Unforgettable Rampage

PHOTOGRAPHER:

Even a century later, the Great Flood of 1916’s watery depths haunt Western North Carolina

Smith’s Bridge, a steel structure that spanned the French Broad River between Asheville and West Asheville, in the midst of the flood, with portions already gone. Within a day of this photo, the remaining parts of the bridge were swept away as well.

On Asheville’s riverside South Depot Street, the Southern Railway Station, streetcars, and a grocery were swamped.

Estimates of the death toll from the flood ranged from 50 to 80.

Hundreds of miles of Southern Railway track were torn apart by the flood waters and landslides.

The raging Yadkin River destroyed the Narrows Dam in Stanly County.

Railway workers braved a portion of track between Old Fort and Ridgecrest, where the earthen support had been completely washed out.

An automobile alongside the French Broad as the flood receded

Asheville’s industrial district along the French Broad, where massive piles of lumber and other debris choked the river at various places

A crowd of onlookers in Biltmore Village gazes at the site where four residents drowned after clinging for hours to the top of a mostly submerged tree next to the Swannanoa River.

A woman surveys the devastation in Dillsboro, where scores of homes were crushed by both flood waters and landslides.

RESOURCES:

photographs courtesy of the north carolina collection, pack memorial library, (suspended tracks & automobile) the north carolina collection, pack memorial library; (damaged tracks) North Carolina flood: July 14, 15, 16, 1916 by Bell, W. M; (Narrows dam) Marcus Donald Bracey Photograph Collection, PhC.193, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC.

ISSUE DATE:

July 2016

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Unforgettable Rampage

Unforgettable Rampage