarantee you that,” Giles says. “Every local person I know drives around and says (of mountaintop homes) ‘I wonder when that house is coming down?’
“Nature is always going to win,” she adds. “We can build roads and highways above the bogs and rivers and creeks. We can build bridges higher and higher and higher above our waterways and bogs. We can dredge our streams and creeks but some time there’s going to come another summer of another heavy rain and we’re going to end up with two tail ends of hurricanes again and all the things that men did is going to be worthless.”

* * * * *

Come Hell Or High Water: Remembering The Flood Of 1916 premieres at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 23, at Thomas Auditorium at BRCC. That show is sold out. Other showings are: BUNCOMBE COUNTY July 16- 1:30 PM - AB Tech, Asheville- So Great The Devastation: The Flood Of 1916 In WNC Symposium, music and our film (15 minute film only); POLK COUNTY July 23- 10:30 AM-  Pacolet Area Conservancy at Anne Elizabeth Suratt Nature Center at Walnut Creek Preserve; MCDOWELL COUNTY August 6- 7:00 PM- Old Fort- Mountain Gateway Museum; TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY August 9- 12:00 PM- Brevard- Transylvania County Library, Rogow Room. For more information visit www.saveculture.org or by calling (828) 692-8062. The program is co-sponsored by the N.C. Humanities Council, the Henderson County History and Genealogy Center, Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy and Mountain True.