A Hell of High Water: Counting the Dead in the Floodplains of Maryland's 1868 Storm

• In Event: Reimagining Flooding in the Era of Climate Change: What Environmental History Offers to Navigate a Watery World

Abstract

Early in the morning of July 24th 1868, a massive summer rainstorm ripped through central Maryland, causing a dangerous surge in the Patapsco River. The waters rose quickly in the industrial and agricultural communities along the river’s banks, destroying factories and homes, and killing at least forty-one people. But death tolls likely surpassed this number. Flood accounts in local presses discussed unnamed dead, referred to only as “bodies,” and omitted or irregularly counted proletariat workers in lists of the deceased. The story quickly became a spectacle in national newspapers and periodicals, and while reporters clamored for information about the floods, they did not trouble themselves too closely with questions of accuracy when presented with conflicting details. The storm unsettled and realigned understandings of industrial society, the environment, and Maryland during Reconstruction. In the Antebellum period, Maryland’s economy had heavily relied on the work of enslaved laborers, and on treacherous forms of environmental extraction, like river damming for hydropower. To emerge victoriously out of the Civil War as an industrial economy, the state needed to quell sociological anxieties about labor and about human impacts on the environment. Through study of the 1868 storm’s victims, destruction, and media coverage, I argue that floods which could have been harbingers of economic catastrophe actually bolstered confidence in the state’s economy, allowing for industrial growth to flourish alongside a highly racialized and rigid Postbellum labor economy. The storm’s public representations simultaneously presented an environment free of slavery, and a racialized labor hierarchy that would uphold capital growth while enshrining white supremacist social order. This research puts forth a methodological intervention within disaster studies, focusing on recovering the lives of those who died in the flood to bring to the surface a pivotal and understudied ecological disaster in the American Reconstruction era.

Author

• Sophie Hess, University of Maryland