This past week will be remembered for many years as one of the warmest, stormiest Christmas seasons in local history. The tragic tornadoes which tore through northern and western Lawrence County on December 23 were followed soon after by historic flooding, particularly in North Alabama and areas close to the state line.

The unusual ferocity of this year’s Christmas tornadoes and flooding brings to mind a topic which I wrote about in ‘Lawrence County History Trivia’ the book, when severe weather struck our region on another holiday.

Known as the ‘Good Friday Freshet’ by those who survived it, the Flood of Good Friday 1902 brought a great deal of destruction to our area. Below is my previous post about the topic, combined with further research pulled from the newspapers of neighboring Lauderdale County, Alabama.

March 1902 was a devastating month for Middle Tennessee. Massive thunderstorms dumped almost a foot of rain on the region in less than four days. The ground, already saturated from melting snow, was unable to absorb the excess water, resulting in record-breaking deadly floods across the mid-state which would claim dozens of lives and cause millions of dollars in damages. These rising waters culminated into the Good Friday Freshet on March 28, 1902.

The Cumberland River left its banks in Nashville, rising 13 feet in one day. According to a contemporary newspaper account posted on the Bedford County Genweb site, all but one of the steel bridges erected over the Duck River near Shelbyville washed away as the river crested at a depth of over 43 feet. Homes were flooded to their second stories. The water in the streets of Shelbyville was deep enough “to float the largest steamboat.”

Closer to home, the Elk River and Richland Creek in Giles County claimed lives and homes as those bodies of water reached their highest-ever crests. The Elk River, alone, reached a depth of almost 41 feet. And in Lawrence County, the waters of almost every creek and stream escaped their banks and caused an immense amount of damage, as can be seen in this picture of men repairing damage done to the railroad at Raven’s Bluff, where it crossed Shoal Creek and Coon Creek.

Shoal Creek reached a depth of 28 feet, which is 14 feet above flood stage. Those who survived the deluge never forgot it. W.W. Rhodes was ten years old and living on Sugar Creek near Mount Zion when the March 1902 flood occurred. Rhodes wrote the editor of the Democrat-Union late in life that he remembered the flood destroying the rail fencing on his father’s land, and how hard he and his family had to work to pull the rails from drifts in the ensuing weeks to rebuild the fences.

Cora Norman Renfro was a thirteen-year-old girl living in Maury County when the flood occurred. Later in life, after having moved to Lawrence County, she wrote the editor of the D-U that she recalled seeing only the roofs of houses sticking out of the water.

Thomas Kilburn was nine years old when the March 1902 flood happened. His family was living on Knob Creek, near West Point, when the water began to rise. Kilburn said that the water rose inside his grandfather’s barn to the point that they had to move the livestock to higher ground. The family’s supply of corn was soaked and had to be dried when the waters receded. Kilburn’s family watched as debris from miles around floated down the creek.

Kilburn said that, when the waters finally receded, his uncle Wild Kilburn found a barrel of molasses in the yard. The molasses was the property of Gus Kelley, and it had floated down the flooded creek from Piney. According to Kilburn, Kelley “came and got his molasses. They were still good.”

In Florence, the rainstorm reached its peak at around 2 p.m. At that time, the Florence ‘Times’ reports that the rain came down ‘in sheets’ on the already-saturated ground. Some area streams crested at 10 to 15 feet above their previously highest-ever recorded flood levels.

The floodwaters washed away six steel bridges in Lauderdale County; namely those which spanned Cypress Creek on Gunwaleford and Waterloo Roads, the two spanning Shoal Creek at Huntsville Road and Military Road, one crossing Bluewater Creek on Huntsville Road, and one which crossed Butler Creek at Pruitton. These six iron bridges alone are estimated to have cost $30,000 to replace.

In addition to the bridges, three mills and two school houses were destroyed in the deluge. Shoal Creek crested ten feet higher than it had ever before risen, destroying a $30-50,000 aqueduct. Along this creek, trees as thick as four feet in diameter were uprooted and washed, roots and all, down the raging waterway to the Tennessee River, which the Army Corps of Engineers reported as rising “higher than it ever has before.”

The March 1902 flood took the lives of eight people in Lauderdale County, all of the Brahan family who lived at the mouth of Cypress Creek.