The 1965 Flood

Sanderson is built in the mouth of a canyon, which is convenient for a railroad and dangerous for everything else. On the morning of 11 June 1965, after as much as nine inches of rain had fallen on the watershed above the town in two days, a fifteen foot wall of water came down Sanderson Canyon at about five past seven and went through the town. Debris had jammed against a bridge abutment upstream and held the water back until the bridge gave way, so it arrived all at once and with no warning at all, down a creek that is normally dry. It took out highway bridges and railroad track, twisted heavy steel rails into shapes that are hard to look at in the photographs, washed frame houses down the creek or broke them against the highway bridge, and dissolved the adobe ones. Twenty six people were killed, and most of them were children: six from the Johnson family alone and four from the Sellers family. The water carried what it took a long way, and bodies were recovered well into the lower Rio Grande. It also tore through two cemeteries and disinterred the caskets, which were reburied together that Saturday as a matter of public health. It remains the deadliest flood ever recorded in this part of Texas. Over the twenty years that followed, eleven flood control dams were built above the town, which is the arrangement Sanderson still lives under, and in 2015 the fiftieth anniversary was marked with a memorial garden and a state marker.