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1940 flood claimed four lives
Come Tuesday, Jackson County’s older residents will likely recall the events of 65 years ago, when the Tuckaseigee River “went on a rampage,” killing four and destroying every bridge that crossed it.
The tales handed down by those who remember that day are chilling.
“It rained all day (Aug. 29) as hard as ever it could. I woke up around midnight (Aug. 30) when I heard a roaring sound. I opened the door to look outside, and water poured into the house,” is the way the late Roxie Queen described it to me in 1982.
Despite the day’s hard rains, she and her family were not especially worried and had gone to bed as usual only to be awakened by the sound of water hitting the house.
The concrete bridge at Cullowhee was destroyed by the flood of Aug. 29-30, 1940, as was every other bridge across the Tuckaseigee River in Jackson County. Buildings in the background are, from left, Robert Brown’s house, Brown’s store and Battle’s Grocery, which also housed the Cullowhee Post Office at that time. The Tuckaseigee and Southeastern Railway, which ran from Sylva to East LaPorte, is visible in front of Battle’s store. The smokestack is on the Western Carolina University campus at the steam plant; Cullowhee Baptist Church’s Cemetery is also visible. – Herald file photo
What Roxie termed a “cloudburst” on the mountain above sent a torrent of water down the normally placid creek a few yards from their home, she said. The force of the water was so great that it drove a poplar log partway through the wall, and the raging water swept away her father’s barn and moved huge rocks that had been on top of the mountain behind their Canada community home down into the yard, Roxie said.
Three of the four people killed during that flood were her neighbors. Albert McCall and his two children drowned after a tremendous slide hit their house and swept it away. The force of the slide “carried Mrs. McCall across the raging creek where she caught the top of a tree and saved herself,” reported this newspaper’s 1951 Centennial edition.
Dot Nicholson of East LaPorte, who then lived with her parents in Canada community near Sols Creek, remembers hearing Ethel McCall’s own account of her escape from the swirling water.
“Everybody comments on how dark it was that night,” Nicholson told me. “But Ethel always said there was a light that guided her and showed her how to find her way to a neighbor’s house.”
The McCalls’ home was last seen “plunging over a 50-foot waterfall,” reported the Sept. 1, 1940, Asheville Citizen.
The body of the McCalls’ 5-year-old son was swept nearly 60 miles by the floodwaters and was found on an island near Bryson City; the bodies of Albert McCall and the other child were never found. (The Jackson County Journal, Sept. 5, 1940)
The fourth Canada resident to perish in the flood was Mrs. Vessie Mathis. The Jackson County Journal reported that her husband told of a slide and huge quantities of water coming down Pistol Creek and carrying his home away.
Based on accounts from the time, Mathis held onto his wife as long as he could, then grabbed something solid and pulled himself from the waters. His wife’s body was found the next morning.
I heard another firsthand account of that night in a mid-1980s interview with the late Alvin Burrell, who lived on Charleys Creek Road next to Sols Creek in 1940. Burrell recalled that a private dam on a tributary of Sols Creek gave way and sent a rush of water toward the main creek, sweeping the Mathis house along with it.
“It was pitiful. Their house was gone. But just a little way from where the house had been their pie safe was standing upright, just like someone had set it there,” Burrell said. “All the food still looked good. The pickled beans they’d had for supper were right there, and so was the cake she’d baked.
“There was even a ten-dollar bill in one of the tea cups. That was to pay the granny woman when their baby came,” Burrell said.
The late Tobe Clark, who lived in East LaPorte during the flood, shared his memories of that day during a 1982 interview.
Clark described what happened in localized areas that received massive amounts of rainfall. Some spoke of “cloudbursts” while others talked of “waterspouts,” Clark said.
“The ground gets so saturated with water that something has to give,” Clark told me more than 20 years ago. “The soil moves and takes the trees and everything else with it, leaving just the bare rock.”
Damage along Caney Fork was extensive, Clark said.
“Caney Fork looked unreal. The course of the creek changed completely during that flood,” he said.
Data from a Tennessee Valley Authority report prepared in March 1982 supports eyewitness accounts that the magnitude of the 1940 flood exceeded any high water event ever seen before.
It is the maximum known flood at the Cullowhee Dam. The river crested 15 feet over the top of the dam at a flow of almost 60,000 cubic feet per second. The average flow at the site is 580 cfs.
An earlier TVA report, completed just two months after the August 29-30, 1940 flood lists a similar conclusion for Tuckasegee, indicating the river crested at 21.1 feet with a flow of 40,300 cfs, greater than 17,000 cfs more than the previous high of 23,000 cfs recorded during the May 1840 flood when the river crested at 18 feet.
Since the 1940 flood, six dams have been built on the Tuckaseigee’s East and West Forks. The largest, Glenville, was under construction in 1940 when the flood ripped through the county. Constructed by Nantahala Power and Light Co. (now Duke Power-Nantahala Area), the four East Fork dams – Cedar Cliff, Bear Creek, Wolf Creek and Tanassee Creek – have been credited with a degree of flood control by one longtime Tuckasegee resident.
Jane Chastain, who turned 95 last October, told me the lakes put an end to a lot of flooding.
“Every time the Tuckaseigee got up, it would wash the bridges away,” she said. “The Tuckaseigee River – before the dams – was something you’d better be afraid of. You didn’t fool with it when it was up – it’d get you.”
Last September’s flooding in the wake of Hurricanes Frances and Ivan was bad, she said, but nothing like 1940’s.
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