The river used to flood, several times a year. And really, of course, the town was built with that in mind. The town you notice is built on a hill. And sometimes you think why would they build a town so far from the river? But they knew what they were doing.

We used to have, in the 1920s and 1930s, severe floods. They would flood residential areas and all, anywhere back in and near the river and there is a lot of buildings back in there now.

The reason was, however, we found out later, was that the timber had all been cut in the floodplain. It had been turned into row crop land, primarily cotton. Back in the pioneer days, when they wore out a piece of land, and it became filled with gullies and all, they just moved to the next land. They didn't bother with terraces.

So that floodplain up there, a hundred square miles, when we had a real cloudburst, all that water would dump into the river at one time and when it got down here, it would come out of the banks and stay for three or four days. In the last 30 and 40s years, we have had no such problem because with the government program of pine tree plantings, all that land now is planted in pine trees and that absorbs these rain showers.