The rivers which surround and flow through Illinois brought both new settlers and commercial wealth to the state. They were vital highways of the state's early history. As the importance of shipping declined and wealth was diverted to the railroads, however, the rivers' potential for destruction remained.

In late January and early February of 1937, for example, the Ohio River poured tons of flowing fury into the homes and lives of Illinoisans in Cairo and other points. Damage was estimated at $75,000,000, a half-million dollars of which was in Shawneetown in Gallatin County. In Cairo where the rampaging Ohio shot over the 59.6-foot mark, eye-witnesses reported that the pressure was so great behind the levee walls that sand boiled up in %ell-like fashion and water shot out of the pumps of wells. Citizens built sandbag walls around these "sand boils" as the water climbed. When the disaster ended, the Red Cross had sent more than $1,100,000 in relief to Southern Illinois and distributed another $500,000 in donated food.

That flood was hardly the first. Shawneetown was flooded every Year until 1884, when a series of levees were built. In 1893, a bad year throughout the state, the waters rose over the walls; and the Knox County Republican, East St. Louis Daily Journal, and Mattoon Commercial all contained stories similar to the warning in the Galesburg Spectator that "it is but a question of time when the levee will go and the town of Brooklyn will be swept away." East St. Louis avowed that "insecurity against floods is the prune, chief, and almost only cause why our city has not long since achieved much greater proportions than its present ones."

That threat left permanent scars. In Alton, for example, lines, drawn on the walls of buildings along the river front record past disasters. The high water mark of 1844 held the record there until the spring of 1973. In a park in Wood River, a marker some 20 feet in the air stands as grim reminder of the crest of that flood. During this modern deluge, the worst in some 200 years, such traditionally' flooded areas in Southern Illinois as Cairo waited nervously behind their levees for the rivers to crest.

The levees held and Illinoisans, shaped and molded by years of flood threat, watched the waters move by Cairo and Shawneetown recalling but not re-enacting the disaster of 1937. How ironic that the state song begins "By thy rivers gently flowing, Illinois . . ." and the rivers flow gently again.