Missouri bicentennial: The Little River Drainage District

This is the 16th in a series of articles with Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation board chairman Frank Nickell, an emeritus faculty member of Southeast Missouri State University, commenting on Show Me State history on the 200th anniversary of Missouri being received as America's 24th state in 1821.

It may be difficult to fathom today but very large swamps once covered more than a million acres in the Missouri Bootheel, leading to a term, "Swampeast Missouri," a moniker still used by some in the region.

"More than a century ago, American swamps and river lowlands were considered (a) wasteland of no value and a hindrance to land development," wrote Kenneth R. Olson, a professor of soil science at the University of Illinois-Urbana, and David Speidel, a soil and water conservation society member from Benton, Missouri, in a 2016 article about the Little River Drainage District.

In what may be an urban legend, the story has it there are two structures on planet Earth visible from the Moon's surface: The Great Wall of China and the Little River Drainage District.

A former LRDD attorney, H. Riley Bock of New Madrid, Missouri, told the Southeast Missourian in 2018 the ditches created by the district were "big man-made scars in the earth," recalling the massive LRDD effort begun early in the 20th century to take uninhabitable swamp land in the Bootheel and drain it.

The LRDD encompassed 620,000 acres in seven Missouri counties (Bollinger, Cape Girardeau, Dunklin, New Madrid, Pemiscot, Scott and Stoddard) and had a five-person board of supervisors determined to increase the value of what were then considered worthless swamplands.

"It was an enormous area," said historian Nickell, noting today fully one-third of all the agricultural income generated in Missouri comes from the seven aforementioned counties.

Nickell said the LRDD's work is vital and ongoing.

"If the (LRDD) didn't exist and if the ditches were not maintained today, much of the area would revert back to swamp," he said.

Bonds were issued and landowners were taxed to start the dredging to create the ditches.

By 1928, the LRDD had built nearly 1,000 miles of ditches, more than 300 miles of levees and had drained 1.2 million acres in a project considered the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.

Land once 95% covered in water and trees is now largely cleared.

A vestige of Swampeast Missouri can still be visited today in the Mingo National Wildlife Refuge near Puxico, Missouri -- a 15,000-acre restored swamp.

Dredging equipment being used in the Little River Drainage District project, which began in 1909, with supplies brought in by railroad in this undated photo.Submitted

Amazing effort

According to Olson and Speidel, the original work of the LRDD, launched in 1907 and now headquartered in Cape Girardeau, was nothing short of the one of the greatest engineering accomplishments in U.S. history.

"These historic river floodplains and their tributaries were drained and transformed into fertile agricultural lands in an ambitious feat comparable to the construction of the Panama Canal," the pair opined.

Early opposition

Louis Houck, a railroad developer and landowner for whom Houck Stadium and Houck Field House are named on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, was a prominent foe of LRDD.

"(Houck) predicted the (LRDD) would be a gigantic failure," said Nickell, noting Houck's opposition went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which denied Houck's petition and affirmed the constitutionality of the law under which the Little River Drainage District was organized.

Massive district

The LRDD's area, with an estimated 950 miles of ditches, runs from the Headwaters Diversion Channel south of Cape Girardeau to the Arkansas border.

LRDD is named for a tributary of the St. Francis River and collects water also from the Castor and Whitewater rivers, plus Crooked, Hubble, LaCroix and Ramsey creeks.

The width of the various LRDD ditches runs from 30 feet to 200 feet and, cumulatively, more than 31 million gallons of water travel through the system daily.

"The (LRDD) has been called the greatest marvel in America and it is not easy to argue with that assessment," Nickell said.