NATCHEZ — The Mississippi River broke its previous record in Natchez Wednesday without even taking a bow.

History in the making did, however, inspire Burnley Cook of Natchez to spend more than an hour Thursday digging up his grandfather’s scrapbook from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 in Vidalia.

“I swear he told me the water reached all the way to Ferriday,” Cook said.

Cook said he remembers a few times his grandfather, John Foggo Dixon, talked about the 1927 flood. It was the same flood that would lead Congress to pass the Flood Control Act of 1928 and give the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the ultimate responsibility of Mississippi River flood control.

Dixon made sure Cook’s grandmother and mother traveled safely away to Natchez first, and then Birmingham, Ala., before the city was flooded on May 13, 1927, Cook said.

But Cook said his grandfather weathered the high waters at his house.

Cook remembers hearing about how all the furniture was put on the second floor, and how his grandfather slept that night on a World War I army cot on the first floor.

“When he put his feet down in water, he knew the levees broke,” Cook said.

Dixon went in the pitch-black night to wake up his neighbors with the news, Cook said.

Cook said his grandfather recorded everything in his scrapbooks.

“He was a warehouse of information,” he said of his mother’s father, John Foggo Dixon.

Between documentation of World War I and the oil business were a few pages dedicated to the 1927 flood in Vidalia.

Cook pointed to a black and white photo taken May 8, 1927, of a train, which appeared to be rolling on water.

“(Dixon) put my grandmother and mother on board on the last train from Vidalia to Natchez,” Cook said.

Cook said his grandfather usually wrote passages in his scrapbook, but the only writings about the flood were a few lines and dates typed on a three by five-inch note card.

A picture of a gas station with Model Ts parked outside was evidence of the supposed first drive through auto service station in Vidalia, which was built and owned by Cook’s grandfather, Cook said.

Dixon’s business was built in 1925 and went under with the floodwaters two years later.

Back then, Cook pointed out, there was no Federal Emergency Management Agency or other government programs to lighten financial burdens of flood victims.

“You were on your own,” Cook said.

Cook said his grandfather had jobs after that, but that he was never able to recoup all that he had lost in the flood.

He suspected those losses might account for lack of lengthy written documentation of the flood.

“He never really talked about (the flood) because it was a really painful time,” Cook said.

Cook pointed to a picture of a steamboat labeled in the margin “Senator Cordill.” He said his grandfather told him how the steamboat would dock in Natchez and charge for sightseeing tours of the flooded Vidalia.

“It’s almost morbid,” Cook said.

Cook said when he used to drive over the Mississippi River bridge with his grandfather, who lived until he was 97 years old, Dixon used to point out where he lived before the flood.

“‘That’s about where my house used to be,’” Cook recalled hearing.

Cook said he always regrets never having listened more to his grandfather’s stories that told the history of the Miss-Lou and wishes he would have pumped him for more information.

“It sounds cliché, but I’ve always considered him to be the most intelligent man I knew in my life,” Cook said.

“He could do anything and would know anything, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it.”

Although Cook joked at first of his grandfather’s obsessive documentation and scrap booking, he knew he was blessed to have those memories to flip through.

Looking through the photos of the past presented a nostalgic but morbid worst-case scenario of the current rising river, Cook said.

“I hope we don’t see this again, and I don’t think we will.”