Great Flood of 1916, from "A Long Life in Buncombe County: The Reminiscences of Ottis Green, Sr."

Great Flood of 1916, from "A Long Life in Buncombe County: The Reminiscences of Ottis Green, Sr."

Ottis Green, Sr. (1874-1973) was interviewed by his grandson, John D. Johnston, Jr., at various times over a period of three weeks in the summer of 1964, when he was 90 years old. As described in a summary provided by Johnston, Green was "a native and a lifelong resident of Buncombe County, and his life span coincided with the evolution of Asheville from a rural settlement into a modern city."

This excerpt from Tape 4, side B, includes Mr. Green's memories of the Great Flood of 1916. Transcribed by Zoe Rhine. 

Listen to the full interview or read the full transcript on Archive.org.

Buncombe County Special Collections

English

MS081.002A

1 audio clip (00:08:40); 1 transcript excerpt (2 pages)

Audio cassette

00:08:40

Now there’s one thing that I think I have overlooked in telling the story of Asheville and what’s happened here, and that was about the 1916 flood. I don’t think I...

J.J.: I think you just mentioned it briefly about washing away Riverside Park—but that’s the only reference we’ve had to it.

Now the first I knew of that, I had been down to Chattanooga, TN to a meeting of the Carolina’s Hardware Association which had been invited down there by the manufacturers of Chattanooga. Well we heard reports of the rain in WNC. And on Saturday morning I had caught the train to come home and a good many people that lived in Eastern Carolina and would have gone through here, decided to go around by Atlanta and stay out of the mountains. And it was fortunate that they did, because the train I came in on from Chattanooga from in the afternoon, was the last train on the track for some time. The first I knew of it was Sunday morning about 9:00, I heard—well this thing struck Saturday night with great force along about midnight. And the first thing I knew of—it was about 9:00 Sunday morning—I heard my cook arguing with somebody that ‘he’d been away for a week and he was very tired’and she just wasn’t going to wake me up. And by that time I heard it and got out of the bed and got there, and it was the sheriff and wanted to get a piece of rope to go up on Swannanoa and tie it to a tree and run a boat out there and try to rescue Mr. Mark Reed’s family which was completely surrounded by water.

Well, I got up and had a coil of rope that suited the occasion and took it out there and got them all out safely. But when it came into Biltmore with such force, that as some of the—two or three of the nurses were trying to get home from the hospital that was out at Biltmore—they were forced to climb trees. And the foreman of the Biltmore Farms, Mr. Vanderbilt’s farm, Mr. Lipe—Col. Lipe—went up to help them. In the meanwhile he found that it went up into these trees and the thing kept rising until it got four or five feet deep in the Biltmore railroad station. And they kept timber and lumber and stuff come down, beating on the trees. And finally Mr. Lipe’s daughter was in the tree with him and he took his coat off and tied her to a tree good and tight. And in the next minute or two he was swept away along with four or five nurses there. Well that came on down, the Swannanoa did and joined the French Broad, and it went, ah, I’ve never sees such a raging water in my life. We had the Smith Bridge there and the big railroad trestle. Well it just picked up houses along the banks of the river, and swirled them around and take them out into the main stream. And one big house hit that Smith bridge—it was a pebbledash house—and the dust must have been a thousand feet high. I’ve never seen such a—in this day and time, you’d thought an atom bomb exploded. And everybody hollered that the railroad bridge was going out. Well, I happened to know the man that put in the trussel down at the railroad. And I think he told me that those piers went down about 24-25 feet deep in solid rock. And with the rails tied on top, they need’t worry about that. But the timbers and the water come up to the top of the trestle—just backed up there. And the Asheville Cotton Mill, the water was 6 or 8 feet deep in there. A lot of oil companies had tanks down below the railroad next to the river and it just picked them up and carried them right off down the road just like they were a leaf.

J.J.: I guess people could stand up around the hills on West End or up above Biltmore there and see the whole thing?

Yes, Everybody in town was there on both sides of the river watching it. It was the most disastrous thing, in loss of life and property run way into the millions of dollars. And it took quite a time to build back.

The railroad trestles were all washed away. The water seemed to have centered right over the Blue Ridge and half of it went down into North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia, and the other half of it went into the Mississippi River. And of course at Knoxville and places like that, they had time to get their people out. But of course the property damage was very heavy.

J.J.: But it started up in these mountains of course and there was no real warning?

The eastern storm and the western storm met there, directly over it. Just emptied all the water that was in the clouds and the winds and down it went. But still on the sides of the mountains, where it washed the vegetation and trees off the sides of the mountains, it was just bare rock. It was a sight on earth to see at first. And now, occasionally you can see where it still hasn’t grown back since 1916.

J.J.: Bet it almost made markings out of these mountains, and we’ve never really had anything comparable to it?

Oh no, we’ve had one or two little floods that got out of the river bank a little bit.

J.J.: But that’s the worse disaster that Asheville ever had of any kind. We’ve never had an earthquake to amount to anything?

Well back in the early 80’s we heard about the earthquake down in Charleston, and there was some little shaking up here. Some people heard it.

John D. Johnston, Jr.

Ottis Green, Sr.