The flood of 1937

It rained in the Ohio Valley for most of January 1937. Upriver, the snow melted at the same time. By the third week of the month the river at Paducah was over its banks and rising by more than a foot a day.

People did what they had always done: carried the furniture upstairs and waited. Then the water reached the upstairs.

Rowboats on Broadway

Within days, boats were the only way to move through most of downtown. Families rowed out of second-floor windows. The Red Cross set up camps on higher ground and on trains, and thousands of people left the city altogether to stay with relatives in towns that had never seen a flood.

When the water finally went down in February it left mud, sometimes a foot deep, inside nearly every building on the low ground. The cleanup took months. Some businesses never reopened.

The wall

The answer was the floodwall: concrete along the riverfront, earthen levees beyond it, and steel gates that close across the streets when the river rises. It has held ever since.

Today the wall is painted with murals of Paducah's history, and most visitors see it as a canvas. Our job downstairs is to remind them that it was built because of one particular winter, and the people who lived through it.