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Posted on Mon, Jul. 21, 2008

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Floods before Big Ditch devastating to Wichita

The Wichita Eagle

This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series' name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties."

BY BECCY TANNER

You think this spring and summer were wet? Try living in Wichita before 1959.

Those Wichitans may not have had as much rain as we have this year, but they sure knew how devastating Arkansas River floodwaters could be.

In those days, the city was periodically hit with floods that swept through downtown businesses and Riverside homes.

The reason?

Wichita was built on a floodplain from Hillside to Ridge Road.

The solution: In 1959, Wichita, Sedgwick County and federal officials finished a $20 million flood-control project popularly known as the Big Ditch.

But for generations of Wichitans who lived in the city before the Big Ditch was built, the city was especially vulnerable to spring and fall flooding. Although Wichita has had some flooding since the construction of the ditch, none of it has been as destructive.

Wichita was hit hardest by the waters of the Arkansas River, the Little Arkansas River, and theCowskin and Chisholm reeks in 1877, 1904, 1916, 1923 and 1944.

The flood of 1944 was the worst. By then, the city had grown, and when waters rose, more homes and businesses were damaged.

That spring, the city was flooded three times in 11 days. The City Commission appointed a committee to study flood control. From its report grew the idea of the Big Ditch.

Until then, Wichitans coped the best they could, climbing into canoes and boats or forcing horses and mules to swim the murky waters as they traveled from one end of town to the other.

During the flood of 1904, L.S. Naftzger, president of the Fourth National Bank, decided to personally investigate farmers' claims of destroyed corn crops.

According to an article in The Wichita Eagle that year, this is what he found:"After the most scientific examination of the situation it was found that monstrous catfish, some of them seven feet in length, were swimming about the field, leisurely eating the corn as fast as they came to it."

Other residents feared the 1904 flood would leave them destitute.

"Unless there is an abatement soon, I fear I am going to lose all of my livestock," John Fennel told The Eagle. Fennel lived seven miles north of town. "I have a boat in readiness, and we shall leave our home the minute the water reaches the house. If it was not that the house rests several feet higher than the surrounding ground we would have been drowned out long ago."

Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.