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The population had reached 3000 and there were numerous attorneys and physicians as well as mills and distilleries.
There was no recorded attempt to provide flood protection until the mid 1860s, when railroads raised their tracks on trestles to keep them above at least low-level floodwaters. With the help of railroads, Lawrenceburg filled in the areas under and around the trestles to make a sort of floodwall.
People visiting today’s levee can still see where the
old levee was located. Above half of the height of the present installation, there is a flat area next to the levee. Until recent years it was also a railroad track, and it was the only protection the city had for many years.
Lawrenceburg sat smugly behind its “flood protection” for many years, aided by the fact that the Ohio failed to approach 60 feet for many years after 1847, and never got to even the lowest point in High Street.
Minor flooding in 1875 failed to affect any part of Lawrenceburg protected by the railroad embankments, although at one point the embankment along what was then Durbin Road began leaking.
The Methodist church bell began ringing furiously at 6 o’clock in the morning on Friday, August 6, 1875, bringing hundreds of men to the site.
They used carts to haul dirt, trains brought carloads of gravel, and hundreds of gunnysacks full of gravel were dumped into the 150-foot long area.
It was Saturday night before the embankment was declared safe once again.
The success of the “levee” and the efforts to shore it up led to a complacent attitude typified by an article in the Lawrenceburg Press.
Editor J.P. Chew bragged in the August 12 Lawrenceburg Press “It was well known that in other years Lawrenceburg had been looked upon as the lowest, most easily flooded of almost any Ohio River town. But now all this has changed, and we can in truth say that scarcely any river town escaped the flood so well as we did.”
He did mention, more or less in passing, that grateful residents would probably be happy to pay for any additional levee work found necessary for future protection but there was no real effort to do so.
After years of comparatively low river levels, Lawrenceburg residents became apprehensive once again as the river rose in February of 1881, and once again they were protected by the rudimentary levee created by the railroads.
Although the local newspaper editor admitted that there were a few places that could be strengthened by fills, he insisted, “High water is no longer to be dreaded but to a few who live on low land outside the levee.”
Postmaster Thomas J. Lucas had even suggested that the area around “Spring Lake,” which often filled with water during low-level floods, should become a city park.
More than 125 years later, the City of Lawrenceburg followed his suggestion, creating the park and ball fields between Tate Street and US 50.
And once again, in the spring of 1881, Lawrenceburg went to sleep, secure in the “knowledge” that they had defeated the mighty Ohio for all time to come.
The very next year saw the first of three straight years of flooding.
On Monday, February 20, 1882, as the Ohio began to threaten, Mayor George Roberts, an attorney who had
This house at the corner of High and Elm Streets, Lawrenceburg, was the birthplace of Cornelius O’Brien, one of five babies born during the 1883 flood. Cornelius grew up to attain local, state and national prominence as a historian, banker, philanthropist, politician, businessman and a member
of Purdue University Board of Trustees.
lived in Lawrenceburg since 1870, called for volunteers to raise the level of the Big Four levee near the Fairgrounds at the eastern edge of Lawrenceburg, and for a while the project seemed to be succeeding.
But about 4 a.m. the next morning, the Miami River flood surge was blocked by the Ohio and Mississippi tracks near the Ohio River just above town.
It caused a virtual tidal wave to hit the Big Four
tracks near Hardentown, and the water rushed into Lawrenceburg, destroying buildings as it went. Although the Mayor had arranged to ring the church bell in an emergency, it all happened so fast that many people heard the bells at the same time the water rose into their homes.