Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

by Geoff Williams

  But the Wallace-Hagenbeck Circus had twelve elephants and not the eight that were encircling the house. The workers couldn’t help but wonder: Where were the others?

  Some of the people at the courthouse could have answered that. They could see several elephants, running loose through the water and looking for any place dry to go, or at least higher ground. Seven-year-old Mary Jane Ward also saw the elephants. She would grow up to be an accomplished author, her most famous title being The Snake Pit, which was turned into an acclaimed 1948 movie starring Olivia de Havilland. Ward wrote shortly after the flood of seeing escaped elephants thrashing in the water and described an altogether surreal scene. The boat took her and her aunt out of their house’s bedroom window just as the new piano floated out the front door. As rescuers rowed them to safety, little Jane could see not just elephants but crying monkeys hanging from trees.

  Daybreak, West Liberty, Ohio

  Phillip Henn, the passenger conductor who had been checking out the bridge over the Mad River when it collapsed underneath him, was still alive. After his fall into the river, he grabbed on to some floating debris from the bridge and was carried about a half mile to another bridge, which he was able to grab hold of. With the water higher than ever, he was able to climb up the bridge—it wasn’t a far ascent—and once he was up, he simply sat.

  He didn’t try to walk off the bridge. For starters, he had a broken leg, and he was weak from the cold and from losing blood. All he could do was sit in a daze and wait to die. But even if he had been able to walk, the river had surrounded the bridge, on each end. It had washed out the middle of the bridge as well, just leaving the railings, one of which he was perched on, above the rushing river.

  But as the sun came up, not that anyone could tell with the clouds and rain disguising it, several people spotted Henn sitting on the bridge, including J. Oliver King, a 22-year-old farmhand, and William Leib, a farmer a few days shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, and a man named Coran Grimes.

  It would take several hours before they could reach him, and, of course, it didn’t help matters when Henn passed out from the trauma, but King and Leib waded onto the bridge while hanging onto a rope, and brought the passenger conductor back to riverbank alive. Both King and Leib would be given Andrew Carnegie Heroism awards, bronze medals and $1,000, for their efforts, and several other rescuers in other communities were also thusly awarded. But there weren’t enough medals to go around for the heroism that would be displayed over the next several days.

  5:50 A.M., Dayton

  Arthur John Bell* was the division plant manager and came into his office the night before to be on hand in case flooding started putting telephone batteries out of commission or the power went out. It seemed like a proactive, responsible thing to do, and Bell didn’t want to take any chances from a personal standpoint. He had recently been promoted from being a lineman, someone who repaired telephone lines, and wanted to prove to his superiors that they had known what they were doing when they had chosen him for this job.

  Bell’s instincts paid off because, sure enough, just before six A.M., the power died. The engine room of the power plant flooded, and the streetcars stopped working.

  Another important Dayton figure believed there would be a flood. John H. Patterson, president of NCR and recently disgraced executive, had been watching the river much of the night, perhaps thinking of his impending jail sentence. He knew that Dayton was susceptible to flooding, having lived in the area his entire life. His family had been born and bred in Dayton and he and his family understood the power of the Great Miami River and its three tributaries, ever since his grandfather, Colonel Robert Patterson, moved to Dayton in the early 1800s. Colonel Patterson was an impressive ancestor for Patterson, who was born seventeen years after his grandfather’s death, to look up to. He was the founder of the city of Lexington, Kentucky, and served with the famed General George Rogers Clark and about a thousand Kentuckians from the Kentucky militia and, among other military engagements, forced Indians from the banks of the Great Miami River in 1788.

  In 1805 when the colonel moved to Dayton, he was awarded 2,400 acres of land, land he would pass on to his heirs and that would eventually become part of John H. Patterson’s company, the National Cash Register Company.

  Patterson had probably heard many tales about the flooding river from his predecessors, but he had also witnessed its power numerous times and once experienced it firsthand. In 1862, when Patterson was seventeen, Dayton had a flood that surrounded a house, and inside there was a family: Joseph Dickensheet, his wife Julia, and their six children, ranging from twelve down to six years of age.

  Several neighbors had attempted to reach the house by boat, and all had failed. Stepping out of a crowd that had grown into the hundreds, Patterson and a classmate decided they would give it a try. Bystanders begged them not to go, but the teenagers insisted, and youth won out. Not only did they go, they reached the home, and the entire family was able to lower themselves out the second-story window, or perhaps climb off the roof, and into the boat. As the crowd literally went wild, Patterson and his friend steered the boat toward the shore, and everyone made it back safe and sound.

  Patterson would say later of his decision to build the National Cash Register Company on a hill above the low terrain where the Dickensheet family lived, “I had studied the land for years, and I didn’t see how the city could escape a big overflow of the Great Miami River. The country the stream tapped would someday provide more water than the river could hold. That’s why I built our plant on high ground.”

  As Patterson watched the river, it hadn’t spilled over the levee yet, at least not where he was, but it was evident that the city didn’t have much time. The muddy black water, flowing fast, was, in some areas, just five inches from the top of the dam. Patterson hurried back to NCR, a plan forming in his mind.

  Dayton, Ohio, 6 A.M.

  An extra addition of the Dayton Daily News hit the soggy streets of Dayton, warning everyone that the levees were close to overflowing. Later, some people would remember seeing the moment the water started to spill over, but they were so few in number that it did not contribute in any way to advance warning.

  Meanwhile, at Dayton’s telephone company, the phone lines were jammed with unfounded rumors of levees breaking and the river taking on a life of its own. But as E. T. Herbig, the traffic chief, looked out the window on Ludlow Street and saw the rain still coming down and water filling up the road, he now knew for certain: Dayton was flooding.

  Columbus, Ohio, probably about 6 A.M.

  Thomas E. Green entered the Columbus offices of the Central Union Telephone Company early. Green, the division toll-wire chief, believed that the heavy rains might cause trouble on the long-distance lines. Better to get in now and try to stay on top of things than come into work playing catch-up all day.

  He was testing the phone lines, making calls to Marion, a city about fifty miles north of Columbus, when someone on the line broke in on him. A manager with the last name of Knifflin, who worked at the telephone company in LaRue, a small village near Marion, told Green that two hundred women and children were stranded on the second stories of buildings thanks to the heavy rains. “We must have help, or we’ll be wiped out,” Knifflin said.

  Moments later, more calls came in. And more. All pretty much said the same thing: “Help.”

  Green put a call through to the governor’s mansion, telling him about all of the communities, but making it clear that LaRue needed the most assistance and that if these two hundred women and children didn’t get boats as soon as possible, they would die.

  It was quite a way for the new governor, James M. Cox, asleep moments earlier, to start the day. Green mentioned that there were boats in Lewistown, thirty-three miles away from LaRue. There were no boats closer, Green said, because at least half a dozen other communities were fighting floods and couldn’t spare the boats. Cox issued his order through Green to get the boats to LaRue and then hurried to
his office; but with sparse communication tools, there was little he could do but wait for the operator to call him back and tell him how things were faring in LaRue.

  Tiffin, Ohio, 6:30 A.M.

  George Klingshirn returned to his house to find it surrounded by raging rapids. He must have been crestfallen when he realized his wife and eight of his children were inside, and he was the one who had told them to stay put. His oldest daughter and granddaughter were in the house next door, and they too were stuck.

  Approximately 7 A.M., Dayton, Ohio

  Many parts of the city already were ankle-deep in water. It wasn’t terribly unusual. Sewers often did back up after a particularly heavy rain, and it was still coming down hard.

  Luckily, many people now had enough foresight to realize that the backed-up sewers were a warning sign of what was to come. Children in Dayton and across the region, on any normal day, would have been going to school; but most parents kept their kids from walking to school, and soon it would be more than apparent that classes were cancelled for the day. But if the flood had occurred just an hour later, it might have been even more devastating than it was. It’s easy to imagine that some parents, trying to be conscientious, might have told their children not to be afraid of some rain and sent them to school. As it worked out, the flood submerged eleven schools in Dayton alone.

  Harry Lindsey, a 47-year-old jewelry repairman, lived across the street from Saettel’s grocery store and was awakened in the early morning by a shout for help from Oliver Saettel, thirty-eight years old. He was moving his goods out of the cellar. Lindsey threw on some clothes, hurried through the water in the street, and began helping, carrying what they could to the first floor. They—and probably other members of Saettel’s family, since he had relatives still over for the Easter weekend—kept working for about an hour, completely unaware of how futile their efforts were.

  Charles and Viola, meanwhile, decided it was time to get their twins to Viola’s Aunt Fannie and Uncle Ottie’s house, just up the next block at 59 Warder Street, on much higher ground. Then Charles could always return and continue flood-proofing the home. They felt that in theory they could wait out the flood on the second floor of their home, but their house had already lost its power, and the thought of waiting upstairs in the cold, without much food or good drinking water for the babies, didn’t appeal to anyone.

  Charles, Viola, and Stella walked to Aunt Fannie and Uncle Ottie’s house in relatively short order. Their uncle and aunt lived uphill, and their front porch was seven feet higher than the street. They would be safe there.

  7 A.M., Shelby County, Ohio

  The Loramie reservoir collapsed. Not that you’d want any reservoir to collapse on you; but as dams go, this one held plenty of water. The Loramie reservoir was a storage unit; it supplied water for the Miami-Erie Canal. It was a lake six miles long and two miles wide, holding, on average, eight feet of water; but when it was full, it was thirty feet deep. On March 25, 1913, it was full. It didn’t help matters any that the western embankment’s earthen dam had been crumbling away for years. Local officials of the village of Fort Loramie had made many trips to the state capital, Columbus, to ask for the funding for a stronger, concrete-reinforced dam.

  But no such luck. When the dam broke on the west side, it rushed down Loramie Creek, past Fort Loramie, traveling 22.7 miles and a difference in elevation of 72 feet, until it reached the Great Miami River, which cuts directly through Dayton, and Dayton was already in trouble.

  And the water from the skies just kept coming. The weather would ultimately bring seven and a half inches of rain, which may not sound like all that much; but as anyone knows who has watched a foot of snow turn into ten-foot drifts, the way rain collects on the ground depends on the terrain, and it always goes to the lowest point in the land. And then there was the spillover from the Miami River’s broken levees and collapsed reservoir to contend with.

  Near the end of the flood, weather forecasters began tallying up just how much rain had fallen in the Dayton area alone. One estimate making the rounds shortly afterward was that during the four days it rained on Dayton, the amount of water dumping over the city and passing through the streets equaled the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a four-day period.

  According to a book published by the Delco Factory, a then-prominent employer in Dayton, the authors stated that the United States Weather Bureau concluded that over 8,000 square miles,* 9 trillion gallons of water fell, weighing 33 billion tons. That seems extreme, given that the respected computational knowledge search engine web site Wolfram/Alpha indicates that 33 billion tons of water is equal to forty percent of all the biomass on Earth. But whatever fell, it was a lot. The Delco writers asserted that a reservoir to hold all of that rain would have to be 174 miles wide, one mile long, and twenty-five feet deep.

  The following year, Popular Mechanics noted that an expert had estimated that approximately 280 billion cubic feet of water—enough to have raised Lake Erie four feet—fell over Ohio and Indiana during the Great Flood of 1913, in a period of about three days.

  Bottom line: this tremendous force of water from the reservoir, the sky, and what was already in the waterways wasn’t all gunning toward Dayton; but for those who lived there, it felt like it.

  Dayton, 8 A.M.

  The 84-year-old father of Dayton’s most famous resident worriedly stared out the window at the rising water levels passing by 7 Hawthorn Street. He was understandably anxious. Milton Wright, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, said later in his diary that the day before the flood, he anticipated it, which isn’t hard to believe, considering how much rain was coming down. And he was worried.

  Rescuers came for a next-door neighbor, a Mrs. Eleanor J. Wagner, and they shouted to Milton that he was welcome to get in as well.

  Bishop Wright, who already had put his overcoat on, liked that idea. He said that he would but needed to do one thing first, and rushed upstairs. A widower for some time now, Bishop Wright had seven children, five of whom grew up to be adults, although one of his sons, Wilbur, had died of typhoid fever a year earlier. Two of his children, 39-year-old Katharine and 42-year-old Orville, lived with him and were sleeping in their bedrooms upstairs.

  Bishop Wright, wanting to let his kids know he was leaving, awakened Katharine and Orville, informed them of what was happening, and then left. That he didn’t wake them up sooner, even before the rescuers in the canoe came by, given that the basement was flooding, seems curious; but then again, the flooding had started quite abruptly, and maybe Orville and Katharine really enjoyed sleeping in and the bishop felt he was doing them a favor.

  He would have done them a better favor by waking them up. According to Fred Howard’s book Wilbur and Orville: A Biography of the Wright Brothers, Orville and Katharine spent some hurried moments moving books and small pieces of furniture to the second floor. Then a horse and buggy—a moving van, actually—came by with some neighbors from across the street, the Valentine family, and the driver asked if they wanted a ride, and Orville and Katharine decided they’d better take the opportunity while they had it and rushed out without a moment to spare.

  So they climbed into the moving van, which was already quite crowded, especially if the entire Valentine family was there: two parents, James and Mary, who had seven children, ranging from the mid-twenties to ten years of age. The Wrights and Valentines knew each other well; some time ago, several of the Valentine boys had worked in the bicycle shop, which the brothers had closed in 1907, four years after their big day at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The media, when they reported about Orville’s escape from the flood later, seemed a bit disappointed that Orville hadn’t outrun the water in an airplane.

  Orville and Katharine were taken five blocks west to some friends of theirs, the house of Edmund S. Lorenz, and then, realizing just how serious this flood was and not knowing where their 84-year-old father had gone, they began to worry.

  Charles Adams had returned
a couple of hours earlier with Viola’s uncle, to flood-proof his home, shortly after his wife and twin babies had settled in at Uncle Ottie’s and Aunt Fannie’s. Ever since Charles returned to his street, every house was in a flurry of activity. A group of neighborhood men were going from house to house, lifting expensive pianos on tables, so they wouldn’t be affected by the river water. Charles, Uncle Ottie, and several neighbors, including a married couple, Tom and Isabelle Hanley, helped move the Adams’s belongings to the second floor, notably Charles and Viola’s beloved Siberian Cinnamon bear rug.

  Charles checked to make sure the windows and doors inside the house were shut tight. He knew that the doors to the bedrooms, closets, and other rooms, if they and the windows were closed, could prevent their home from having raging currents rushing inside the house, surreal and frightening as it must have been to consider. He also noticed their chirping canary and took the cage to the second floor, hoping the bird would be safe there.

  Once Charles and Ottie felt that they had done all they could do, they shut the front door and started scouting out the rain-raged neighborhood, looking for others to help, and planning to return one more time to grab a few last-minute things.

  Around eight o’clock, the rain still dumping on Dayton, Charles stopped to take a photo of his house. He had grabbed his camera, probably a Brownie, a fairly simple and inexpensive camera that Kodak had introduced to the public thirteen years earlier. There was a rapidly growing stream on Rung Street, which was an unpaved dirt road. It was kind of appropriate that there was water here once again, Charles figured. Only a few years ago, when this land had been a farm, there had been an abandoned trench, powered by a machine called a hydraulic ram. Water ran through the trench—also simply called a hydraulic—to supply the farm with plenty of hydration for crops or livestock. Then later, after the farmer sold his land and houses started being built, a road simply followed the hydraulic. So did the rain.