by Tom McCarthy
En passant, to show the power of the voluminous flood, these incidents of the awful day are related:
The morning of June 6, the wreck of an express train was unearthed. The baggage of Miss Annie Chism of Nashville, Tennessee, was found. She was a missionary on her way to Brazil for the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Church.
Among her effects was a Bible, and in it was a message to be filed at Altoona and addressed to the Methodist concern at No. 20 East Tenth Street, New York, announcing that she was on the train. Her watch, some money, and a Greek Testament were also found. It is evident that many lives were lost on this train, more than at first supposed.
The whole train affair is still a mystery. At least the passengers have not so far been found and located. The body of a nicely dressed lady was found yesterday which was so decomposed as to be unrecognizable. The effects of Miss Chism were sent to Altoona.
There was a small riot at the labor camp one morning on account of a lack of food and of utensils for cooking. Mr. Flinn, who is at the head of the labor bureau, told the men it was impossible to get things down from the railroad but that this would be remedied as soon as possible. He also said that they did not want men who expected to live on the fat of the land and that this was principally a work of charity, even though the men were paid for their work.
A few minutes after this, as Mr. Flinn was drinking some black coffee and eating some hard crackers and cheese, two workmen came up to him and commenced to complain because they did not have soup and meat. This enraged Mr. Flinn, and after telling them that he thought he was used to as good as they were, he ordered the guards to take the men out of town and not permit them to come back again. This seemed to have the desired effect, and there was no more trouble.
It had been known for several days that the Rev. J. A. Ranney and the parents of Mrs. Charles Harly of Delhi, Indiana, were on one of the ill-fated trains overtaken by the flood in Conemaugh Valley, and no tidings could be received from them.
Word comes that Mr. Ranney has arrived home. He telegraphs,
Mrs. Ranney and I were on the train at Conemaugh when the flood came. The occupants of our car rushed for the door, where Mrs. Ranney and I became separated. She was one of the first to jump, and I saw her run and disappear behind the houses in sight. Before I could get out, the deluge was too high, and with a number I remained in the car. Our car was lifted up and dashed against a car loaded with stone and was badly wrecked, but most of the occupants were saved. As far as I know, all who jumped from the car lost their lives. The rest of the train was swept away. I searched for days for Mrs. Ranney and could find no trace of her. I think she perished. The mind cannot conceive the awful sight presented when we first saw the danger. The approaching wall of water looked like Niagara, and huge engines were caught up and whirled away as if they were mere wheelbarrows.
Here is another telegram: “Mrs. Susan Stonebraker with her three children arrived at Camden Station, Baltimore, Maryland, from Johnstown this afternoon and was met by her brothers.
“We lived at Millville, just across the stream from Johnstown,” she said.
When the water rose higher and higher, we sought safety at a neighbor’s. Soon after, the water struck us with full force, and I am sure some of the occupants of the house were drowned. Soon after, we all took planks and floated down the stream, as the waters rose so high in the house that we thought it unsafe to remain. I saw babies in cradles floating along, and one floated down as far as Allegheny City, about eighty miles, where it was rescued. Our house was the first to be dashed against the stone bridge, and immediately after, we were swept against it on our boards. I must have seen at least a thousand persons drowned. We stayed on the wreck from 3:30 on Friday afternoon until after 3 on Saturday morning, when we were rescued. My husband, Joseph H. Stonebraker, had several ribs broken and is now in the hospital. Before we were rescued, the wreck took fire, and had we remained a short time longer, we would have been lost.
Word comes from Steubenville, Ohio, to this effect: Mrs. Frank Davis and her two children have arrived home from Johnstown with the body of her husband, who was employed there. Mrs. Davis and her children went to visit him last week and stayed at the house of a friend named Hamilton, where Davis boarded. During Friday water came into the house, and all were busy moving things to the upper floors. When the deluge came, they were in the third story, and the house was carried against a brick block and was partly broken up but stuck fast.
Davis’s foot got crushed in between the timbers, and he was held fast. Every effort was made to release him but to no avail. With one child clinging to her neck and the babe on her shoulders, Mrs. Davis worked desperately, but the fastened foot could not be extricated, and the water continued to rise. How this woman must have suffered! Pangs of the most horrible death couldn’t be worse. Men dived down into water to see what held the foot. The water reached Davis’s mouth, and he held back his head.
Mrs. Davis laid down her babe in the water and pulled with renewed energy. The water came up to her husband’s nose, and while with brave energy she attempted to rescue, she never lost sight of her children, who at times she held above her head to keep them from drowning. Then the roof was taken off the building, the floor lifted up and floated down against another building, where it lodged, and Mrs. Davis and her children were rescued.
Other scenes of a like nature could be told, and as usual in such cases, there was a hero of heroes present, a self-sacrificing young man, who nearly lost his own life in his efforts to save those of his fellows:
Hundreds of lives were saved by this second Paul Revere, by name John G. Parke, and hundreds more would probably have escaped violent death if the warning had been heeded. It is not exaggeration to call young Parke a hero. He is an engineer. He saw that the South Fork dam must go, and jumping into the saddle, he dashed down the valley at terrific speed, shouting out his warning: “The dam! The dam is breaking. Run for your lives!” When he arrived at South Fork station, Parke sent a telegraphic message to Johnstown, two miles below, warning the inhabitants of the town of the coming disaster. He sent his message fully an hour before the flood came. When the water was almost upon him, Parke fled to the mountains.
Too modest to speak of his actions in this regard, young Mr. Parke was prevailed upon to tell what he knew about the breaking of the dam. Said he,
On Thursday night the dam was in perfect condition, and the water was not within seven feet of the top. At that stage the lake is nearly three miles long. It rained very hard Thursday night, I am told, for I slept too soundly myself to hear it, but when I got up Friday morning, I could see there was a flood, for the water was over the drive in front of the clubhouse, and the level of the water in the lake had risen until it was only four feet below the top of the dam. I rode up to the head of the lake and saw that the woods were boiling full of water. South Fork and Muddy Run, which emptied into the lake, were fetching trees, logs, cut timber, and stuff from a sawmill that was up in the woods in that direction. This was about 7:30 o’clock. When I returned, Col. Unger, the president of the club, hired twenty-two Italians, and a number of farmers joined in to work on the dam. Altogether thirty men were at work. A plough was run along the top of the dam, and earth was thrown on the face of the dam to strengthen it. At the same time, a channel was dug on the west end of the dam to make a sluiceway there. There was about three feet of shale rock through which it was possible to cut, but then we struck bedrock that it was impossible to get through without blasting. When we got the channel opened, the water soon scoured down to the bedrock, and a stream thirty feet wide and three feet deep rushed out on that end of the dam, while the weir was letting an enormous quantity on the other end. Notwithstanding these outlets, the water kept rising at the rate of about ten inches an hour.
By 11:30 I had made up my mind it was impossible to save the dam, and getting my horse I galloped down the road to South For
k to warn the people of their danger. The telegraph tower is a mile from the town, and I sent two men there to have messages sent to Johnstown and other points below. I heard that the lady operator fainted when she sent off the news and had to be carried off. The people at South Fork had ample time to get to the high grounds, and they were able to move their furniture, too. In fact, only one person was drowned at South Fork, and he while attempting to fish something from the flood as it rolled by. It was just twelve o’clock when the telegraph messages were sent out, so that the people of Johnstown had over three hours’ warning.
As I rode back to the dam, I expected almost every moment to meet the lake coming down on me, but the dam was still intact, although the water had reached the top. At about one o’clock, I walked over the dam. At that time the water was three inches deep on it, and was gradually eating away the earth on the outer face. As the stream rolled down the outer face, it kept wearing down the edge of the embankment, and I saw it was merely a question of time. I then went up to the clubhouse and got dinner, and when I returned I saw a great deal more of the outer edge of the dam had crumbled away. The dam did not give away. At a rough guess, I should say that there was 60,000,000 tons of water in that lake, and the pressure of that mass of water was increased by floods from two streams pouring into it, but the dam would have stood it could the level of the lake have been kept below the top of the dam. But the friction of the water pouring over the top of the dam gradually wore it away from the outer face until the top became so thin that it gave away.
The break took place at three o’clock. It was about ten feet wide at first and shallow, but now that the flood had made a gap, it grew wider with increased rapidity, and the lake went roaring down the valley. That three miles of water was drained out in forty-five minutes. The downfall of those millions of tons was simply irresistible. Stones from the dam and boulders in the riverbed were carried for miles.
Perhaps the most heartless story in the annals of any city has been told today of this unfortunate place. To charge extortionate prices for food, as many of the people in the surrounding villages did when the hungry survivors asked them for bread, was cruel enough. This is an oft-told tale in the presence of such calamities as this, but probably never before did vampires seek to use such a terrible misfortune as this to ruin the souls, to try and lure the orphans of the valley to the dens of vice.
Supt. Hines, the chairman of the Committee on Transportation, is authority for the story that, for the past two days, two women of Pittsburgh have been here offering homes in that city to young girls who have been left without any protectors. Their object was not suspected at first, but subsequently they were recognized, and it became evident that their intention was to take girls away to their own places of iniquity in the Smoky City. It is not known whether any of the unfortunate maidens fell into the trap, as the two women became frightened and left this scene of desolation. Supt. Hines was terribly angered at this exhibition of utter heartlessness and declared after he had tried in vain to find them that, had he laid his hands on them, they would have had a ducking in the Conemaugh before they got away. It is related here that women of the same class have been seen around the depots in Pittsburgh on the arrival of trains from here, waiting to see if they could not gain possession of the poor victims who were going into the city to begin life anew in a strange place.
Today it is reported that a young lad, Eddie Fisher, has committed suicide after spending a week in brooding over the loss of his entire family and that an unknown woman suddenly became insane in the street and had to be removed to a hospital. It is impossible to verify either of these stories, but they are thought to be true, though no information could be had about them at headquarters.
New stories of incidents of the flood are heard every day and probably will continue to be told for weeks to come, but certainly the most touching of any that have yet been narrated is that of the Frohnheiser family. The father was a well-known workman in the Cambria Iron Works and lived with his wife, two little girls, and a son in a cottage, which was washed away. The mother and elder daughter were lost, but the father managed to crawl from the room with the other two children through a rent made by the flood in the roof. He reached down after his boy and told him to come near to him, but the lad answered, “It is no use, Papa. You can’t save me; I’m too far away. Save Katie; she is near to you.” Now the little girl had her leg broken by being jammed in between some furniture, and she cried, “You can’t save me, Papa, for my leg is caught. Save him, or cut my leg off and get me out.” The boy also asked the father to give him a pistol and he would shoot himself, but just then the house, which had been floating downstream, suddenly struck high ground and fell over on its side. The father landed unhurt, and the two children were thrown out on the hillside. The boy was unhurt, and the little girl is now in the hospital doing quite well.
In order to prevent the spread of the pestilence which is feared, fires were late last night started among the wreckage. Thus, in order to save valuable remaining lives, it has been deemed necessary to destroy by the other fearful element the festering debris, even if the bodies underneath have to be cremated with it. It is the only manner in which the health of the locality can be sustained.
If Johnstown suffered, Cambria City was almost entirely wiped out. The work of repairing the wreck in this place will be short, as the flood did the most of it. Nowhere in all the fifteen-mile course of the fearful torrent was the surface of the earth swept more clean than in that place. Cambria City was a borough organized separately from Johnstown and lying below it on the opposite side of the river. It began just below the railroad bridge and extended for a mile down the river. The Conemaugh below the bridge makes a long curve from the mountains, and a flat a mile long, with a curving front half a mile wide at its widest point, is left. Cambria City was built upon this flat. There were six hundred houses and about three thousand inhabitants. Most of the houses were small-frame buildings very lightly built. There were a few large stores, a small brick brewery, streetcar lines, electric lights, and other substantial improvements above ground.
The plan of the town in a general way was of four broad streets running across the flat lengthwise, with numerous cross streets at right angles. The first wild dash of the flood, when its advance wave was shattered against the bridge, was turned aside into the Cambria Iron Works, across the river from Cambria City. Passing through these from end to end, the outer half of the flat upon which Cambria City was built lay straight before it. The flood with a front of twenty feet high, bristling with all manner of debris, struck straight across the flat, as though the river’s course had always been that way. It cut off the outer two-thirds of the city with a line as true and straight as could have been drawn by a surveyor. On the part over which it swept, there remains standing but one building, the brewery. With this exception, not only the houses and stores but the pavements, sidewalks and curbstones, and the earth beneath for several feet is washed away so that the water mains are laid bare. The pavements were of cinders from the iron works, a bed six inches thick, as hard as stone and with a surface like macadam. Over most of the washed-out portions of the city, not even the broken fragments of these pavements are left. Along the edge of the river, much of the land was made ground built up of these cinders. The mass of them was so great and the surface afforded so little hold for the flood that the land here is two or three feet higher than farther inland, where the ground yielded easier. But even here the water left its mark. Beside the sweeping away of all buildings upon the surface of the land itself, the hard cinder mass is torn, split, and corrugated, as if chiseled and cut by some convulsion of nature.
Of the six hundred houses of Cambria City, nearly four hundred stood upon the part of the flat which the first rush of the flood covered. If all the debris, not only of the houses, but of logs, timber, and other driftwood, that the flood left upon that mile-long shortcut across the bend in the river were piled into a heap, i
t would not make a mass as large as a single one of all the buildings swept away. There are not half a dozen wheelbarrow loads of earth or sand left upon the surface of the flat. The rush of the water left nothing on top except the heavy rocks and stones, and these were tossed about so thickly that they cover the whole surface, distributed as though some volcano had covered the earth with a shower of rocks.
Aside from the few logs and timbers left by the afterwash of the flood, there is nothing remaining upon the outer edge of the flat, including two of the four long streets of the city, except the brewery mentioned before and a grand piano. The water marks on the brewery walls show that the flood reached twenty feet up its sides, and it stood on a little higher ground than the buildings around it at that. Jacob Greener, the owner, with his family and workmen—nine men and two women in all—were caught in the building by the flood. They took refuge in the attic over the storeroom and were saved. The brewery was completely wrecked and will have to be torn down, but the main walls remained standing. The piano was built by Christie & Son, New York, and was numbered 6,609. Its legs are gone, and its cover is missing. The keys seem a little out of order, and two or three of the wires are broken.
Of the two hundred houses that were not swept away by the shortcut of the flood across the flats, there are not half a dozen that are uninjured. Fully half of them are wrecked completely. The value of those that can be repaired would not pay for the cost of removing the others. As far as property is concerned, it would have been cheaper if the flood had made its clean sweep over the whole of Cambria City. It would surely have done so had not the bridge checked it and turned it aside.
The death rate among these fragile frame buildings was horrible. The borough authorities estimate the loss of life at 1,100. Almost 750 bodies have already been recovered and brought to the morgue. It is not probable that Cambria City will be rebuilt, at least for a long time. The expense of preparing that rocky plain for building would be enormous. There is not a street left or any landmark by which to determine the location of lots, except the water mains through one or two streets. The part of the town still in existence will probably be put in order and maintained, but the broad flat will doubtless remain a rocky desert for a long time to come.