As he and his companion neared the far end, he was astonished to discover that they were rowing over the top of a four-strand barbed-wire fence which stood well back from the normal shore line. Then, rowing against the strong current, they proceeded to cover another hundred yards or more across what was normally a cow pasture. They passed by the place where Muddy Run emptied into the lake and went on to South Fork Creek, which Parke described as “a perfect torrent, sweeping through the woods in the most direct course, scarcely following its natural bed, and stripping branches and leaves from the trees five and six feet from the ground.”
The two of them pulled their boat onto what seemed the driest spot in sight and started up along the creek by foot. For half a mile the woods boiled with water. The trees dripped water, their drenched trunks black against the mist. The very air itself seemed better than half water.
When they returned for their boat, they found that the lake had come up enough in that short time to set it slightly adrift. From there they struck out straight for the clubhouse. From what he had seen, Parke knew that the situation at the dam must be growing very serious and that an appreciable letup in the volume of water pouring into the lake was most unlikely.
As near as he could tell, the lake was rising about an inch every ten minutes. If this were so, it would be only a matter of hours until the water started over the top of the dam, unless something could be done to release more water than the spillway was handling.
At the clubhouse Parke was told that he was needed at the dam immediately. He went to the stable for his horse and within minutes was galloping off through the cold rain.
There were close to fifty people at the dam when he came riding out of the woods. There was a clump of bystanders, South Fork men and boys mostly, under the trees over at the far side, next to the spillway. Along the road that crossed over the dam itself, a dozen or so of the Italian sewer diggers were working with picks and shovels, trying, without much success, to throw up a small ridge of earth to heighten the dam. Bill Showers, Colonel Unger’s hired man, was also making little progress with a horse and plow. Despite all the rain, the road was so hard packed that thus far they had managed to make only a slight strip of loose earth across the center of the dam hardly more than a foot high.
At the center of the dam the water level was only two feet or so from the top.
At the west end another ten or twelve men were trying to cut a new spillway through the tough shale of the hillside but were able to dig down no more than about knee-deep, and the width of their trench was only two feet or so.
Also among the onlookers were several of the clubmen who had come up from Pittsburgh for the Memorial Day weekend. But the man who was directing things, and deciding what ought to be done as the water advanced steadily toward the crest, was Colonel Elias J. Unger, who had retired from business in Pittsburgh the year before and had only recently been named the club’s president and over-all manager. He was living at the lake the year around now, in a modest farmhouse just beyond the spillway.
The Colonel had started life on another farm in Dauphin County, in the eastern part of the state. His father was a Pennsylvania German, as was his mother, who came from the big and well-known Eisenhower family. At twenty he got a job on the railroad and managed to work himself up from brakeman to conductor to superintendent of the Pennsylvania’s hotels, from Pittsburgh to Jersey City, including the one at Cresson, where he was manager for a time and so got to know Carnegie and the others.
About the time the South Fork club was being organized, he had gone into the hotel business on his own in Pittsburgh and made even more of a name for himself. By 1888 he was well enough situated to buy the place on Lake Conemaugh and settle down to a quiet retirement in a glorious setting where there was also the added interest of a not very taxing job to keep him occupied, plus, in the summer months at least, the chance to keep up with his Pittsburgh friendships.
Unger had come a long way from Dauphin County. But even so, socially and financially, he was a noticeable cut below the other members of the South Fork fishing and hunting organization. His experience in hotel management, it would appear, had something to do with his position in the club.
The Colonel had returned home only the night before, after visiting friends in Harrisburg. When he got out of bed that morning at six, it looked to him, he later said, as though the whole valley below was under water, and he was baffled as to what it all meant. He put on his gum coat and boots and walked down the hill in front of the house, crossed the wooden bridge over the spillway and walked out onto the dam, where he began taking measurements of the rising water.
About eight thirty Unger’s caretaker over at the club grounds, a man by the name of Boyer, came by in a spring wagon with D. W. C. Bidwell, who was on his way to South Fork intending to catch the 9:15 train to Pittsburgh. Bidwell, who evidently had had enough of the soaking weekend at the lake, stopped to ask Unger how things were going.
“Serious,” answered Unger, who later that morning was heard to say that if the dam survived the day, he would see that major changes were made to insure that this sort of thing never happened again.
When Boyer got back from South Fork, which was sometime near ten, Unger sent him off to bring the Italian work crew down to the dam. He had decided to try digging another spillway at the western end, where he thought the hillside would be solid enough to keep the water from cutting through it too rapidly. There was brief disagreement over the idea, with some of the men protesting that the water would rip through any new wasteway so fast that the dam would quickly fail.
“It won’t matter much,” Unger said, “it will be ruined anyhow if I can’t get rid of this water.”
When it became clear that even the shallowest sort of ditch could barely be cut through the rocky hillside, Unger then set several of his men to work trying to clear away the debris which by now was clogging the iron fish screens in the main spillway and seriously reducing its capacity.
Among the bystanders taking all this in was a small fourteen-year-old boy with the big name of U. Ed Schwartzentruver, who, with some of his friends, had been there all morning in the rain watching the excitement. Seventy-six years later, sitting on his porch on Grant Street in South Fork, not quite ninety and nearly blind, he would talk about what he had seen that morning as though it had happened the day before.
“When this high water come down, there was all kinds of debris, stumps, pieces of logs, and underbrush and it started to jam up those screens under the bridge. The bridge was well constructed of heavy timber. There was a man named Bucannon up there, John Bucannon, who lived in South Fork. Well he kept telling Colonel Unger to tear out that bridge and pull out that big iron screen.
“But Colonel Unger wouldn’t do it. And then when he said he would do it, it was too late. The screens wouldn’t budge, they were so jammed in by all that debris.”
When John Parke came up onto the dam on horseback, he did what he could to exhort Unger’s men to dig harder and faster, riding back and forth along the breast, shouting orders and moving men from one place to another when he thought it would do some good. But by eleven o’clock it was apparent to everyone that the lake was still advancing as fast as ever before. In fact, by eleven, the water was about level with the top of the dam and had already started to eat into what little had been thrown up by the plow and shovels. On the outer face, near the base of the dam, it looked as though several serious leaks had developed.
At this point, Colonel Unger decided that perhaps something ought to be done to warn the people in the valley below. The only way was to send a man down. There was a telephone line from the clubhouse to South Fork, but it was used only during the summer season and had not as yet been put in working order.
With all the rain there had been, the road to South Fork was in very bad shape, but John Parke made the ride in about ten minutes. Parke’s relative youth, and the fact that he was not well known in the area, may account for the marginal succes
s of his mission.
Furthermore, the first people to come from the dam to South Fork that morning, Boyer and Bidwell, had already told everyone that there was no danger of the water running over the top. So when Parke came splashing up Railroad Street with his warning, the news was both unexpected and perhaps seemed somewhat questionable. According to testimony made later by Bidwell, Parke stopped in front of George Stineman’s supply store, which was across the street from the depot, and where a small crowd had gathered.
“I saw him come down there,” Bidwell said, “and make a statement to the people standing about that the water was then running over the top of the dam, and there was very great danger of it giving way.” Parke also told two men to go to the railroad’s telegraph tower next to the depot and tell the operator to alert Johnstown. But soon after they left, Bidwell, according to one witness, began telling everyone that there was really nothing to get excited about.
The operator at South Fork that Friday morning was Miss Emma Ehrenfeld. She had come on duty at seven o’clock. It was about noon, she would later estimate, that a man came up into the tower “very much excited.”
“Notify Johnstown right away about the dam,” he said. “It’s raising very fast and there’s danger of the reservoir breaking.”
“Who told you all this?” she asked.
“There’s a man came from the lake,” he said.
Emma was not quite sure how much to believe of his story. She had seen the man around town and thought his name was Wertzengreist, though she was uncertain about that too. But she said later, “He is a man that people generally don’t have much confidence in, and for that reason, I scarcely knew what to do under the circumstances.”
She was also hampered by the fact that her lines west were open only as far as the next tower, four miles down the river at Mineral Point. Beyond Mineral Point there seemed to be a break somewhere and so she had no direct contact with Johnstown.
The operator at Mineral Point, W. H. Pickerell, was an old hand along the Little Conemaugh, having been there at that same tower for some fifteen years. Emma decided to “talk” it over with him on the one good wire she had. She tapped out her problem and waited for an answer. Pickerell told her that the break to the west was caused by the poles falling into the river, and that though he had no way of getting Johnstown, he thought “it was a thing that there oughtn’t to be any risks taken on.” He said he would take the message and send it on to East Conemaugh by foot if someone should happen along the tracks below his tower.
So the two of them worked out a message addressed to the yardmaster at Conemaugh and to Robert Pitcairn in Pittsburgh.
“I wrote the message up,” Pickerell declared weeks after, “and repeated it to her and asked her if that would do, and she said that was splendid—to send it that way. I doubled the message and waited and waited.”
After a while a trackman came by. He had been sent from East Conemaugh to flag a landslide at Buttermilk Falls, to the west of Pickerell’s tower. Pickerell gave him the folded message and sent him on his way back down the tracks. At Buttermilk Falls, the man, whose name was William Reichard, turned the message over to his boss, the foreman of the division, L. L. Rusher, who set out for East Conemaugh after telling Reichard to go on back up to Mineral Point, in case there should be any more messages.
As it turned out, Rusher had only to go as far as what was known as “AO” tower, which was about a mile and half from Mineral Point and better than a mile upriver from East Conemaugh. From “AO” tower west the lines were still clear. Rusher gave the message to operator R. W, Shade, who sent it on immediately. And it was his message which was received by J. C. Walkinshaw at East Conemaugh and by agent Deckert in Johnstown sometime between noon and one o’clock.
In Pittsburgh, operator Charles Culp, at the Union depot later said he was the one who had received the message there and that he took it right over “and laid it on Mr. Pitcairn’s table in front of him.” Within an hour Robert Pitcairn, who had a special interest in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad, was sitting in his private railroad car on his way to Johnstown.
But the telegram drafted by operator Pickerell and Emma Ehrenfeld was only the first of three warnings sent down the valley by way of the Pennsylvania’s telegraph system.
About twelve thirty, or sometime very shortly after John Parke reined up in front of Stineman’s store, another rider was sent from South Fork to check the condition of the dam. His name was Dan Siebert. He worked for J. P. Wilson, who was superintendent of the Argyle Coal Company in South Fork and an old friend of Robert Pitcairn’s. Wilson had been asked by Pitcairn some three years earlier to notify him at once if ever he saw any signs of danger at the dam.
Siebert borrowed Wilson’s horse and was up and back from the dam inside of twenty-five minutes. He had stayed only long enough to see that near the center of the dam a glassy sheet of water, fifty to sixty feet wide, had started over the top. But Siebert did not seem especially concerned over what he had seen. He was, in fact, according to one witness, “perfectly cool about it.”
Wilson, however, on hearing Siebert’s report, turned to C. P. Dougherty, the Pennsylvania’s ticket agent in South Fork, and asked him if he did not think that Mr. Pitcairn should be notified. When Dougherty hesitated, saying there was trouble with the wires downriver, Wilson took it to mean that Dougherty was reluctant to assume the responsibility of such a message and told him to sign his, Wilson’s, name.
Whereupon Dougherty went over to the tower, taking along another operator, Elmer Paul, who was more experienced than Miss Ehrenfeld and who Dougherty thought might have better luck getting a circuit. Paul tried the wire for a few minutes but without success.
So again a message was sent as far as Mineral Point, where it was received at 1:52 by operator Pickerell, who gave it to William Reichard, who walked it down the tracks to “AO” tower. From there it was put on the wire to East Conemaugh, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. The message read:
SOUTH FORK, MAY 31, 1889
R.P. O.D. VIA MP & AO
THE WATER IS RUNNING OVER THE BREAST OF LAKE DAM, IN CENTER AND WEST SIDE AND IS BECOMING DANGEROUS.
C. P. DOUGHERTY
It was no more than thirty minutes later that J. P. Wilson came up to the tower himself to have Emma Ehrenfeld send still another warning. The rain was beating down terribly hard by then, and outside they could see the water of the Little Conemaugh and South Fork Creek raging across the flats just below the station. Over near Lake Street, South Fork Creek had flooded the first floors of several houses and the aspens along the banks were whipping about wildly in the wind.
Wilson had just heard that a young South Fork boy named John Baker had ridden down from the lake and said that the water had now cut a notch in the center of the dam. Without taking time to write anything down, Wilson dictated a message to Pitcairn which Emma Ehrenfeld put right on the wire.
SOUTH FORK, MAY 31, 1889
R.P.
OD
THE DAM IS BECOMING DANGEROUS AND MAY POSSIBLY GO.
J. P. WILSON
Wilson waited in the tower long enough to be sure the message had gotten at least as far as Mineral Point; then he warned Miss Ehrenfeld to be on the lookout up South Fork Creek and went out the door
The time was 2:25. By 2:33 the message had reached East Conemaugh. For some unknown reason, Pickerell this time had been able to get a circuit. Apparently, a wire that had fallen into the river lifted out somehow, and as Pickerell said, “All at once the wire came all right.”
The message was through to East Conemaugh in a matter of minutes, and on to Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Agent Deckert in Johnstown would later state that he had received this particular message sometime near 2:45. He also concluded upon reading it that this time he had best telephone its contents across the way to Hettie Ogle, who ran the central telephone switchboard and Western Union office, just across the river at the corner of Washington and Wa
lnut.
Mrs. Hettie Ogle was a Civil War widow who had been with Western Union for some twenty-eight years. At one o’clock the rising water had forced her to move, with her daughter, Minnie, to the second floor of the two-story frame building. Sometime near three she notified her Pittsburgh office of the condition of the dam as reported by Deckert and said that that would be her last message, meaning that the rising water was about to ground her wires. Then she put through a call to the Tribune, where editor Swank was still keeping up his running account of the day’s events.
“At three o’clock,” he wrote, “the town sat down with its hands in its pockets to make the best of a very dreary situation. All that had got out of reach of the flood that could, and there was nothing to do but wait; and what impatient waiting it was anyone who has ever been penned in by a flood and has watched the water rising, and night coming on, can imagine….”
He described how the Stony Creek carried a live cow down from some point above Moxham and how she struck against a pier of the dislodged Poplar Street Bridge, where she managed to get a foothold for a while but finally, making a misstep, fell into the current and was carried off.
“At 3:15 the Central Telephone office called the Tribune up to say it had been informed by Agent Deckert, of the Pennsylvania Railroad freight station, that the South Fork Reservoir was getting worse all the time and that the danger of its breaking was increasing momentarily. It is idle to speculate what would be the result if this tremendous body of water—three miles long, a mile wide in places, and sixty feet deep at the breast at its normal stage—should be thrown into the already submerged Valley of the Conemaugh.”
But by 3:15 Lake Conemaugh was already on its way to Johnstown.
–3–
When John Parke had arrived back at the dam from his dash to South Fork, he was confident that his warning had been sent on down the valley. Along the way from South Fork he had passed two men struggling through the mud with a sewing machine, and one of them shouted to him, “We got the sewing machine out, if nothing else,” which Parke took to be a very good sign. At the dam he found the water had already started sliding over the top, at the center, right above where the old culvert had been. It had taken no time for the water to wash across the little earth ridge that had been thrown up. Now, as he rode his horse out along the breast, the water crossing over the road there was a good six inches deep and getting stronger every minute. Within minutes the sheet of water was a hundred yards wide. But it was all concentrated at the center, clearly illustrating, Parke noted, that the dam dished a little.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 249