cause Morgan drastically overestimated. Hines and his party of nearly a hundred men stole uniforms from a Union supply depot in Brownsville, Kentucky, then robbed a train in Elizabethtown to acquire Union currency. Dressed as Federal troops, they crossed the Ohio River on horseback a few miles downstream from Leavenworth, then struck out for Paoli, pretending to be in pursuit of Union deserters. In French Lick, they met with the local Copperhead leader, Doctor William A. Bowles, who headed the Confederate-leaning Democratic party in southern Indiana and was a supporter of slavery. Bowles told them he was unable to help them. Indiana Home Guards were then in pursuit of the Confederates. Hines hired a Leavenworth local to guide them to a safe ford over the river where they could escape into Kentucky, but the local was actually a Union supporter and betrayed them. Residents of Leavenworth carried ammunition to Union troops, who gunned several of the horsemen down as they tried to get across the river at Little Blue Island. Three Confederate soldiers were killed and a large number were taken prisoner and kept in the Methodist Church in Leavenworth. The spy, Hines, escaped. Between the Civil War and the 1937 Ohio River Flood At the end of the Civil War, Leavenworth was a thriving town, a regular stop for steamboats on the Ohio River. Button-making was an important industry, relying on shell banks in the river. The industry declined in the 1920s, when shell banks were exhausted. A total of 700 people lived in the town in 1910 and three button factories employed twenty-four families. Other industries included boat-making, freight hauling, and barrel production. Quarries opened up in the 1880s and lime was shipped out on flatboats. In October 1890, a fire destroyed about one-third of Leavenworth. The population at this time was over five hundred. The 1937 Ohio River Flood The river's waters began to rise in January 1937. Record rainfalls by late January resulted in a huge flood, the most destructive in the Ohio Valley's history. Of 145 houses in Leavenworth, twenty floated away and sixty-five were lifted off their foundations. Four hundred of the town’s population of 418 were forced to evacuate. Laborers enlisted by Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) salvaged what they could, but when the waters receded, it was decided to move what was left of Leavenworth uphill. Under the direction of Indiana