MONROE COUNTY, Ill - Besides his wife dying, Earl Gummersheimer calls it the worst day of his life.
“I was raised in that house,” he said.
A large white farmhouse outside Columbia, Illinois had been in Earl’s family for generations.
His grandfather built it in 1901. Over the years, the Gummersheimer family turned the land into a self-sustaining farmstead with several buildings including a hog house, cattle shed, smoke house, and chicken house.
But, with the naked eye the Mississippi was visible from the porch of that farmhouse. The river that made their farm so fertile, would end up taking their livelihood away.
“I’m sure they would turn over in their graves if they knew what happened,” Earl says about his grandparents who built the house.
On August 1, 1993 the Mississippi busted through the levee near the farm and swept the entire home away on live television.
Five on your side photographers covering the summer long disaster watched it all unfold.
“It was overwhelming. It took out a lot of the outbuildings first and then it just kept pounding the house. And eventually it just literally went underwater it was incredible,” said Five On Your Side photographer Terri Krueger.
Earl, was part owner of the house after his father left the farm to him and his brother Virgil.
Virgil’s family was living there when the levee broke and had evacuated but the contents were all still inside.
Now 25 years later, what was the Gummersheimer farmstead is only fields.
The family moved a little bit farther from the Mississippi but stayed in flood plain and rebuilt.
A new life and a new respect for a river Earl refuses to underestimate.
“I’m sure [a flood] is going to happen again, but not in my lifetime I hope,” he said.
