Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Even though Roosevelt County’s wettest recorded year happened 20 years before I was born, I rarely empty my rain gauge without thinking of 1941.
I grew up on the stories — you may have as well.
At our place it was known as “40 inches in ’41.”
It was the year our grandparents and great-grandparents were kept busy planting, replanting, and emptying those rain gauges until the rains finally turned off late in the fall.
The official precipitation for Portales for 1941 was 43.61 inches, the Portales Daily News reported on Dec. 31 in a year-end wrap-up, calling it (with perhaps a whisker of exaggeration) “a year unanimously agreed to be the most unusual in the history of man.”
The prize for the wettest recorded spot in the county went to the community of Bethel, 10 miles west/northwest of Portales, where A.C. Woodburn had poured almost 60 inches — an even 5 feet — of rain from his gauge over the previous 12 months.
The last two months of 1941 were dry — in fact, not a drop of rain or a flake of snow fell in December — and yet, according to the year-end newspaper story, “there are still running streams in at least one section of the county.
“At Arch, the groundwater table has risen until it actually flows along the side of the road in one place,” the story said. “Springs dot the prairies and as the duck hunters can tell you, there are so many lakes in the county now that the transients have no trouble in keeping out of harm’s way.”
The biggest and most memorable rains fell in May that year (10-12 inches in most areas), leaving behind massive lakes that closed roads in every direction.
More than a few rural high school seniors rode tractors to their graduations, the only vehicles that could navigate the muddy roads.
“Never before in the history of the county has there been a time when everyone agreed there had been enough rain,” a reporter wrote in a front-page story of the May 26, 1941, edition of the Portales Daily News, with the headline: “County Has Rain of a Lifetime.”
Homes flooded, wells were chlorinated to slow potential contamination, and the Roosevelt County Red Cross “made arrangements to furnish typhoid serum to all persons who will permit themselves to be inoculated,” the Daily News reported.
Thirteen lakes were reported visible from Greathouse Mesa west of Floyd, only part of the standing water so abundant in the county that even the Chamber of Commerce rose to the occasion, presenting a special program on “Mosquito Prevention” at its weekly luncheon.
“Yep, that’s right,” the Daily News said. “No typographical error.”
The 1941 New Year’s Eve wrap-up in the Daily News said that even with the damages suffered from flooding and hail, Roosevelt County crops were still “the best in history.” It also accurately predicted that rainfalls of 1941 “will be remembered through many lifetimes.”
The story concluded with this: “Most families whose livelihood depends upon soil and moisture would wish only that he (1941) had been a little more considerate in choosing his time for the deluges.”
Some things, it seems, never change.
Betty Williamson would love to see a 40-inch year, but expects we could never agree on timing. Reach her at: