After ten the Heiser store was closed for the day, the lights out downstairs. When the downpour began, George and Mathilde did not think much of it, except that there would almost certainly be high water in the morning. But the thought bothered them very little, except for the inconveniences there might be. They listened to the rain drum on the roof and were glad to be inside.
If there was such a thing as a typical married couple in Johnstown on the night of May 30, 1889, George and Mathilde Heiser would come about as close as any to qualifying. Together, like Johnstown itself, they combined an Old World will to make good in the New with a sort of earlier-American, cracker-barrel willingness to take life pretty much as it came. Unlike a large number of Johnstown people, they were not directly beholden to the Cambria Iron Company, but their fortunes, like those of the entire valley, depended nonetheless on how red those skies glowed at night.
They had suffered the death of a child; they had tried their luck elsewhere and had lost. They fought dirt daily, saved every spare nickel, and took tremendous pride in the progress they were making. All things considered, Johnstown seemed a good place to be. It was their home.
II
Sailboats on the mountain
–1–
The lake had several different names. On old state maps it was the Western Reservoir, the name it had been given more than forty years earlier when the dam was first built. It was also known as the Old Reservoir and Three Mile Dam, which was the most descriptive name of the lot, if somewhat misleading, since the lake was closer to two than three miles long. The Pittsburgh people who had owned it now for ten years, and who had made a number of changes, called it Lake Conemaugh. But in Johnstown, and in the little coal towns and railroad stops along the way to Johnstown, it was generally known as South Fork dam.
South Fork was the nearest place to it of any size. Something like 1,500 people lived there in gaunt little frame houses perched on a hill just back from the tracks and the place where South Fork Creek flows into the Little Conemaugh River. Green hills closed in on every side; the air smelled of coal dust and pine trees. It was a town like any one of a half dozen along the main line of the Pennsylvania between Altoona and Johnstown; except for July and August, when things picked up considerably in South Fork.
The Pittsburgh people were coming and going then, and they were something to see with their troops of beautiful children, their parasols, and servants. Two or three spring wagons and buggies were usually waiting at the depot to take them to the lake. On Saturdays and Sundays the drivers were going back and forth several times a day.
The ride to the lake was two miles along a dusty country road that ran through the woods beside South Fork Creek, past Lamb’s Bridge, then on up the valley almost to the base of the dam.
Seen from down below, the dam looked like a tremendous mound of overgrown rubble, the work of a glacier perhaps. It reared up 72 feet above the valley floor and was more than 900 feet long. Its face was very steep and covered with loose rocks. There were deep crevices between the rocks where, as late as May, you could still find winter ice hiding; but wild grass, bushes, and saplings had long since taken root across nearly all of the face and pushed up vigorously from between the rocks, adding to the over-all impression that the whole huge affair somehow actually belonged to the natural landscape. There was hardly any indication that the thing was the work of man and no suggestion at all of what lay on the other side, except over at the far left, at the eastern end of the dam, where a spillway had been cut through the solid rock of the hillside and a wide sheet of water came crashing down over dark boulders. It was a most picturesque spot, and a favorite for picnics. Long shafts of sunlight slanted through a leafy gloom where the mountain laurel grew higher than a man could reach. And at the base of the falls a wooden bridge crossed the loud water and sent the road climbing straight to a clump of trees at the top of the dam, just to the right of the spillway.
There the road divided, with the left-hand fork crossing another long wooden bridge which went directly over the spillway. But carriages heading for the club took the road to the right, which turned sharply out of the trees into the sunshine and ran straight across the breast of the dam where, about a hundred yards out, the drivers customarily stopped long enough for everyone to take in the view.
To the right the dam dropped off a great deal more abruptly even than it had looked from below, and South Fork Creek could be seen glittering through the trees as it wound toward Lamb’s Bridge.
On the other side of the road the bank sloped sharply to the water’s edge, which was usually no more than six or seven feet below the top of the dam. From there the broad surface of the lake, gleaming in the sunlight, swept off down the valley until it disappeared behind a wooded ridge in the distance.
Along the eastern shore, to the left, were the hayfields and orchards of the Unger farm, neatly framed with split-rail fences. Beyond that was what was known as Sheep’s Head Point, a grassy knoll that jutted out into the lake. Then there were one, two, three ridges, and the water turned in behind them, out of sight, running, so it seemed, clear to the hazy blue horizon off to the south.
At the western end of the dam the road swung on through the woods, never far from the water, for another mile or so, to the main grounds of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which, seen from the dam, looked like a colorful string of doll houses against the distant shore line.
From the dam to the club, across the water, was about a mile. Except for a few small coves, the narrowest part of the lake was at the dam, but there was one spot, on down past the club, where an east-west line across the water was nearly a mile. A hike the whole way around the shore was five miles.
When the water was up in the spring, the lake covered about 450 acres and was close to seventy feet deep in places. The claim, in 1889, was that it was the largest man-made lake in the country, which it was not. But even so, as one man in Johnstown often told his children, it was “a mighty body of water to be up there on the mountain.”
The difference in elevation between the top of the dam and the city of Johnstown at the stone bridge was about 450 feet, and the distance from the dam to that point, by way of the river valley, was just under fifteen miles. Estimates are that the water of Lake Conemaugh weighed about 20 million tons.
The water came from half a dozen streams and little creeks that rushed down from Blue Knob and Allegheny Mountain, draining some sixty square miles. There was Rorabaugh Creek, Toppers Run, Yellow Run, Bottle Run, Muddy Run, South Fork Creek, and one or two others which seem never to have been named officially. South Fork Creek and Muddy Run were the biggest of them, but South Fork Creek was at least twice the size of the others. Even in midsummer it was a good twenty feet across. Like the others it was shallow, ice-cold, very swift, and just about a perfect place for trout fishing.
In South Fork there were scores of people who had been out on the dam and had seen the view. There were others who knew even more about the club and the goings on there because they worked on the grounds, tending lawns or waiting on tables at the clubhouse. But for everyone else the place was largely a mystery. It was all private property, and as the club managers had made quite clear on more than one occasion, uninvited guests were definitely not welcome.
The club had been organized in Pittsburgh in 1879. It owned the dam, the lake, and about 160 acres besides. By 1889 sixteen cottages had been built along the lake, as well as boathouses and stables. The cottages were set out in an orderly line among the trees, not very far apart, and only a short way back from the water. They looked far too substantial really to be called “cottages.” Nearly every one of them was three stories tall, with high ceilings, long windows, a deep porch downstairs, and, often as not, another little porch or two upstairs tucked under sharp-peaked roofs. The Lippincott house with its two sweeping front porches, one set on top of the other, and its fancy jigsaw trim, looked like a Mississippi riverboat. The Moorhead house was Queen Anne style, which was “all the
rage” then; it had seventeen rooms and a round tower at one end with tinted glass windows. And the Philander Knox house, next door, was not much smaller.
But even the largest of them was dwarfed by the clubhouse. It had enough windows and more than enough porch for ten houses. There were forty-seven rooms inside. During the season most of the club members and their guests stayed there, and the rule was that everyone had to take his meals there in the main dining room, where 150 could sit down at one time.
In the “front rooms” there were huge brick fireplaces for chilly summer nights, billiard tables, and heavy furniture against the walls. In summer, after the midday dinner, the long front porch was crowded with cigar-smoking industrialists taking the air off the water. String hammocks swung under the trees. Young women in long white dresses, their faces shaded under big summer hats, strolled the boardwalks in twos and threes, or on the arms of very proper-looking young men in dark suits and derbies. Cottages were noisy with big families, and on moonlight nights there were boating parties on the lake and the sound of singing and banjos across the black water.
In all the talk there would be about the lake in the years after it had vanished, the boats, perhaps more than anything else, would keep coming up over and over again. Boats of any kind were a rare sight in the mountains. There were rowboats on the old Suppes ice pond at the edge of Johnstown, and a few men had canoes along the river below the city. But that was about it. Not since the time when Johnstown had been the start of the canal route west had there been boats in any number, and then they had been only ungainly canal barges.
The club fleet included fifty rowboats and canoes, sailboats, and two little steam yachts that went puttering about flying bright pennants and trailing feathers of smoke from their tall funnels. There was even an electric catamaran, a weird-looking craft with a searchlight mounted up front, which had been built by a young member, Louis Clarke, who liked to put on a blue sailor’s outfit for his cruises around the lake.
But it was the sailboats that made the greatest impression. Sailboats on the mountain! It seemed almost impossible in a country where water was always a tree-crowded creek or stream, wild and dangerous in the spring, not much better than ankle-deep in the hottest months. Yet there they were: white sails moving against the dark forest across a great green mirror of a lake so big that you could see miles and miles of sky in it.
Some of the people in Johnstown who were, as they said, “privileged” to visit the club on August Sundays brought home vivid descriptions of young people gliding over the water under full sail. It was a picture of a life so removed from Johnstown that it seemed almost like a fantasy, ever so much farther away than fifteen miles, and wholly untouchable. It was a picture that would live on for a long time after.
That the Pittsburgh people also took enormous pleasure in the sight seems certain. There was no body of water such as this anywhere near Pittsburgh. There were, of course, the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, but they were not exactly clean any longer, and with the mills going full blast, which they had been for some time now, the air around them was getting a little more unpleasant each year. It was a curious paradox; the more the city prospered, the more uncomfortable it became living there. Progress could be downright repressive. But fortunately for the Pittsburgh people, it was very much within their power to create and maintain a place so blessed with all of nature’s virtues.
This water was pure and teeming with fish, and the air tasted like wine after Pittsburgh. The woods were full of songbirds and deer that came down to drink from the mist-hung lake at dawn. There were wild strawberries everywhere, and even on the very hottest days it was comfortable under the big trees.
In fact, with its bracing air, its lovely lake, and the intense quiet of its cool nights, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club must have seemed like paradise after Pittsburgh. Under such a spell even a Presbyterian steel master might wish to unbend a little.
The summer resort idea was something new for that part of the country. And only the favored few had the time or the money to experiment with it. But so far every indication was that the club was a great success. There had been problems from time to time. Poachers had been a continuing nuisance. The summer of 1888 had been cut short when a scarlet-fever scare sent everyone packing off home to Pittsburgh. Still, everything considered, in 1889 it looked as though the men who had bought the old dam ten years earlier knew what they were doing.
–2–
The first member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to take an interest in the regenerative powers of the Alleghenies was Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie had been going to what he called “The Glorious Mountain” long before the South Fork organization was put together. He had his own modest frame house at Cresson, which was one of the first summer resorts in Pennsylvania and the only one of any consequence in the western part of the state. It was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad and was located fourteen miles up the line from South Fork at the crest of the Allegheny range.
Cresson, or Cresson Springs as it was also known, had been started before the Civil War by a doctor named Robert Montgomery Smith Jackson. The main attractions at Cresson, aside from the mountain air and scenery, were the “iron springs,” the best-known of which was the Ignatius Spring, named after “the venerable huntsman” Ignatius Adams, who first discovered its life-preserving powers and whose ghost was said still to haunt the place. According to Jackson, “by drinking this water, dwelling in the woods and eating venison,” Ignatius had “lived near the good old age of one hundred years.” Jackson was against whiskey, slavery, and what he called the “present tendency to agglomerate in swarms, or accumulate in masses and mobs.” Those “gregarious instincts [which] now impel this race to fix its hopes of earthly happiness on city life alone” would, he was convinced, be the undoing of the race. Life in the country was the answer to practically every one of man’s ills, and particularly life on the Allegheny Mountain.
Jackson’s ambition (“a mission, solemn as a command from Heaven,” he called it) was to make Cresson “the place of restoration for all forms of human suffering.” He got his friend J. Edgar Thomson, president of the Pennsylvania, interested, and the railroad built a hotel and developed the place, though, as things turned out, along rather different lines. Carnegie, B. F. Jones, and a few other Pittsburgh businessmen, none of whom seems to have been suffering very much, built cottages and the summer trade flourished. Every passenger train bound east or west stopped there. Well-to-do families from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia arrived for summer stays of several weeks.
Jackson meanwhile had set down the fundamentals of his philosophy along with a detailed natural history of the Allegheny highlands in a book called The Mountain. He borrowed heavily from Wordsworth and Thoreau, and, in his own way, did about as much as anyone to sum up the wild beauty of the area. Also, in his spare time, he tended bar at the hotel and would be remembered for years after for the two jars he kept prominently displayed on one shelf, flanked on either side by whiskey bottles. In each jar, preserved in alcohol, was a human stomach. One had belonged to a man who had died a natural death, and was, according to all who saw it, an exceedingly unappetizing sight. But it was, nonetheless, an improvement over its companion piece, which, according to its label, had belonged to a man who had died of delirium tremens. When setting out drinks, the doctor seldom failed to call attention to his display. The result was that his bar became the best patronized of any for miles about. Regular customers grew quite attached to the jars; word of them spread far, and along with the iron springs, they appear to have been a major attraction at Cresson for several years.
Jackson served in the war; then, in 1865, despite all his good life on the mountain, he died at the age of fifty.
By 1881, to accommodate the growing trade, the railroad cleared space in a maple grove and built another hotel, The Mountain House, which, with its endless thick-carpeted halls, its many towers and flowing stairways, was easily the grandes
t piece of architecture in Cambria County.
Carnegie’s house, only a short distance from the hotel, was his only real home in Pennsylvania by that time. Though no one held more sway in Pittsburgh, he had not lived there for nearly twenty years. He visited often, and was front-page news when he did, but the rest of the time he was either in New York, Scotland, or at Cresson. He loved Cresson and talked up its charms with great vigor, which is perhaps not surprising for a Scot who had been brought up on Burns and had learned to quote him before he had learned to read. (“My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;/ My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.”) He courted his young wife there in the summer of 1886. (“A.C. walked home with me in the starlight…” she wrote in her diary at Cresson. “Such wonderful happiness…the happiest day of my life.”) He also very nearly died there of typhoid later that fall; and his mother, who took sick at the same time and lay in the next room down the hall, did die there on November 10. He entertained his distinguished friends at Cresson (Matthew Arnold had stopped over in 1883), and he managed, as was his pleasure, to keep his mind free and above the petty preoccupations of the steel business.
As one admiring writer of the period explained it: “All other iron and steel magnates, with the exception of Carnegie, lived in Pittsburgh and were swayed constantly by the local gossip, by the labour troubles, and by the rumours of competition and low prices that floated from office to office. To-day they were elated; tomorrow they were depressed. To-day they bought; to-morrow they sold. Carnegie, on the other hand, deliberately placed himself where these little ups and downs were unnoticed…. the news that Coleman had quarrelled with Shinn, or that coke-drawers wanted five cents a day more, was of small consequence. One thing he knew—that civilisation needed steel and was able to pay for it. All else was not worth troubling about.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 243