Webb Mountain Flood

Among the stories Aunt Dicey (Loveday) Kelly told us in the early 1970s was one about the historic flooding of Webb's Creek at Webb Mountain. I've also heard Daddy talk about it throughout the years, but I didn't really appreciate the significance of it until I read more recent articles in his Cousin Myrtle (Justus) Patrick's scrapbooks recounting the event. (Myrtle passed away just a month before my father, Carl Loveday, in 2006, and her son Charles has very generously loaned me her scrapbooks.)

It was election night, August 5, 1938, when torrential rains set in, keeping many folks from reaching home after voting, forcing them to stay the night with friends and family. One man had left his car and walked home when he had been unable to ford a creek with it, only to return the next morning and find the vehicle many yards downstream… on its top!! Others awoke that same day to swamped fields and more impassable roads. Creeks had been rerouted by gushing waters unable to be contained within their natural beds, cutting new ravines throughout the area. The son of Atchley’s funeral home director was ready to celebrate his birthday only to get a call to come get bodies at the foot of Webb Mountain. He’d have to go around by Newport, he was told, because too many roads had been washed away along what would be his normal route. Within just a couple of hours, an estimated 15 inches of rain had fallen on the mountain and crashed down its slopes, creating a monstrous wall of water that had destroyed everything in its path!

When Atchley finally reached his destination, he was met by farmers who had come to help and others who were just morbidly curious. Jesse Evans and his wife Eula (Whaley) had been unable to get home from the polls and had stayed the night with Alfred and Lona (McCarter) Ball and their four children. The force of the destructive surge had blown the unsuspecting home to splinters upon impact. The occupants never knew what hit them. Their bodies were strewn down throughout the valley. As word spread across the farmlands, the locals came together to build their caskets and bury them.

Daddy would have been about 14 years old when it happened, and he was still in awe of the event even in his last years.