Soon the high waters of the Ohio River will begin lowering in tri-state communities, after reaching historic levels. In Evansville and beyond, the great Ohio River Flood of 1937 caused considerable damage. WNIN’s Tim Jagielo spoke with University of Southern Indiana Archivist Jennifer Greene about USI’s large 1937 Flood digital archives and how it brings the historic event to life.
Jennifer Greene
“I'm from Central Indiana, and we didn't experience the flood of '37 in Central Indiana. So when I moved here to Evansville, and particularly working at the university, one of the most popular requests was pictures of the flood. And these pictures bring to life what it means to have five feet of water coming up in front of your house. There's a picture of a cow out on a porch. The entire yard is flooded, and they had brought the cow onto the porch so that it wouldn't get swept away in the flood. I mean, these show real impacts on everybody's daily life.”
Tim
Why do you think it's important to explore such collections again, especially if you didn't live it?
JG
“So there's lots of reasons. Curiosity about, ‘why are there flood walls in Evansville? What's the big deal about raising Dress Plaza and making it taller, adding the temporary flood barriers like they have?’ So looking at things like the flood of '37 and the flood of, I think it's 1897, really can show the impact of how the Ohio River can really shut the town down.”
“Another really great thing, and especially with the flood pictures — buildings that don't exist anymore, buildings that were taken down because of damage from the flood or the winds that came in after the flood. These buildings don't exist, but they do in the pictures, and so we can piece life in Evansville in 1937 back together again.”
TJ
Is there a particular segment of the collection that you find interesting or compelling?
JG
“The catwalks in downtown Evansville that they put up to get supplies and peoples off of the little lifeboats that they were using to put supplies around town and rescue people. When you see these catwalks going from the McCurdy down to the riverside, and they're completely surrounded by water and a boat, a motor boat, tied up to the catwalk, it really brings it home.”
TJ
Can you just describe the collection itself, how many pieces, where it came from, what kind of media we're talking about?
JG
“So it's a little bit of everything. It's primarily photographs, about 920 photographs. I think it's one of the largest 1937, flood collections I've seen anywhere. There are some delightful home movies that have been digitized. There are two of those, and there's a documentary that was done on the flood, two that was produced by USI. And then we have letters. We have a collection, small collection, of letters from two sisters who lived here in town, and that talks about what they were doing during the flood. And in our oral history collections, we have about 15 different interviews where, during the oral history, they talk about the flood and what it was like to be here in Evansville.”
TJ
Is there anything from those interviews that struck you the most as illustrative of what people went through?
JG
“They all talk about the lack of water, running water in their homes, which makes sense — 'okay, it's flooding.' But then you think, well, but why wouldn't you have water? Because there's plenty of water. Well, of course, all the waters were shut down. But the other really interesting thing is, how this area floods, and six, seven blocks over, it's not flooded at all, and so people had very different experiences just within the same neighborhoods.”
TJ
Would you want to talk about, or expand upon the digital archives in general, like maybe what's the most recent edition, or what's the largest single collection in there?
JG
“It's called the Digital Archives at David L. Rice library, we really just call it the Digital Archives right now, but it's got over 80,000 digital items in there that's everything from University history to regional history. In fact, our flood photos aren't just Evansville. We have some of the surrounding area as well, all the way up to Louisville.
Ironically, the flood is one of the larger collections in there. But we have some wonderful photos from Sonny Brown, who is a photographer for the Courier. We have Greg Smith's collection. He was a photographer for the Press. So those are some really fun and interesting pictures — Covers the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and the oral histories are really rich. We have a lot of WWII experiences, but we also have a lot of ethnic oral histories on there. Dr Bigham did a lot of work here in Evansville in the 70s collecting stories from Baptist Town.”
Individuals with additional information on archived photographs can contact the department via email, by a link on the archives home page.
Physical archives can be viewed during regular hours:
Hours: Monday-Friday:
8:00am-6:00pm
Summer Hours:
Monday-Friday
8:00am-5:00pm
The online archive can be viewed here
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