Within little more than a week in June, 1947, the Des Moines River flooded the city of Ottumwa, Iowa, twice. The 1947 floods proved a pivotal moment in Ottumwa’s history, leading to a massive project to straighten the river’s course, widen the channel, build protective levees, and repurpose land in the flood plain.
Shortly after the double disaster, a small spiral-bound book of flood photos was published. Few copies remain. This new edition includes all of the photos from the 1947 book, plus 50 additional photos of the flood, news stories, and maps. New captions add context and information to all the photographs.
Michael W. Lemberger received more than a hundred national and state awards during seventeen years as a newspaper photographer. He worked in film, video, and digital media as well as creating pen-and-ink drawings. He taught photo seminars at the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a well-known archivist of historical photographs; after his death in 2016, The Lemberger Collection was donated by his family to the University of Iowa Libraries.
Leigh Michaels is the author of more than 100 books, including 80 contemporary romance novels, a dozen historical romance novels, non-fiction books about writing, and local history books. More than 35 million copies of her books have been printed in 25 languages around the world. She is a six-time finalist in the Romance Writers of America RITA contest, and was honored by Iowa Library Association with the Johnson Brigham Award for an Iowa author making a contribution to literature world-wide. For more information about her, visit her website at www.leighmichaels.com.
176 pages, illustrated in black and white