Letter from Dee, page 2 — china price list, flood news
Book 2, Page 164 ·1940
Transcription
this afternoon I threw away the price list on the china! Now there’ll have to be another trip to Miller & R’s before a decision can be reached.
Everybody seems to be excited over the floods, but since there’s no difficulty in getting in the office 'cause the water’s a couple of blocks away, and as
AI Notes
Second page of the letter begun on page 163. The writer reports throwing away the china price list and needing to make another trip to Miller & R’s (almost certainly Miller & Rhoads, the Richmond department store) before settling on a pattern, and remarks on Richmond residents’ excitement about the floods — likely the August 1940 floods that affected much of Virginia and the upper South after heavy rains. The office where she works is only a couple of blocks from the rising water but apparently still accessible on foot. Written in graphite pencil on the same cream notepaper as the preceding leaf; the page breaks mid-sentence at ‘and as’.
“Miller & R’s” is Miller & Rhoads, Broad Street’s flagship Richmond department store (1885–1990). The floods are the mid-August 1940 James River flooding — the remnants of an Aug. 11 hurricane that made landfall on the Ga./S.C. coast and dumped 5–15 inches across central Virginia. The James crested in Richmond at 28.6 ft. (a record surpassed only by Hurricane Agnes in 1972 and the 1985 election-day floods), submerging roughly a sixth of the city and destroying four of the five bridges across the river.