Watch Us Grow

Watch Us Grow is a 1940 novel written by Harry Hamilton and published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis and New York. The book opens in 1912 in the fictional Mississippi River town of Aleta, Arkansas. A reviewer for the Indianapolis News described the novel as a “brittle comedy with a dash of seriousness” and populated by “movie characters,” while Kirkus Reviews stated that the book constituted an “early century tempest in a tea-cup, with period details and family problems well blended.”

Harry L. Hamilton was born in Chester, Illinois, a town on the Mississippi River, in 1896. For at least a few years, he lived near his paternal grandparents in Fulton County, Arkansas, although he apparently did not attend school there, graduating from high school in Chester in 1916, at the age of twenty. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918 during World War I but was discharged a few months later. As a young man, he traveled widely, working a variety of odd jobs, before enrolling at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. After a stint teaching and directing theater in Alabama, he established himself in the New York creative scene, publishing his first novel, Banjo on My Knee, in 1936; it was immediately adapted into a film starring Barbara Stanwyck. He began his third novel, Watch Us Grow, while on a trip to American Samoa, finishing it during a later trip to France. He settled in California in the 1940s, dying in Long Beach in 1975.

The book’s fictional Aleta—located just south of the Missouri state line, across the Mississippi River from Tennessee—has a population of about 1,000, not counting local squatters, or African Americans, who all “lived back of the levee,” while more “respectable” whites lived in front of the levee. The town is overseen by Noah Morehead, who made his money cutting timber that was not his out of the local swamp and selling it. His wife, Ernestine (née Carlin), who hails from an upper-crust family in Osceola (Mississippi County), has long “felt her children were her only reward for a wasted life.” These children are sons Buford and Paul and daughter Louella, who is engaged to the local doctor, Wayne Price. Paul is an entitled wastrel who once “ran over a little Negro girl in the Apperson Jack Rabbit, the first car ever seen on the streets of Aleta,” and Ernestine “felt that the Moreheads had behaved very handsomely in giving the parents of the dead child a hundred dollars, a vast sum for a Negro family.”

Buford takes after his businessman father and invites “a Yankee” named Dave Randall to oversee a project that will “put Aleta on the map.” The project is to drain nearby “Niggerhead Swamp” where the squatters live and sell them the land for cheap—despite the fact that the Moreheads do not actually own the land in question. Buford plans to use Dave Randall, a “drummer,” to sell the squatters on the idea. Dave, thinking he has been offered a genuine managerial position in what is being called the Aleta Land Development Company, moves from Illinois to Aleta with wife Clara, daughter Judy (age twenty-one), and son Johnny (age nineteen). Buford arranges for Paul to serve as company president, and he hires Judy for stenography, pitching the job as a chance for her to improve the lot of the squatters, who are riddled with malaria, hookworm, and lice. However, when the squatters, led by Sarah Tiller, realize that the project is to drain the land they inhabit, a project promoted under the banner of “Watch Us Grow,” they vow to fight it.

In the meantime, Judy falls in love with Wayne, and he with her. As Wayne’s fiancée, Louella is suspicious of their attentiveness toward each other, but then she is surprised by the return of Buck Tiller, Sarah’s son, who had loved her as a youth but knew that she would never reciprocate the love of a squatter and so joined the U.S. Marines.

Meanwhile, the draining of the swamp proceeds, although a flood of the Mississippi River sends the town and surrounding communities into a nearby Red Cross refugee camp. Constantly in his presence, Louella finds herself irresistibly attracted to Buck but also desperate to preserve her own standing and so aims to marry Wayne as soon as possible. Louella schedules the wedding for May 20, but the night before, when she is taking some items over to her new home, she encounters Buck there and they have sex. Her mother witnesses this but insists that Louella go through with her marriage to Wayne, and so Buck leaves town to reenlist in the marines the following day.

After the flood passes, the riverbank starts caving in, taking with it a cotton warehouse and some houses, including the Randalls’ home, and the Randalls relocate behind the levee, to Squattertown, making them more trusted among the squatters. Land sales begin on June 15, and Judy and Dave manage to convince all the squatters to sign to sell their land by the end of sixty days, save for the Elkins and Tiller families, who are immediately served notice of eviction. This leads Mrs. Tiller and daughter Liddie to take the train to Blytheville (Mississippi County) to make inquiries at the courthouse about the legality of the eviction.

There, they learn that the swamp, part of the Sunken Lands, actually belongs to the government, and they are able to file a homestead claim free of charge for 160 acres. A delegation of squatters goes to confront Noah Morehead, but a massive storm whips up during the meeting, and the swollen river cuts a new path through town, slowly consuming every building on that side of the levee, even, finally, the Morehead mansion. With residents of Aleta trying to settle behind the levee, the squatters propose to sell them lots in what they are calling New Aleta, with Mrs. Tiller setting up a land office in a former cow shed. After an informal tribunal, they decide not to report the Moreheads to authorities in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Dave and Johnny Randall open a grocery store, and as the town takes shape, the former squatters become “town people.”

In the last chapter, on the eve of World War I, word arrives that Buck Tiller was killed in action along the Mexican border. Realizing that she has been deprived forever of a life with Buck, and not wanting to inflict the same heartbreak upon Wayne, Louella vows to divorce Wayne so that he can marry Judy, but Judy refuses to marry Wayne, urging him to recommit to Louella, while she decides to leave town and live on her own for a while.

For additional information:
Hamilton, Harry. Watch Us Grow. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1940.

“Harry L. Hamilton.” Randolph Society. https://randolphsociety.org/harry-l-hamilton/ (accessed April 7, 2026).

Review of Watch Us Grow. Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1940. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/harry-hamilton/watch-us-grow/ (accessed April 7, 2026).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas