The 1958 Levee and Flood Wall: A Brief Report

As many of you know, I’ve been puttering around on an integrity survey of the 1958 Levee and Flood Wall in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It’s been a fun, little project that combines my recreational walking route and some of my interest in riparian history both in Grand Forks and in the American West. 

The levee and flood wall are largely destroyed, at least above the level of the surface, but they tell an interesting story both at the local and national levels. To be clear, a better report on the earthen levee and flood wall would involve some archival research and perhaps even a discreet subsurface probe, but this is a start and would give anyone serious about writing the history of the Red River in Grand Forks a solid place to start.

1. Access

From Belmont Road south of downtown Grand Forks, turn east on Lincoln Drive and proceed approximate 0.4 miles to Lincoln Park. After passing through the contemporary flood wall, continue for another 0.25 miles east and downslope toward the Red River.

2. Site Description (include setting and feature descriptions):

The site stands on the west bank of the Red River of the North within the city limits of Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Red River flows north through the bed of the former glacial lake Agassiz at the gentle slope of .5-.75 ft per mile. The flat terrain of the extinct lake largely consists of 60-80 ft of stratified clays (Harrison and Bluemle 1980). As a result of this and the gentle slope of the region, the river runs only around 30 ft lower than the surrounding plain. In the case of the Lincoln Drive neighborhood which encroached on the river’s banks, the river was only 20 ft lower than the lowest homes in the region and about 30-35 ft lower than most buildings in Grand Forks’ Near South Side. This made Lincoln Drive neighborhood particularly prone to flooding and prompted the installation of an earthen levee and concrete flood wall in 1958. 

The aftermath of the 1997 flood destroyed most of the visible remains of the 1958 levee and flood. Topographic maps produced by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1994 as well as aerial photographs, however, preserve a record of both the 1958 flood wall and levee and the now destroyed Lincoln Drive neighborhood. It showed the levee and flood wall roughly following the course of the Red River as it meandered south, then turned toward the north and northwest in a lazy oxbow. 

The floodwall and levee formed a c-shaped loop around the Lincoln Drive neighborhood. The top of the wall was 830 ft asl and it began and ended at the point when the natural elevation of the town met that level. It stood over 10 ft above the lowest sections of the Lincoln Drive neighborhood, which were then 300 ft from the course of the river and at an elevation of under 820 ft asl. The average width of the levee was 120 ft with the width of the highest section of 10 ft.

The destroyed concrete flood wall began 140 ft southeast of the intersection with Plum Avenue at around the 830 ft contour above the river bank. The concrete flood wall followed a course to the south-east roughly parallel to Lincoln Drive for 120 ft (ca. 40 meters) before turning in a more southerly direction for 320 ft. (ca. 100 meters) and then angling slightly to the east for another 320 ft. (ca 100 m). At this point, approximately 770 ft (ca. 240 meters) from its point of origin, the flood wall merged with an earthwork levee. This concrete flood wall does not appear to have been part of the original plan proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers. It was presumably built to avoid the need to remove 6 homes in order to install an earth levee in the narrow space between Lincoln Drive and the river on the west side of the neighborhood. 

The levee followed the course of the Red River as it meanders to the south and then turns toward the north and then toward the northwest When the river arcs to the northeast at the northern edge of the Lincoln Drive neighborhood, the flood wall turned more sharply the west where it continued until merged with the higher terrain of the homes on Reeves Drive in the Near South Side neighborhood. The c-shaped flood wall and levee system bounded the area of the Lincoln Drive neighborhood prior to the flood of 1997 and protected approximately 3,767,370 sq. ft (350,000 m2). 

The levee itself consisted of compacted fill excavated from a borrow a few miles from the Lincoln Drive site. The levee featured sloping sides at 1:2.5 ratio and a total width of around 120 ft. The relative height of the levee varied, but the 10 ft wide top of the levee was 830 ft asl. The walls were built directly upon the surface of the ground and covered with 6 inches of topsoil and seeded with grass.

3. Statement of Integrity:

There is no visible trace of the concrete flood wall. The lowest levels of the earthen levee, on the other hand, remains visible in some places, but is so much reduced from its original height that its river-side slope is largely indistinguishable from the natural slope of the ground toward the river. Excavations would presumably reveal the presence of the compacted earth core which would make it possible to know if subsurface fragments of the flood wall were still in existence.

4. Significance

The 1958 flood protection system in the Lincoln Drive neighborhood represents the intersection of national attitudes to water management in the American West and the needs of the local community. 

The project received initial funding as part of the Flood Control Act of 1948 and Flood Control Act of 1950. These two bills were part of a series of post-World War II flood control acts passed by Congress which authorized work by the Army Corp of Engineers to control flooding, provide irrigation, and develop hydroelectric power on Western rivers (Worster 1985). While the interwar mania for large-scale damming projects for hydroelectric power that produced the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River subsided, flood control and irrigation projects remained a priority across the American West. North Dakota experienced the last gasp of these projects when the Pick-Sloan Flood Control Act of 1944 authorized the construction of the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River (as well as a series of other dams downstream). The flooding of the Columbia River in 1948 which completely destroyed the wartime city of Vanport, Oregon added a sense of urgency to continued national efforts to tame Western rivers (White 1995).

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the city of Grand Forks was enjoying steady population growth spurred by both returning service men and the movement of population from rural areas and small towns to larger urban areas (Caraher and Caraher 2021). The growth of the University of North Dakota and the founding of Grand Forks Air Force Base in 1955 further spurred the city’s population boom in the two decades after World War II. As a result of these forces, the city witness the rapid construction of a new housing stock, schools, churches, and commercial establishments. 

The Red River of the North had little inclination to accommodate the growth of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, Minnesota during the post war decades. Significant floods in 1948 and 1950 saw the river overrun its banks with crests of 41.68 ft and 45.61 ft respectively The 1950 flood caused $33 million worth of damage (which is the equivalent to almost a half a billion dollars in 2023) and put additional pressure on the city’s already strained housing stock by causing the destruction of a number of homes in low lying areas. Smaller floods in 1951 (33.52) and 1952 (33.60 ft) inflicted additional damage. 

The Army Corps of Engineers proposed a flood mitigation plan for Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, Minnesota in 1953 (Bokay 1953). This plan continued work elsewhere in the region including reservoirs on various tributaries to the Red in North Dakota and Minnesota and levees around other communities. For Grand Forks, flood mitigation focused on the Lincoln Drive neighborhood which was the lowest lying area of the city and included over 350 houses as well as a school. According to the Army Corp plan: “The improvement at Grand Forks consists of a single section of levee 6,555 feet long having a maximum height of 22.5 feet” (Bokay 1953, 7)) The levee would be 10 ft wide and would stand over 52.5 ft above gauge level on the Red River in Grand Forks (780 ft). This height would protect the Lincoln Drive neighborhood not only a flood event like that experienced in 1950, but also from from the highest previous recorded flood levels, 50.20 ft in 1897. When the wall was completed in 1958, approximately 770 ft of the proposed earthen levee was replaced with a concrete flood wall presumably avoid the removal of several homes along the south side of Lincoln Drive. The earth for the earthen levee was quarried from a borrow west of Belmont Road in south of the intersection with Terrace Drive. The flood mitigation plan also included a pumping station in Lincoln Drive. 

The 1958 flood wall is significant because it was the last major flood mitigation project prior to the devastating 1979 and 1997 floods in Grand Forks. In 1979, the rising waters of the Red River came within 4 feet of the top of the levees which residents reinforced with sand bags (Brokke 2015, 242-244). The aging levees held, but showed signs of strain with residents reporting cracks in their earthen walls. Overland flooding compounded the problem of the cresting river and revealed the increasingly complex relationship between flooding and drainage in the growing city. In 1997, the levees began to fail around the Lincoln Drive neighborhood and the homes were evacuated. In the end, the levees held, but the rising river crested at 54.35 ft and simply overran city streets before topping the levees and inundating much of the city of Grand Forks. In the aftermath of the devastating flood, the Army Corp punched through the earthen levees to allow the water that had pooled behind it to escape. The Lincoln Drive neighborhood and the 1958 flood wall were destroyed as part of the more ambitious post-1997 flood mitigation project. 

As significant as the 1958 flood wall was to the local community and residents of the Lincoln Drive neighborhood it also spoke to larger national trends. The growing pressure on affordable housing in the immediate aftermath of World War II undoubtedly influenced the decision to protect Lincoln Drive neighborhood from flooding. The 1958 levee and flood wall also made manifest the long tail of national efforts to tame Western rivers which shaped not only the topography of Grand Forks, but also the Red River and its tributaries.