Evansville man recalls living through the Great Flood of 1937
EVANSVILLE, Ind. (WFIE) - Over the past few weeks, many people across the Tri-State have told our 14 News crews they’ve never seen the river levels so high. One Evansville man surely has them beat.
96-year-old Dan Ernspiger was living on Henning Avenue in January of 1937, when the Great Flood hit Evansville. It’s the worst flood on record, with the Ohio River cresting at nearly 54 feet.
He was 8-years-old at the time, but remembers the flood in great detail.
“We were right at the corner of Henning and Monroe,” Ernspriger said. “All of the sudden, at each sewer opening, a geyser of water shot up, lifting the lid from that sewer up in the air and throwing it aside.”
He says the water started filling the streets quickly. That’s when his father rounded the family up into their 1928 Dodge, and took off, until they ran out of road.
“We were on the railroad track, and of course we were bouncing along on the ties,” he said. “I’m sitting in the back seat, looking out the back window. 8-years-old. That’s a scene I will never forget of course.”
Ernspiger says his family was forced to stay with friends, but it only lasted a few days before there was a knock on the door.
“Eventually the authorities said we had to evacuate the women and children from Evansville,” he recalled.
Leaving by train, Ernspiger and his mother went to Cisne, Illinois to stay with family, while his father hung back.
“He and another man got in a row boat and rowed back to our house,” Ernspiger remembered. “We had a player piano and the two of them lifted each end one at a time and placed them on concrete blocks. When the water came in, it never got on the piano.”
As he recalls what life was like nearly 90 years ago, Ernspiger can’t help but think how different things were with the flooding this time around: a different height, different damage, a different time.
For Ernspiger, it was a different experience for a number of reasons.
“I’m blind,” Ernspiger said. “I can’t see a thing. It started several years ago. I really got to the point where I was totally blind a year and a half, two years ago.”
One of the few living souls, old enough to remember the 1937 flood, now having to experience this historic flooding another way, without his sight.
“I’ve heard the reports on the all of the news,” he said. “It goes a few more feet, a few more feet and it’s very slowly. Very slowly. Much different than the way I saw it. It came quickly.”
But even without his sight, stories coming out of this flood have old memories coming back to Ernspiger.
“A few weeks ago, down in Kentucky they were having to evacuate people from their homes, and I thought well gee whiz, that’s what was happening to us,” he said. “So I understand how those people felt.
“Certain things that happen to you, you never forget,” Ernspiger said. “Some things are good and you never forget them, and some things are bad and you never forget them. But I survived. I’m here, still talking and telling about it.”
What Ernspiger remembers about after the flood was how things changed.
The levees and dams were built to protect Evansville from another flood like that, and he says if it weren’t for all that work, this flood could have looked a lot like the Great Flood, even if the water wasn’t as high.
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