The Maine Historical Society this week opened an exhibit titled "Photojournalism & the 1936 Flood." The flood is an event few now remember.
Henry Caiazzo, the digital archivist and content manager for the Historical Society said he was unaware of the flood, despite work that immerses him in Maine's past.
"I started doing some processing of the collection, putting them into the digital archives, and I saw all these amazing photos of flooding in the Kennebec River, with bridges, going down the river," Caiazzo said. "It just kind of piqued my interest."
Like the Ice Storm of 1998, the flood was the result of one-two weather punch. The National Weather Service estimated there was twice the usual amount of water in the snow pack, when a warm, moist front stalled over the region beginning March 9, 1936, followed by several inches of rain two days later.
A week after that, another storm brought as much as 5 more inches of rain to Maine and over 10 inches to Mount Washington in New Hampshire.
Ice dams compounded the flooding and, near Holyoke , Massachusetts, ice sheared off a 5-foot high, 1,000 foot wide section of a granite dam.
Across New England it was estimated that between 150 and 200 people died and a hundred million dollars in damage done. That would be about $2.2 billion today. It caused the worst flooding on record along the Androscoggin River north of Auburn, the Little Androscoggin in Auburn, and along the Saco River.
The display at the Historical society draws on photographs from the Portland Press Herald archives and Caiazzo says it gave Guy Gannett, who owned the Portland Press Herald, the chance to experiment with photojournalism from the air.
"It was the cutting edge, especially for Maine," Caiazzo said. "I would argue that his photographs, and his air pictures are some of the best examples of aerial photography at the time."
The aerial shots showed how the flood washed whole bridges downstream and left part of Saco an island surrounded by floodwaters. The exhibit of photos from the 1936 flood is at the Maine Historical Society's gallery in Portland and will be on display there until late December.
