Flood 100 years ago was one of worst ever
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The Great Flood of Good Friday 1902 dumped 11 inches of water on the county from 8 p.m. Thursday, March 27, to 8 p.m. Friday, March 28. It claimed five lives and forever altered the face of Warren County’s economy.
With the abundant supply of water in the area, it is only natural the main industry during the 1800s was water-driven milling. Water provided power for everything from sawmills and grist mills to cotton mills and clothing manufacturing plants. In 1895, according to Walter Womack’s “McMinnville at a Milestone,” there were 32 water-driven mills operating in the county.
After the 1902 flood, less than 12 remained.
Among the largest employers, and hardest hit, were four mills established by the Faulkner family, two of them on the Charles Creek just north of McMinnville in the Faulkner Springs community to which the family gave its name.
Good fortunes turn bad
Fortunes turned for the mill industry that fateful Good Friday in 1902.
The flood waters rose rapidly, just as they did this past January, and then again earlier this month. The first word of destruction came from the Yeager community, several miles west of the present-day fairgrounds. At around 3 p.m., the waters of Charles Creek swelled to wipe out a dam, mill, store and blacksmith shop there.
M.T. Bass, manager of the Tennessee Woolen Mills, got word in town by telephone of the damage at Yeager, and by the time he reached Faulkner Springs the flood had destroyed $25,000 worth of property at his mill.
At 5 p.m., a call came from Clay Faulkner’s Mountain City Woolen Mill that he and his workers were trapped by the flood waters. Apparently Faulkner had gone to the mill to try to rescue the workers and got stuck there himself.
Several townspeople tried to answer the summons, but the Bybee Branch had become a “roaring torrent” and blocked access by Faulkner Springs Road. The newspaper reported, “Mr. Faulkner and his hands were imprisoned in his mill for hours, the waters driving around it in such mad fury on all sides that it was impossible for them to either escape or for others to reach them.”
The water began to fall at dark and they were finally rescued.
Everyone at Faulkner Springs, however, was not so fortunate. Henry Madewell had tried to escape from the Mountain City Woolen Mill by a rope when the flood waters were at their height. He fell into the swirling waters and drowned. Madewell was 28 years old and had been married just three months.
Mrs. Jennie Blevins and her three daughters, age 8, 10 and 13, were in their double log house between the two Charles Creek mills when the flood waters demolished the dwelling. It was several days before their bodies were recovered. Madewell and the Blevins family were all buried at the Faulkner Cemetery just above Falconhurst off Pike Hill Road.
Flood waters of the Barren Fork reached the second story of the Annis Cotton Mill, wrecked its office, and destroyed the power house of McMinnville Electric Light and Water Works, which was powered by the Annis Mill dam.
The wheel house and mill wheel at Rock Island, which was turned by the powerful force of the Great Falls themselves, washed away in the flood waters, as did the Collins River Bridge. Four other county bridges also were destroyed.
The aftermath
The Falls City Mill never reopened, and the majestic building has not been used for anything besides storage to this very day.
Work resumed at the Annis Cotton Mill, but the next year it too closed its doors, the toll of weather, aging machinery, and the high cost of raw cotton.
Damage to the Mountain City Woolen Mill was not as great, but the flood affected its fate in a different way. When he was clearing debris, Clay Faulkner discovered the source of a manganese spring, a mineral which was thought might cure rheumatism.
He had already been peddling “Faulkner Mineral Water” in limestone, freestone, and sulfur varieties, since it “cured” his kidney ailment in 1896. The additional discovery encouraged Clay to go full-time into the health resort business.
The dominance of water-driven milling was over, but fortunately for Warren County, a new industry had been founded in the 1880s by J.H.H. Boyd. The area’s reputation as the Nursery Capital of the World was well on its way to being established with its first large, out-of-state shipment around 1900, a million seedlings delivered in a refrigerated railroad car to the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.
George and Charlien McGlothin own Historic Falcon Manor located in McMinnville.