Swept Away

In the late nineteenth century, timber created a booming town at Dyerville that served outposts and lumber camps along the Eel River, with hotels, mercantile stores, saloons, a school, and a baseball diamond cut from the river bank. Heavy rains and unstable geology made the Eel River one of the most erosive rivers in the United States, and although settlers in the eighteen hundreds had avoided building too close to the bank because of periodic floods, a thirty-year dry period encouraged settlement nearer the river's edge. Beginning in the nineteen thirties, Dyerville suffered a series of catastrophic floods that culminated in 1955, when the river swept the town away. When the record-breaking flood of 1964 came, nothing remained to be lost except the train trestle, the only remnant of the once thriving community.

California · United States