The situation for property holders in the lower part of town was growing serious, Rose and Dibert agreed. This business of flooded cellars every spring had to be corrected. The solution, as they saw it, was to call a meeting to protest the way the Cambria Iron Company had been filling in the riverbanks next to the mills below town. They recalled that town ordinances had fixed the width of the Stony Creek at 175 feet and the Little Conemaugh at 110 feet. This meant that the combined width of the two was 285 feet; but the Conemaugh, which had to carry all the water from both of them, was now less than 200 feet wide near the mills. Obviously, the rivers were bound to back up when flash floods hit, and obviously the Cambria Iron Company would have to restore the riverbed to its original width. With that settled, the two friends parted.
Rose went directly home, where he found the water now so deep that he was unable to get near his front door. He sent young Forest with the team to a nearby hillside while he and Percy assembled a makeshift raft and floated over to the back porch. Once inside, like nearly everyone else in town, they busied themselves taking up carpets and furniture. Rose also “marked with sadness” that the slowly rising water “with its muddy freight” had already ruined his new wallpaper.
Then everyone moved upstairs where the morning took on the air of a family picnic. Forest had been unable to get back to the house after leaving the horses but had signaled from a window across the street that he was high and dry with the Fishers.
Horace Rose called back and forth to Squire Fisher and joked about their troubles while his wife and the others got a fire going in the grate and made some coffee. After a bit Rose got his rifle, went up to the attic, propped himself in a window, and whiled away the time shooting at rats struggling along the wall of a stable in the adjoining lot.
And so the morning passed on into afternoon; there was nothing much to do but wait it out and make the best of what, after all, was not such an unpleasant situation.
There were hundreds of other families, however, who had seen enough. They began moving out, wading through the streets with bundles of clothing and food precariously balanced on rude rafts, or jammed into half-submerged spring wagons. Here and there a lone rowboat pushed up to a front porch or window ledge to make a clumsy, noisy rescue of women and grandfathers, dogs, cats, and children.
Some people were simply heading for higher ground, without any particular place in mind; others were going to the homes of friends or relatives where they hoped there might not be quite so much water, and where, come nightfall, there might be electricity and a dry kitchen.
A few families went over to the big hotels in the center of town, thinking they would be the safest places of all to ride out the storm. Quite a good many, wherever their destination, went a little sheepishly, dreading the looks and the kidding they would get when they came back home again.
The water by now, from one end of town to the other, was anywhere from two to ten feet deep. It was already higher than the ‘87 flood, making it, by noon at least, Johnstown’s worst flood on record. The Gautier works had closed down at ten, when Fred Krebs, the manager, was reminded by one of the men that the huge barbed-wire plant stood on fill that had been dumped into the old canal basin, and that once upon a time there had been four feet of water right where they were standing. At eleven, or soon after, a log boom burst up the Stony Creek and sent a wild rush of logs stampeding through the valley until they crashed into the stone bridge below town and jammed in among the massive arches.
Not very long after that the Stony Creek ripped out the Poplar Street Bridge; then, within the hour, the Cambria City Bridge went. At St. John’s Catholic Church, which stood far uptown at Jackson and Locust, and so, presumably, well beyond reach of spring floods, the water was so deep that the funeral of Mrs. Mary McNally had to be postponed midway through the service and the casket left in the church.
Worst of all, and unlike any other flood in Johnstown’s history, there had been a tragic death. A teamster named Joseph Ross, a father of four children, had been drowned when he fell into a flooded excavation while helping evacuate a stranded family.
Along Main Street, shopkeepers were working feverishly to move their goods out of reach of the water. In his second-floor office overlooking Franklin and Main, George T. Swank, the cantankerous editor and proprietor of the Tribune, began working on what he planned to be a running log of the day’s events, with the intention of publishing it in the next edition, whenever that might be.
“As we write at noon,” he put down, “Johnstown is again under water, and all about us the tide is rising. Wagons for hours have been passing along the streets carrying people from submerged points to places of safety…From seven o’clock on the water rose. People who were glad they ‘didn’t live downtown’ began to wish they didn’t live in town at all. On the water crept, and on, up one street and out the other…Eighteen inches an hour the Stony Creek rose for a time, and the Conemaugh about as rapidly.”
On the street below his window the current, coming across from the Stony Creek, was rushing by at an estimated six miles an hour.
Across Main, and three doors down Franklin, the Reverend H. L. Chapman was having a slightly unnerving day.
After an early breakfast he had retired to his study to work on his sermon for Sunday. The text he had selected was “But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?” He had barely begun when he was interrupted by the door-bell. Opening the front door, he found his wife’s cousin, Mrs. A. D. Brinker, standing on the porch looking terribly frightened.
She had crossed the park from her home on the other side. She asked Chapman if he had heard about the high water downtown. He said he had not and that he did not think there would be much of a flood.
“Johnstown is going to be destroyed today,” she said, and then told him that the reservoir would break and all would be swept away.
Chapman was so incredulous he almost laughed in her face, and would have had she not looked so pitifully terror-stricken. It was also not the first time Mrs. Brinker had made just such a forecast.
“Well, Sister Brinker, you have been fearing this for years,” Chapman said with patience, “and it has never yet happened, and I don’t think there is much danger.”
He invited her to step in and stay with them until after the flood had passed, an invitation she gladly accepted, saying that her husband had insisted on staying home, to “hold the fort” as he had put it.
Later, a young student friend named Parker dropped by to see if the Chapmans needed help moving their furniture, but the Reverend told him he expected no trouble, as the new parsonage had a higher foundation than other houses. But the young man stayed on nonetheless.
About noon Chapman happened to look out the window long enough to see one of the town’s most dignified figures standing in the street in water up to his waist. It was Cyrus Elder, who along with being chief counsel for the Iron Company was now Johnstown’s one and only member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, having acquired the Morrell memberships at the time of the old Quaker’s death.
Chapman was puzzled by the whole thing and hurried onto the porch to see what he could do. Elder, though a most solid citizen, seems also to have had a sense of humor.
“Doctor,” he called, “have you any fishing tackle?”
Chapman answered that he thought he had.
“Well,” said Elder, “I was in a skiff and it upset and left me here, and I am waiting for a man who has gone after a horse, to take me out, and I might put in my time fishing.”
When the man and horse returned, the hefty Elder, try as he would, was unable to get up on the animal’s slippery back. So the rider went off again and returned next with a wagon. This time they had better luck and started off down Main toward Elder’s home on Walnut Street but had to turn back and head uptown for Elder’s brother’s house; all of which was duly noted with amusement from the window of the Tribune by George Swank, who was also Elder’s brother-
in-law.
Elder had arrived back in Johnstown from Chicago just that morning and had been trying for hours to get home to his wife and daughter. From the station platform he had been able to look right across at his house, where, on the front porch, the two women were waving their handkerchiefs at him. They had gestured back and forth about the water and how he might get home, but from then on he had made little progress.
At midday the Chapmans and their guests sat down to dinner, but Mrs. Brinker was still too unstrung to eat anything. Dinner over, they moved to the study, where they sat quietly chatting beside the gas fire. But the Reverend soon grew impatient with the comings and goings of Lizzie Swing, the Chapmans German servant girl, who kept tramping past the study door on her way from the cellar to the attic with armloads of food.
“Why does she do that?” Chapman asked. He was genuinely puzzled by the girl’s obvious state of nerves, since she understood almost no English. The Reverend was having trouble maintaining an intelligent sense of domestic calm.
The train which returned Cyrus Elder to Johnstown had left Chicago the day before at three in the afternoon. It was one of two sections of the Day Express, which had pulled out of Pittsburgh that morning, on time, at 8:10. The two trains arrived at Johnstown about 10:15, and again on time, but were held there for a half-hour or so. The eastbound track on up the valley had washed out. Not until a local mail train came through were the two sections given orders to follow it to East Conemaugh, running east on the westbound track.
During the wait at Johnstown, passengers on board watched in fascination the struggles of the flooded city. They waved back and forth to families hanging out of upstairs windows. Some got out for a few minutes and joined the crowds on the station platform and along the near enbankment to watch the railroad crew that was trying to dislodge the logs and drift from the stone bridge. When the trains began moving again, very slowly, around the blind corner of Prospect Hill and on to the East Conemaugh yards two miles ahead, the passengers could see the ugly yellow-brown surge of the Little Conemaugh to their right, now very near their rain-streaked windows. More and more debris swept by and telegraph poles swayed precariously in the strong wind.
The run to East Conemaugh took about ten minutes, with the mail train in the lead, followed by the first and second Day Express, in that order. At East Conemaugh all trains were stopped and held for further orders. There was trouble up the line at Lilly. Bear Run had risen more than six feet, burst over its banks, and washed out a quarter of a mile of track. Nothing could move east or west. Two earlier eastbound trains, the Chicago Limited and a freight from Derry, had gotten as far as South Fork, where now they too were being held.
The first section of the Day Express was made up of seven cars—five coaches, a baggage car, and one Pullman. On board were some 90 passengers plus crew. The second section had three sleepers, one baggage and two mail cars, and perhaps 50 passengers and crew. The mail train had only three cars, one for the mail, plus two coaches. Most of its passengers were members of the Night Off company, who were on their way to Altoona for their next performance.
East Conemaugh was the main marshaling yard for Johnstown. Eastbound trains picked up their “helpers” there, the extra engines for the climb over the mountain. There was a huge sixteen-stall roundhouse, water towers, four main tracks, sidings, sheds, repair shops, coal tipples, dozens of locomotives, rolling stock of every description. So that the trains now detained there in the driving rain were only part of a whole concentration of equipment set along a broad flat where the Little Conemaugh makes a sweeping curve between the hills.
For the people of the little town set just back from the yards, the morning was turning into a fine show. The river was still within its banks but rising fast. There was every sign that the wooden bridge above the station was about to wash out, and rain or no rain, most of the town had gathered along the riverbank to see it happen.
Sometime between noon and one o’clock a telegraph message came into the East Conemaugh dispatcher’s tower from the next tower up the valley to the east. The message was directed to the yardmaster at East Conemaugh, J. C. Walkinshaw, and to the head of the entire division, Mr. Robert Pitcairn, at Pittsburgh. No one would later recall at exactly what moment the message arrived, and numerous people who should have seen it later claimed that they never did. Nor was there ever agreement on its precise wording, but the consensus was that the message said something close to this:
SOUTH FORK DAM IS LIABLE TO BREAK: NOTIFY THE
PEOPLE OF JOHNSTOWN TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST.
It was signed simply “Operator.”
At Johnstown the message was received at the telegraph office at the depot only a few minutes later. The freight agent, Frank Deckert, was told it had come in; he glanced at it, but he did not stop to read it. As he said later, he knew that “it was in regard to the dam; that there was some danger of it breaking.” But it created no alarm in his mind. He had heard such warnings before. When he passed the word along to the few people who happened to be about the station, their response was the same as his, with only one or two exceptions. Two men who were shown the message by Charles Moore, the assistant ticket agent, read it and laughed out loud.
Deckert made no further effort to spread the warning. He did not move his family from their home just down from the station, nor did he bother to send the message over to the central part of town.
–2–
No one on the mountain could remember there ever being a night like it.
John Lovett, who was seventy-one and had a sawmill on South Fork Creek a quarter of a mile from the head of Lake Conemaugh, said it was the hardest rain he had ever heard. He could not see it, he said, but he could hear it all right, and the creeks got so vicious they carried off logs that had been on his place for forty years. William Hank and Sam Peblin, who had farms farther up the mountain, at the headwaters of South Fork Creek, said much the same thing. Sylvester Reynolds, another farmer, reported that Otto Run, which feeds into Yellow Run, was running four feet deep, compared to its normal depth of two inches. F. N. George, Justice of the Peace at Lilly, said he had never known a cloudburst like it in fifty years. At Wilmore, H. W. Plotner, a druggist who was nearly seventy, said he could recall no worse storm. Dan Sipe, who owned the flour mill on the Little Conemaugh at Summerhill, Sheriff George Stineman, the coal operator at South Fork, and Mrs. Leap, who kept the general store at Bens Creek, all agreed it was the mightiest downpour and the highest water ever in their memories.
There were also “weird and unnatural occurrences” reported. One family by the name of Heidenfelter later described how they had been suddenly awakened and badly frightened by a “rumbling, roaring sound” that seemed to come from some indefinable object not far from their house. It was then followed by a terrific downpour, which, according to Mrs. Heidenfelter, sounded as if a gigantic tank had opened at the bottom and all the water dumped out at once.
“Indeed I thought the last day had come,” she later told a newspaper reporter. “I never heard anything like it in my life. I wanted my husband to get up and see what the matter was, but it was dark and he could have done no good. In the morning, as soon as we could see, the fields were covered with water four or five feet deep…. People say the noise we heard was a waterspout, but I’ve never seen one and don’t know how they act.”
Apparently the storm did tear big holes in the ground near the Heidenfelter farm, and other families close by the lake reported hearing sounds much like thunder but which they were certain were not thunder.
In any case it was a wild night on the mountain, and when morning came virtually every farm in the area had swamped cellars and pastures. Freshly plowed fields were sliced through with gullies that carried water as much as three feet deep. Acres of winter wheat and corn planted a few weeks earlier had been washed away. Every backwoods road had turned into a creek; every little mountain spring, run, creek, and stream was on a rampage. The earth could not absorb any more
water.
It was about six thirty that morning when young John Parke awoke in his high-ceilinged room upstairs at the clubhouse on the shore of Lake Conemaugh. He had awakened once before, about an hour earlier, and had heard the rain hammering against the big frame building, but thinking nothing of it, had dropped off to sleep again. Now, outside his window, there was little to be seen but a heavy, white mist that had closed down over the trees and water.
Parke dressed quickly, went downstairs, crossed through the main living room, out the porch door into the cold morning, where, for the first time, he heard what he would later describe as a “terrible roaring as of a cataract” coming from the head of the lake to the south. He also noticed that during the night the lake had risen what looked to be perhaps two feet. Yesterday the water had been at its usual level, which, he reckoned, was about four to six feet below the crest of the dam. Now, it might be no more than two or three feet from the crest. What he could not tell was how much water was still coming in, and that he knew would be the crucial factor for the next several hours. But the sound from the head of the lake was far from encouraging.
He went inside again, had breakfast, then, along with a young workman who had been helping on the sewer project, he got hold of a rowboat and started off to have a look at the incoming creeks.
“I found that the upper one-quarter of the lake was thickly covered with debris, logs, slabs from sawmill, plank, etc.,” he wrote afterward, “but this matter was scarcely moving on the lake, and what movement there was, carried it into an arm or eddy in the lake, caused by the force of the two streams flowing in and forming a stream for a long distance out into the lake.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 248