It was the historic Mississippi River Flood of 1927 that brought my dad to Panola County, if indirectly.

That benchmark flood triggered the massive Flood Control Act of 1928 that led to the construction of north Mississippi’s flood control reservoirs, starting in the late 1930s with Sardis Dam on the Little Tallahatchie River.

That’s where my dad found a job during the Depression. Nor was he unique to his generation. Though age has rapidly thinned their ranks, there was a time when almost any man that you met in Panola County of a certain age would invariably tell you, “I got my first job helping build the dam.”

Often it was for 50 cents an hour, but it was a paycheck in an era when money was scarce beyond our imagining today.

But there were many others whose great sacrifices are now mostly forgotten except by their descendants. They were the people who were forced from the land they farmed in the riverbottoms of the Coldwater, Tallahatchie, Yocona and Yalobusha Rivers. Reservoir waters are now stored where people once lived and farmed.

Considering the epic relocation made necessary with the construction of north Mississippi’s flood control reservoirs, there was remarkably little resistance. Not that they were happy about being moved, but they were convinced that their sacrifice would save somebody downstream from flooding.

Today, Sardis stands at 267.90 feet above sea level, well below the 281.40 feet at the crest of its emergency spillway. Remarkably, at that level the reservoir is currently just a little over half-full, Dale Potts of the Sardis Field Office of the Corps of Engineers said Monday.

The distribution of rainfall in 2011, unlike 1973 when waters overtopped the emergency spillway, has allowed the gates to remain closed at Sardis without overtopping. That has kept tributary river levels downstream lower as the Mississippi’s rise backs into the Lower Yazoo. It is yet a delicate balancing act whose outcome is not certain.

But the water now held behind the dams at Arkabutla, Sardis, Enid and Grenada would vastly compound problems downstream. For that reason, it is well to remember those people of generations past whose displacement allowed construction of the dams holding back water in 2011.