Rockdale Iowa Flood of 1876

Centennial parade in Dubuque, Iowa, July 4, 1876

It was America’s hundredth birthday — a loud, sweaty carnival of self-congratulation. Dubuque was drunk on patriotism and beef fat. Main Street looked like a fever dream of George Washington with arches everywhere, bunting flapping, men in hats shouting nonsense about liberty. “Hayden’s Battery preceded the car of 1776,” somebody wrote, as if that meant anything. Every man was a patriot, every woman a flag, and every kid sticky with pie and gunpowder.

 The Germania Band blared while Holman’s Cavalry clomped down the avenue, followed by grim men pretending this was still about freedom and not about eating their body weight in ribs. Fireworks cracked overhead, and somewhere a brass band struck up something heroic and off-key. It was all very grand, very human, very doomed.

 

Then, as it always does, nature got bored. The sky rolled its eyes and said, enough already. A few polite raindrops fell on the arms of drunks and dancers. Nothing serious, just a quiet warning from the gods. Nobody listened. They never do. They mounted up and rode home to Rockdale, two miles west — a one-saloon village tucked in a gorge, the place where lightning likes to linger.

 

The Storm came out of nowhere at just after
11 pm as the town was asleep

By ten o’clock they were asleep. By eleven, the storm hit like God emptying His bathtub. The thunder rolled in from Hell’s basement. Catfish Creek, usually a muddy trickle, turned into a roaring juggernaut. By one a.m. it was a half-mile wide and twenty feet deep. “At about one o’clock the dam gave way,” one account said, “followed by the crash of the railroad bridge — its fragments went tearing down the valley.”

 

The little hamlet “was swept away as with the besom of destruction.” Houses, stores, barns — everything fell before “the terrible storm that came rolling in great surges down the valley.” Lightning everywhere. Horses screaming. “Their voices crying out for help amidst the roar of the thunder and the crash of the storm.”

 

Thirty-nine people died. One building survived. Everything else was pulp.

 

Charles Thimmesch, the bartender at Becker’s saloon, was the first to realize the game was up. He saw the water rising and ran upstairs to warn the family, but by the time he got back down, the street had turned into a river of doom. He climbed onto a roof, stripped naked, shoved his cash in his mouth, and dove into the flood — swimming blind through a nightmare.

 

Next door, the Rockdale House ripped loose and shattered like a whiskey glass in a bar fight. Mr. Kapp thought his family would be safer there. He was wrong. His own house — the one he abandoned — was the only one left standing. That’s one trick fate plays when you try to out-think it.

 

Carey watched his home drift away with his wife and children still inside. Becker’s saloon went next — eleven dead. The ones who lived clung to trees all night, howling across the black water like lost animals. Horn’s store went down. Klassen’s house was the finale — his wife and five kids were swallowed whole.

 

Aftermath of the Rockdale flood - total destruction

“The wave came upon them,” a survivor said, “lifting the buildings and tossing them like eggshells.” By morning, “what eighteen hours ago was a quiet, unsuspecting, and happy little rural village was now only a waste of waters — fragments piled in gorges from a few feet to twenty feet high.”

 

The Kapp boys — eleven, fourteen, and five — ended up in treetops, shouting back and forth till dawn. “We hollered to keep our courage up,” one said.

 

Fifty men from Dubuque rode in to count the dead. They found “arms and legs poking from the mud, faces half-buried, clothes tangled in driftwood.” Others lay “almost entirely hid from view by the mud, with perhaps a hand only exposed, or a foot, or a portion of the face.” “Altogether,” one paper sighed, “the scene was one to touch a heart of stone.”

 

Looters came next. They always do. One man was caught robbing the dead. Others got away. It was the American way — profit from the wreckage, blame the weather.

 

Even Dubuque got hammered. “Terrific thunder and blinding lightning,” said one paper. “Rushing torrents gorged the sewers.” Seventeenth Street turned into a canyon. Mr. Becket lost his fancy stone fence — the one he’d bragged “God Almighty couldn’t wash out.” Well, God called, and He wanted a word.

 

Everywhere were strange stories: a man who woke to find his bed floating, a dairy farmer whose horses surfed their barn to freedom, a cooper who watched his beer kegs float away to glory. “Heaven knows where — if heaven knows anything about beer kegs,” a reporter said.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Ulrich woke in the dark to find their baby gone — drowned in the cradle beside them. The worst kind of silence. That’s how the flood ended, not with fireworks, but with a mother’s scream swallowed by the water.

 

Then came the journalists, slapping headlines and moral lessons across the carnage. Why didn’t the Signal Service warn us? demanded the New York Herald. They puffed up, boasting they’d predicted “bad weather from the west.” Everyone loves a scapegoat, especially when it’s safely in Washington.

 

“Terrible Fate of the Village of Rockdale,” one headline read. “The Town Swept Away by a Flood, and Every Inhabitant Drowned.” Another called it “The Rockdale Catastrophe.”

 

“The Centennial Fourth will not soon be forgotten by the people of northern Iowa,” a paper wrote.

 

Truth was, nobody could have predicted anything. The 1876 version of meteorology was a man with a mustache guessing at clouds. You might as well flip Tarot cards or sacrifice a goat. Radar didn’t exist, drones didn’t exist, common sense barely existed. They were on their own.

 

That’s the joke, you see — man throws a party for his great Republic, struts around with flags and fiddles and roast beef, and by midnight he’s naked in a tree, howling at the storm.