Editor’s note: As Patrick County begins another round of cleanup following this weekend’s flooding, longtime local historian Tom Perry reflects on another devastating chapter in the region’s history. While today’s flood is a different event, many of the same communities along the Ararat, Mayo and Dan rivers once again faced rising waters. Perry’s personal memories offer historical perspective on a disaster that remains etched in the memories of many local residents.
Genesis 8:4 “And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.”
This morning I woke up and thought it was 1979. Sadly, I was not 18 years old, but 65. I hope everyone is safe.
If you grew up along the Ararat River, you read the story of Noah and the ark landing on the “Mountains of Ararat.” On the Jefferson Fry Map of our area, Pilot Mountain, Sauratown, and Hanging Rock were listed as the Mountains of Ararat. So we have two communities in Virginia and North Carolina known as Ararat and a river of the same name that connects them.
Twenty-five years ago in September of 1979, I attended my first college class at Surry Community College in Dobson, North Carolina. Appropriately, it was a history class taught by Conrad C. Holcomb. Little did I know that a few weeks later I would experience history face to face and not very pleasantly.
Around five o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, September 21, 1979, it began to rain. Rain had fallen over a very wet summer and even on Thursday through Friday morning. By nine that evening, the heavens opened up in a horrible downpour that put 6.24 inches of rain down in twenty-four hours. When the sun came up the next morning, WHEO was still on the air, and one of the worst floods of the twentieth century had come and gone in Patrick and Surry counties, totally ignoring the state line.
Floods occurred in Patrick in 1889, 1937, and 1940, but this was much worse. The Mayo River went from 50 feet wide to over 600 feet in places. Eight feet of water from the Mayo River came into the United Elastic Plant in Stuart. Damage estimates in Patrick County reached over $15 million in business and $1 million in private property. Governor John Dalton visited Stuart, and President Jimmy Carter declared the area a disaster area.
The same was true in Quality Mills on Riverside Drive in Mount Airy along the banks of the Ararat River. Years later, spending several third shifts in the dye house of Quality Mills, then Cross Creek Apparel, the watermarks were still visible on the white cinder block walls. Today that building makes carports.
There was a famous photo of the late Robert Merritt standing in front of his company, Renfro, with water almost up to the sign on the building. North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt visited the town where damage estimates reached over 40 million dollars, including 300,000 pounds of tobacco washed from a warehouse.
Since the flood, dikes along the Ararat and flood control dams have been built in Patrick and Surry Counties, along with widening of the streams. Lovills Creek, which feeds into the Ararat near the industrial park where I once worked as a teenager, is twice as wide, with a great walking trail alongside. That night in 1979, the creek stretched across Highway 52, enveloping Lowe’s Hardware, where Parrish Tire and Pizza Hut are today, and for one of the few times, closing the road to traffic.
That Friday night, I could not get home from Mount Airy to Ararat after working in the dye house of Oakdale Knitting Company. Water was across Highway 104. I remember at the White Sulphur Springs and Willis Gap Road intersection, water was across the road. I remember Raleigh Puckett walking through the water at the Sparger House to retrieve his daughters.
That night, many of us returned to Mount Airy and found ourselves at Ray’s King Burger, where Arthur Boyd and Pert King both worked, where Coach’s is today near Mayberry Mall. They made us some of those good char-broiled King Burgers for several hours.
Therefore, I turned around and spent a night at my friend Teddy Guynn’s house off Riverside Drive about as close to making history as I wanted to come. Many of us spent the next day “long necking” to the tragedy of a house washed away along the Little Dan River and odd sights such as a bridge sitting alone in midstream with no road on either side near Rabbit Ridge near where Wolf Creek emptied into the Ararat River.
Genesis 9:11 “And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.”
