Part 6 of 6
Anna Eliza Blount Kline and Her Swamp Land Grant
I hope you have
enjoyed learning about my great-grandmother Anna Eliza Kline. She was an
educated pioneer lady who enjoyed life to the best of her ability in the swamps
of Southeast Missouri.
In 1907, a group of men formed an organization
called the Little River Drainage District to take on the swamp. They issued
bonds and taxed landowners in the district for the benefits derived. From
topographical maps, they knew that the elevation of the land falls one foot per
mile from Cape Girardeau to the Arkansas border. They devised a system of
levees and ditches that relied heavily on gravity.
By 1928, the district
had built nearly 1,000 miles of ditches, more than 300 miles of levees and had
drained 1.2 million acres of land in a drainage project that at the time was
the largest in the history of the world. The district drains 750,000 acres upland
of the drainage system and 1.2 million acres total. Houseboats were home to
many of the men and women who dug canals and built the levees. My
Dad remembered some of the children who lived on the houseboats parked not far
from his house. Land, once 95 percent covered in water and trees, is now
largely cleared and free of water most of the year. Draining the earthquake
swamp became one of the greatest engineering marvels of the 20th century. The project moved more
earth than was moved in digging the Panama Canal. [1]
Sadly, Anna Eliza Blount
Kline never got to enjoy the fruits of her portion of tax money spent on
draining the swamps. The money she invested in the Stock Market provided
generous dividends for many years until the 1929 Stock Market Crash.
With the onset of the Great Depression and the loss of her money in the market,
she was forced to use what funds she had on hand to support the family and see
her last two grandsons through high school. My father was very
disappointed he was unable to go college as did his three older siblings.
He wanted to obtain a degree in the field of mathematics.
In the end, the
combination of Anna losing her money in the crash of the Stock Market, coupled
with the fact previous customers could no longer afford to purchase dairy
products from the family dairy farm, and Henry Cline’s siblings coming to
visit, while expecting to be fed for weeks and months at a time, made Anna flat
broke within three years. My dad told my brothers and me that he recalled
his father’s brothers and sisters coming to visit for extended stays because
his family had a large garden, fruit trees, and dairy cows to feed them.
Some of his father’s siblings could not find work and had no food. During
the Great Depression, many people had no food and had to wait in bread lines to
keep from starving. Henry took care of his brother Bedford when he
became elderly and had no means of support, in addition to raising his
half-brother Sam.
Anna first sold off
portions of her Swamp Land Patent, then by late 1932, she lost the land in
total. She and her son-in-law Henry had to move in with his son, and
her grandson Ed Cline in McMullin, Missouri. She took pride in the
fact she saw all her grandchildren finish high school and three of the older grandchildren
went to college. People who knew her well said that even after she
lost her money and property, she held her head high and entered a room like she
owned it up until her death on 29 June 1934. She was quite a lady,
and I wish I could have met her.
Researched and written by
Anna Eliza’s great-granddaughter, Margaret
Cline Harmon. Contact – mcharmon1@gmail.com, 225-788-5999. Any reproduction of this article should give credit to the author, dated
February 2017.
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