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Story Archives: Concordia flood stories: Beavers, levees, lawsuits, pirogues
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Concordia flood stories: Beavers, levees, lawsuits, pirogues
 In 1886, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received reports that the Glasscock Levee below Vidalia in Concordia Parish was "in a dangerous condition" during a high water. A breach was feared.
This portion of the Mississippi River levee passed through the Glasscock Swamp from Green's to the Fairview levee south of Deer Park. Glasscock today is a huge island formed when the Glasscock cutoff was made early last century to shorten a big bend in the river.
But more than a century ago, Corps' assistant engineer H.S. Douglas and Capt. Dan C. Kingman reported that a potential break at the Glasscock Levee "was only prevented by the exertions of parties living in the neighborhood."
The engineers reported that the weakness in the levee, "unexpected" and "apparently unaccountable," had caused parish residents to worry and "gave rise to rumors of defective construction." To temporarily remedy the problem, logs, barrels and others materials were placed in the embankment.
But as the high water began to recede the real and most serious problem with the levee was found to be not faulty construction but expert dam builders -- beavers.
The Corps reported: "The borrow pits dug in the construction of the levee, being in buck-shot soil, which is non-absorbent, remained filled with water the year round, and in these pits a colony of beavers had located. They had made their dens or houses in the levee embankment itself, and had tunneled almost through several points."
At the point where a levee break was feared, the Corps discovered during an inspection that "the beavers had made a hole entirely through the embankment." What made the damage impossible to see was that the levee was "thickly overgrown with young trees, briars, and weeds."
Four days before Christmas -- Tuesday, Dec. 21, 1886 -- a Corps' crew went to work to clear the overgrowth. Beneath the greenery, the workers found "six separate places" where the "embankment had been burrowed by the beavers."For the full story, subscribe to the The Concordia Sentinel's NEW E-Edition! |
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