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Stewards of the Land

More than 100 years ago, visionaries foresaw a way to transform an impenetrable 1.2 million-acre swampland in southeast Missouri into some of the richest and most productive cropland in America.

The Little River Drainage District (LRDD) was formed in 1907 to drain the swamp. LRDD developed a plan for construction of an elaborate network of drainage ditches, retention basins, and levees that would require moving more than 66 million cubic yards of earth—more dirt than was moved to build the Panama Canal—and transform the nation’s largest wetlands into productive agricultural land.

This extensive, complex project required the involvement of some of the best engineering minds of the time.

Knowing the land falls one foot per mile from Cape Girardeau, Missouri south to the Arkansas border, work began in 1914 on a system of nearly 1,000 miles of drainage channels, and more than 300 miles of levees that rely heavily upon gravity, plus five detention basins. It was completed in 1928. 

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