Above: Excerpt of a photo of the 1915 Flood of Table Rock’s Lower Town. The view is from the west side of the Taylor Branch bridge. Note the daring young man on the bridge railing above the standing wave of flood waters hitting the bridge. The house in the foreground is gone, replaced by a small house built by Albert & Bernice Hillers. Donnie Kalina lives there now. The author lives in the next house after that, and she sometimes winces during heavy rains as she thinks of this picture.
Water, water, everywhere in Table Rock
When Table Rock was just a young town in 1858, devastating flooding wiped out crops and the standing water left brought terrible illness. The Big Nemaha River and even Taylor Branch periodically flooded and wreaked havoc.
The 1870s saw especially bad floods. About one, the papers reported that “for a number of hours, the water through the streets of Table Rock was over three feet deep with a curren…
