Neosho Falls School

A systematic relief effort was also enacted by the National Red Cross, headed by a field director by the name of R. Munn, who first set up a headquarters in Yates Center City Hall, then later moved into the swampy wreckage of Neosho Falls High School. Many residents of the Falls had taken refuge in the school, as well as on rooftops and the upper floors of various buildings. Those who’d managed to park their cars and trucks at the school watched in horrified awe as the floodwaters devoured their vehicles, swallowing them into the insatiable maw of the Neosho River. Given the vast scope of the disaster, human refugees were not the only ones to take shelter in the high school. Many pets and livestock hunkered down as well, and people’s cows and chickens were kept on the school auditorium stage, creating what must have looked like some terrible inverted re-imagining of the Biblical nativity. In contrast to a warm dry manger, at one point opaque water even crept up to immerse the auditorium stage’s floor. One resident remembered seeing a horse swimming by in front of the building, desperately fighting against the current, but it was too heavy and too far out of reach to be saved. On the third floor, somewhere in the school building’s southwest corner, was the “dog room,” where more than fifteen dogs were kept as they nervously paced and panted in the sticky wet summer night. Most humans and other creatures would weather another three to four nervous moons in those concrete rooms.