A small town's bid to stave off the Mighty Miss

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

CLARKSVILLE, Mo. - Mayor Jo Anne Smiley surveyed the bustling effort to save her tiny historic town from the rapidly rising Mississippi River, took a deep breath and ran down her mental checklist.

“Foodwise, I think we’re OK for today,” she said. “My husband is getting fried chicken, service for a hundred. The ice situation was kind of desperate for a while, better now. I think we have enough water.”

And then there were the sand bags. In the past few days, nearly 300,000 had been filled and placed to protect the town’s riverfront homes and businesses, she said Sunday. Another 70,000 were on the way and Smiley had ordered 100,000 more. The trouble was getting them filled.

“If we just get more bodies, we’ll be OK,” she said. “We may just pull this off.”

It’s a scene that is being played out in towns like Clarksville along hundreds of miles of the Upper Mississippi. While massive inundations to the north, along Mississippi tributaries in Iowa, have captured far more media attention, Clarksville and her neighboring burgs are bracing for their own watery nightmares.

A flood’s misery, after all, is personal. It makes no difference to the owner if his is the only home or business that goes under, or one of 10,000. And there is much to lose in this magical Twain Country town on State Route 79 about 70 miles north of St. Louis.

A town that time forgot
While Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn hailed from Hannibal, some 40 miles upriver, Clarksville, population 500, is a storybook place in its own right. Historic but well-kept houses line the quiet streets, their lush, manicured yards as welcoming as the townsfolk, porch swings fairly beckoning visitors to nap in the heavy late spring air.

From its ornately steepled churches and quaint library to its tin-ceilinged Odd Fellows Hall and downtown brick storefronts, a walk around Clarksville is a walk back in time.

There is no operating gas station or market, but you can rent a room at the Clarksville Inn for $195.52 a week with tax, and dine next door at the Steamboat Restaurant and Lounge on a whole fried catfish with slaw and fries for $11.99. The Saturday night karaoke show is free. The resplendent Carroll House Bed and Breakfast with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, 2,000 square feet on two city lots with antique furnishings included, is currently on the market for all of $179,900.

“This is Missouri’s best kept secret,” said Mara Foreman, who with husband, Paul, owns and operates the motel and restaurant. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the dang world,” despite the fact that while their businesses, near Clarksville’s highest ground, will remain dry, their home could flood to the rafters.

As it is across much of the Midwest, the benchmark for misery in Clarksville is 1993, when the Mississippi crested here at 37.5 feet. Sunday night, the National Weather Service predicted the river would crest about 38 feet on Friday.

1993 flood ‘devastated the place’
“Ninety-three just devastated the place,” said Jim Dockery, a retired math teacher and fisherman who has lived in and around Clarksville for more than three decades. The flooding dampened the community’s spirit for years; some businesses and residents didn’t return. It took a petition drive to persuade the local lumberyard and hardware store to stay and many fear that the town’s largest retailer, which sells plenty of household items in addition to plywood and nails, will close for good this time if it takes a big hit.

In the past few years, Clarksville’s downtown core has been reborn as an arts and antiques district and is the focus of much of the sandbagging effort. Shops like Dawn of Creation, Sunfire Pottery, Williams Colonial Furniture and Rothbard Gallery are now strung along Front Street, facing the river, normally just a few feet lower than the street with no levee or other protection in between. “Touch the Mississippi,” the town’s motto, is emblazoned on a nearby arch.

“Being able to have that many artists all together in one place was pretty exciting,” Mayor Smiley said. “My fear is that with the age and condition of the buildings, if the water comes in, I have a suspicion that they will not reopen.”

John Brecher / msnbc.com Clarksville Mayor Jo Anne Smiley, right, coordinates flood preparation with members of the National Guard on Sunday.

So the tall, striking retired high school music teacher, who could easily pass for a decade younger than her 67 years, has rallied residents and outsiders to face the biggest crisis of her three years in office. Between now and when the river crests, Clarksville’s unpaid mayor must orchestrate the efforts of scores of volunteers,  prison inmates and National Guard soldiers to build the best sandbag bulwarks they can against the rising tide.

She is getting plenty of help from the town’s four aldermen, AmeriCorps coordinators, state officials and sheriff’s deputies. But Smiley seems to be everywhere, on hand at midnight Saturday to personally welcome Guard officers in advance of the 50 soldiers due later Sunday, then back at City Hall at daybreak to continue overseeing the sandbagging efforts.

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