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The rain last week here in central Pennsylvania reminded me of something I came across when I was leading an archeological excavation in Johnstown, PA. We often think that spring is the time for disastrous flooding, when melting snow, torrential rains, and floating ice can combine to drive any stream over its banks. Certainly some of our most dangerous floods have happened in the spring -- Hurricane Agnes in 1972 and of course the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889. As we prepared to dig in Johnstown, we first dug into the history of the city, and discovered that Johnstown had been flooded about 30 times between the 1990s and the early 1800s. Some of those floods, occurring in the fall, had been nicknamed "pumpkin floods." Pumpkins, it seems, float very well.

The most recent pumpkin flood happened along the Connecticut River and its tributaries in October 2005. Robert Thorson, a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut, described it this way:

An orange armada floated down the Connecticut River. At first, each pumpkin simply gets wet. Then the floodwaters rise, covering the pumpkin's bottom. But just before it's submerged completely, a pumpkin floats skyward and reaches the end of its tether, resembling an orange lobster buoy being dragged by a rising tide. If the floodwaters keep rising, fields of pumpkins are uprooted from the saturated ground. Then, with anchors cut, a pumpkin fleet is swept downstream. Thousands of spherical ships then bobble like enormous tangerines in muddy water, dragging their twisted stalks behind them, announcing to everyone that a lingering wet tropical storm is doing its October thing and might just get worse. (Currents and Eddies, spring 2006).

The professor paints a pretty neat image, doesn't he, but, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

This particular image was taken during the flooding in 2005, on the Wallkill River, which flows from northern New Jersey into New York. It is a northward-flowing  tributary of the Hudson River.

People living along the North Branch of the Susquehanna in northern Pennsylvania and in Wheeling, West Virginia along the Ohio River remembered the flood of November 1811 as the Pumpkin Flood.

The most famous Pumpkin Flood happened along the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers in eastern Pennsylvania on October 5, 1786. Many floods since then are compared to this record-setting flood. According to the Farmer's Almanac, one person noted, "Heavy pumpkins came tumbling downstream like great orange cannonballs and had much the same effect when houses or men stood in their way."

The earliest recorded Pumpkin Flood flowed past the town of Harper's Ferry, West Virginia in 1753. The town was a growing manufacturing location because of the waterpower provided by the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. Unlike the later floods, where the pumpkins were grown by European settlers as cattle feed, these pumpkins were washed down from the gardens of nearby Indian villages.

Last week's rains eased some of the drought conditions across the mid-Atlantic states, and reminds us to keep alert -- floods don't just happen in the spring!

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