Drainage

After protracted wrangling over funding, including an election in which women, ostensibly keeping house on a municipal scale, voted in New Orleans for the first time, construction began in 1900. Each year after that, the city advanced and the backswamp retreated. By 1909 forty miles of canals crossed New Orleans, and even the acid-tongued New Orleans–born author George Washington Cable marveled that “the curtains of swamp forest are totally gone. Their sites are drained dry and covered with miles of gardened homes.” Then, in 1913, A. Baldwin Wood invented the screw pumps bearing his name—many still operate—allowing the drainage works to suck up still more wetlands. A rise in assessed property narrated the system’s growth and the swamp’s decline: in 1890 the tax rolls of New Orleans listed $132 million worth of property; by 1914 that number had nearly doubled. The same year, triumphant sanitarians noted that the death rate had plummeted, from 27 per 1,000 at the turn of the century to below 20 per 1,000.[15]