Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 229, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 September 1916 — Mississippi Slights Memphis But Eats a Park [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Mississippi Slights Memphis But Eats a Park

MEMPHIS, TENN. —A great bar of mud and sand, half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide, has formed along the Mississippi river front, preventing steamboats landing at the Memphis levee. Thousands of dollars are

being expended to remove the obstruction to navigation. For six months there has been a race between the dredgeboats pumping out the sand and the current of the river, which has been throwing the sand and mud toward the shore. The current won, but the government engineers have worked out a plan whereby a channel will be cut to let the current of the river flow against the mud bar from another point, eventually cutting it away and restor-

ing navigation. Twenty years ago there was 90 feet of water where the mud bank now extends four or five feet above the surface of the water. The channel has veered off from Memphis, swinging to the Arkansas shore, where It runs swift and deep. It will probably-eost the government a half a million dollars to induce the channel to swing back to the Tennessee side, A little farther down the river the channel has set hard against the Tennessee shore and is eating its way into beautiful Riverside park, a large tract of land owned by the city. Already at some places the bank has been washed away and the highly improved driveway has fallen into the water. When the channel of the Mississippi decides to make a change, nothing, apparently can stop it. It will begin eating into the soft earthen banks and such obstructions as trees of giant proportions do not stand in its way. At some points the river has carried away a quarter of a mileof land in a single highwater period and steamboats run where only a few months before fields of corn and cotton grew.