Jennie Jones Giles On Flood of 1916

Partial Transcript: Hendersonville was a hill surrounded by a huge lake in the flood of 1916. There was no way to get in and out of town.

Partial Transcript: In 1916 we had a rainy summer, and we had a heavy rain period for 10 days - which is not unusual. But then we had a tail end of a hurricane at the same time, a hurricane that came in on the gulf, and that dumped a tremendous amount of rain on the area. So, the rivers were already at flood stage. What we see a lot, sometimes every year. This is normal for here. Then a small hurricane hit Charleston and we got the tail end of that hurricane also. The rivers and creeks could not hold any more water. When the tail end of that hurricane hit, there was nowhere for the water to go.

Partial Transcript: All of western North Carolina was hit bad. All the rivers in Western North Carolina did the same thing. It effected everywhere from Hickory all the way to the Tennessee border. Anywhere the French Broad River and the Catawba River were going. All of western North Carolina was a disaster.

Partial Transcript: In Transylvania County, along the Toxaway River, the dams broke. It destroyed the Lake Toxaway Inn that was up there and boulders were coming down from the mountains slides and landing in the river. Huge boulders that weighed several tons are still sitting in that river today. That’s how huge these boulders were.

There was a well in Bat Cave, by the time all the soil was stripped out and the land slides had gone down, instead of being underground, it was sitting on top of the ground.

Boulders were crashing and falling down into the Rocky Broad so that a lot of the boulders you see in the river today are a result of the 1916 flood.

Partial Transcript: In the flood of 1916, the water – according to my grandfather – rose so high that they feared for their lives and they had to get out. They walked up to Silver Creek Baptist Church. And that’s where they stayed to get out of the flood waters. When they returned to their home, all the topsoil had washed away. They lived in a log cabin, actually. They could rebuild a log cabin fairly easily. But the problem was the soil because they were farmers. Wydell Hill, my great-grandfather was a farmer. He could no longer make a living farming because the top soil was gone.
The people's lives were the worst thing. But they also lost all their crops. This is July. Its harvest season. You no longer have a harvest. What are you going to live on in the next winter? The vast majority of our Appalachian mountain people in the county were self-sustaining farmers and many of them lost their entire harvest. If you’re a self-sustaining farmer and you don’t have a harvest how’s your family going to eat the next winter?

Partial Transcript: The people's lives were the worst thing. But they also lost all their crops. This is July. Its harvest season. You no longer have a harvest. What are you going to live on in the next winter? The vast majority of our Appalachian mountain people in the county were self-sustaining farmers and many of them lost their entire harvest. If you’re a self-sustaining farmer and you don’t have a harvest how’s your family going to eat the next winter?
They quit farming and just moved out. All the people in Bright's Creek just moved out. You couldn't farm there anymore. People moved out of the Cove. The Green River Cove was one of the richest agricultural areas in the region at the time. My great-grandfather became a sharecropper. All he could do is sell the timber rights. The land was worthless for farming.

Partial Transcript: Western North Carolina gets what the local Appalachian mountain people call the tail-ends of hurricanes. I grew up listening to my mom and dad and grandparents saying “oh the tail end of the hurricane is coming.” So anytime that a hurricane is hits the South Carolina coast or the Gulf Coast, particularly around Mississippi or Alabama, is when we get the tail-end of the hurricane. What that means is you’re not getting a lot of wind or the wind damage, but you’re getting a tremendous amount of rain. This is very normal here, every time there’s a hurricane this happens. As a child growing up, that’s when all the water would be flooding all the land around Hendersonville and you couldn’t get in and out. So anytime a hurricane came you know to stock up because you’re not going to be able to get into town. You know that area is going to be flooded. That’s a normal occurrence here. It’s a normal occurrence here to have the French Broad River to go above flood stage in a normal heavy rain. Or in a rainy summer.

Partial Transcript: I was a reporter at the Times-News at that time in 2004 and a photographer and I were surveying the damage from the hurricanes. I was worried about Alma Avery and her husband who live down in Bat Cave, where the creek comes through there is Reedy Patch Creek. And they lived on the other side. We were taking pictures and talking to people about the horrible flooding that occurred down there then. We decided to check on her and we had these wading boots to wade across Reedy Patch Creek and we walked up to their house, this elderly couple were out on their front porch. They were grilling their food, they stored some meat. They had their wood cook stove going. She said, “oh we’re perfectly fine. We have everything we need right here.” And it was just so cute and it made a tremendous impression upon me because the rest of the people in town and in the suburbs were going crazy because they didn’t have food or water. They couldn’t get to town and they couldn’t buy these things. They had no electricity. But these older Appalachian mountain people they know how to survive without those things. They know how to prepare ahead of time for these things.

Partial Transcript: There are some sections in this region that are just not suitable to live on if you look back at the 1916 flood. I can drive along some roads today, like along the north Pacolet between Saluda and Melrose, that section of Joules Creek. Or even today in the Brights Creek area, where they are building and developing in areas that the local people would just shake their heads and say why would anyone live there? Because most local people moved away from those areas and didn’t go back. There is a reason why the local people moved out of those areas and didn’t go back.

Partial Transcript: Nature is always going to win. We can build roads and highways high up. We can build our bridges higher. We can dredge our streams and creeks, but sometime there is going to come another summer of a lot of rain every single day, and we can get tail ends of hurricanes twice more and all that stuff man did is going to be worthless.

Partial Transcript: Churches were the main relief efforts that helped flood victims.