Brushy Mountain Freshet, The

DESCRIPTION: "In the month of July, in the year 'sixteen, Came the awfullest storm that's ever been seen." The song describes the progress of the storm, and presumably details the various people killed or rendered homeless
AUTHOR: Pink Dugan? (source: NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal)
EARLIEST DATE: 1952 (Brown)
KEYWORDS: disaster storm flood
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jul 16, 1916 - A thirty hour rainfall causes floods in North Carolina
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore2 284, "The Brushy Mountain Fresher" (1 text)
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal, W. Amos Abrams, "Time Was: Its Lore and Language," Vol. XIX, No. 2 (Mar 1971), p. 44, "(The Great Nineteen Sixteen Fresh)" (1 text)
Roud #6643
NOTES [1172 words]: The notes in Brown describe notes attached to this song about the storm of 1916. The song, however, is so fragmentary that little can be verified about its connection with actual events. Similarly with the excerpt cited in NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal. The latter claims to have at least ten verses but quotes only one. I'm joining them only because they are supposed to be about the same event.
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal links the tune to "Titanic (I), The ("It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down") [Laws D24] (Titanic #1)." This certainly fits the verse form:
Down the roarin(g) river
Come a lumberhack (sic.)
And on it a old hen
Walked for'ard and back,
In them days when the Great Fresh come down.
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal dates this to July 14, 1916, but I rather suspect it was two days later, the day of the "Great Flood of 1916" (which you can google). Sharpe, p. 20, also has the date wrong, but his description is graphic: "on June 16 and 17, 1916, the worst rain storm ever to hit the whole of North Carolina dealt a staggering blow. More than twenty-two inches of rain fell within twenty-four hours. The downpour has been captioned 'The 1916 Flood,'" and among other things it almost blew away an incomplete hydroelectic dam.
Similarly Sharpe, p. 233, "[I]n 1916, the 'fountains of the deep' opened up, and for several days the rains came, due to a storm which came up out of the Gulf and across the mountains.... Never had people seen so much water at one time in the valley. Whole sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains slid off. Trees were up-rooted, houses swept away, bridges wiped out, and mills destroyed. Many lives were lost. Whole towns were almost washed away. Wilkesboro and North Wilkesboro suffered a great loss since the two towns were built so close to the river. Other towns along the Yadkin suffered similar damage. Railroads and highways were impassable. Crops were literally washed out of the fiedls by the 'June, 1916 flood.'"
That was just in Stanly County and the Yadkin valley. But the damage included a broad area drained by the French Broad, Swannanoah, and Yadkin rivers among others. Web articles say that it was the heaviest rainfall ever measured in the United States to that time.
Michael Hill, in the Foreword to Bandel (p. v), says, "The 1916 flood had a significant impact on western North Carolina and the western Piedmont, leaving unprecedented destruction. Practically all rail lines west of Winston-Salem were affected with scarcely a mile of track between Statesville and Asheville left undamaged. Bridges along the length of the Cawawba, Yadkin, and French Broad Rivers were torn from their piers. Hardest hit was agriculture. With topsoil ripped from the field and waterways literally rerouted, farmers coped with the effects for a generation."
Damage was estimated at somewhere between 10 and 25 million 1916 dollars (Bandel, p. 13). That probably means at least half a billion 2020 dollars, and likely more. And that doesn't count the effects of water- and insect-borne diseases. And there wasn't a government disaster agency at the time, although the federal government made a special $540,000 appropriation, plus there were private donations (Bandel, p. 15).
Bandel, p. 2, says that "North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi would all need relief aid in the months following the flood," but it was worst in North Carolina.
Newspapers sometimes claimed more than eighty dead, but Bandel, pp. 26-27, lists exactly fifty verified dead. They came from seventeen different towns and townships, and ranged in age from 77 down to eleven months. Belmont in Gaston County suffered the most, with nine dead.
The Brown version lists the site of one of the local tragedies as Jack's Branch, with the notes saying two children died in that event. Bandel doesn't list any dead in "Jack's Branch," but her list is by towns, not river names. But the only Jack's Branch, North Carolina that I can find is somewhat east of Charlotte, which is the far eastern limit of the flood. But there might well be a "Jack's Branch" that isn't on the map. There are four instances in Bandel where at least two children in a single family were killed; two have exactly two children, the other two instances have a third person killed:
1. Polly and Sue Collins (ages unknown) of Volga, Buncombe County (the county around Asheville)
2. Annie and Brison McGee (ages 6 and 3) of North Cove, McDowell County
3. Bonnie, Fred, and Stacy Hill (ages 8, 11, 14) of Bat Cave, Henderson County
4. Doctor Louis (sic.), Jennie May, and John Perry Russell (ages 7, 6, and 9) of Little River, Alexander County
Bandel has a description of the loss of the Hills on p. 11. They were caught in a mudslide: "Around 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. [Brown E.] Huntley arose from bed to investigate unnerving noises from outside. He first thought it was the sound of water rising from the creek below his house, but as he opened the door to step outside, a wall of rock, mud, and wood slammed against the tiny structure and pushed it -- and his family -- right into the cluthes of the flood. Huntley lost his twenty-nine-year-old wife, Belle, and their two adopted children, Bonne and Fred Hill, ages seven and eleven" (note that the ages do not match those Bandel gave on p. 27!).
Bandel, p. 11, also has an account of the death of the Russells: "On the Little River in northern Alexander County, a landslide crashed down on the home of Lonas and Lillie Russell. The couple managed to escape the house, but their three oldest children -- Jennie, Louis, and John, ages 6, 7, &9 -- were swept away in the slide. John's body was never recovered" (here again the text doesn't match the table on p. 27!).
Of course, it is possible that some people were killed whose deaths were not recorded.
Brushy Mountain itself is near Wilkesboro. There was one fatality in Wilkes County -- but it was 44-year-old Jonathan Perry of Union, North Carolina. I think we have to say that one or another of our pieces of information about the Brown fragment -- "Brushy Mountain," "Jack's Branch," or "two and only two children" -- is wrong.
One other possibility is that the attribution to 1916 is wrong. There is no collection date on the Brown fragment. The 1916 flood was the greatest in North Carolina history, but there was also a 1940 flood that was "infamous" (Peña/Hayes, p. 85; Sharpe, p. 233, says that, in Stanley County at least, it was "even worse" than the 1916 event -- though Sharpe's opinion might have been influenced by the fact that he would have remembered the 1940 flood). Odds are that the informant would have known which flood was meant, but it's just possible that the song refers to 1940 rather than 1916.
There are apparently at least a few books about the 1916 flood: Bandel's, (though it's only a few dozen pages long); W. M. Bell, The North Carolina Flood: July 14, 15, 16, 1916; and Matthew C. Bumgarner, The Floods of July 1916: How the Southern Railway Met an Emergency. - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.2
File: BrII284

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