The Little River Drainage District collection

Southeast Missouri is prosperous today as a rich, agricultural center partly because of the Little River Drainage District (LRDD), the body responsible for digging the levees, channels, and canals during the early twentieth century that drained the swampland which covered much of Southeast Missouri. The LRDD collected all the records related to the engineering project and to various aspects of people’s lives during that time, including tax records, plats, maps, catalogs, field reports, etc., and asked Southeast Missouri State University’s Kent Library to house them. Because of space considerations, the collection has been placed at the Bootheel Center, in Malden, Missouri. This article gives a brief history of Southeast Missouri and the LRDD, describes the collection, and highlights why these papers are of fundamental importance to the citizens of Southeast Missouri.