Nobody ever learned who the man was.
Dayton, 8:45 A.M.-9 A.M.
More and more people needed rescuing. The water on parts of Main Street, according to some accounts, was now ten feet deep and still moving rapidly. Oliver Saettel and his neighbor Harry Lindsey had abandoned their efforts to save the rest of the goods in the cellar. Lindsey, in fact, quickly recognized that he couldn’t get back to his home and raced up the stairs with Oliver and his family.
Lindsey made the right decision to stick with the Saettels and not attempt a crossing. The roads were no longer roads, as many people were discovering. According to several newspaper accounts, a moving wagon with a driver at the reins, and his passengers, a doctor, his four-year-old son, and an African-American maid or nanny, were caught up in the flood. Their horse and buggy was swept into the current until they crashed into a telegraph pole. Just before the van overturned, the doctor, servant, and driver managed to climb up the pole with the four-year-old, where they would remain in rain and snow, trapped, shouting for help that wouldn’t come for another thirty-six hours.
Fred Boyer, a high school teacher, was on Main Street when the water rushed over the levee. He wrote about it later, stating that at 8:30, his school decided to close since only ten or fifteen teachers and just fifty students had shown up. The staff had also heard that shops were closing, and that Main Street was underwater. Everyone dispersed.
When at nine in the morning Boyer and five others—it isn’t clear if he was walking with teachers, students, or both—arrived at Main Street, much of it was covered with water, but at least where they were, it was nowhere near the ten feet that it was further down the road. About then, a modern-day Paul Revere showed up, according to Boyer: “A man came galloping down the street on a horse, a tall, gaunt, ungainly figure, waving his hands in the other direction and crying, ‘The levee’s broke, the levee’s broke.’”
Everyone began running in the direction the rider was going, including the streetcars, which began backing up, away from where the waters were expected to be coming. Boyer recalled seeing a company of African-American militia, marching up the street from the south, toward the flood, possibly as part of a routine exercise or, more likely, on the scene to see if they could be of help.
But nobody could help. The street gutters were full of water, and suddenly Boyer could see the water coming down Main Street, a wall of water about six inches high in the center of the street. Boyer and his group ran down Fifth Street, where it met Jefferson, but the water was coming there, too.
Miss Flossie Lester, a stenographer, found herself marooned on a horse-drawn moving van when the water rushed through the streets of Dayton. She and several other men had climbed onto the van as the water barreled past them. Eventually, the van tipped over, ripping away from the horses, and everyone went into the muddy water and they were all separated. The van sailed down the street with the horse, Miss Lester, and the men. It isn’t known what happened to the men, but Miss Lester managed to stay afloat for a while as the river took her for what looked to be her final swim.
But then she spotted one of the horses swimming near her, and somehow Miss Lester grabbed a dangling strap from the animal and pulled herself up, climbing onto his back, hugging his neck and hanging on. Although thousands of horses were killed in the flood, it was a smart move because this one was a strong swimmer. The horse swam for at least a mile and a half before it navigated to high ground. The horse reached a farmhouse, and Miss Lester, apparently realizing she was safe now, fell off the horse and promptly passed out. The farmer’s family took her in and led the horse to their barn.*
Arthur F. Coulter owned a shoe store. When the levee broke, and the river rushed down Second Street, he grabbed the $30 that was in his cash register, one almost certainly manufactured by Patterson’s company, and then he dashed outside.
Big mistake. The water was so high that he was swept off his feet, and a telephone pole or some debris hit him, breaking his arm.
Coulter was being carried along Second Street with groceries, grand pianos, pieces of lumber, broken glass, nails, and other parts of Dayton. As he would tell The New York Times later, “The water was dark and furious. Everybody was screaming for help, it seemed to me—and there could be no help. I seemed to realize that, and I tried to stop shouting and save my breath. I swam, or rather I kept afloat. I can swim well, but that was of little assistance in that torrent. I don’t know how far I went, but I do know that when I was finally picked up by a boat, I was three blocks away from my store.”
Coulter escaped Dayton in rapid order and traveled to flood-besieged Columbus, where he was robbed of whatever he had left of his thirty dollars. Then Coulter backtracked to Clayton, Ohio, a village near Dayton where he had friends who were able to give him some money. By the time he reached Cleveland three days after being carried down Second Street, he was able to find a doctor who could set his arm, which had been broken and apparently dangling the entire time.
As miserable as that sounds, Coulter was one of the lucky ones.
While Coulter and other Dayton residents were running and swimming for their lives, John Bell was hard at work. The batteries were submerged in the watery tomb of the basement, but he had managed to keep one wire alive by hooking together several dry batteries that he managed to scrape up. He rummaged around and found a lineman’s test set, and with that, he was able to rig up a sending and receiving apparatus. That allowed him to cut in upon the wire on the roof of a four-story building, which connected him with a testing station about eight miles north in Phoneton, Ohio.
Phoneton was a community practically built by the telephone communications industry, as the name would imply. Originally named Tadmor, the AT&T Company built a three-story brick building along the National Road, the first freeway built by the federal government in the 1800s, which currently officially stretched from Ohio to Illinois, though one could take various trails from there to the Pacific. By the time 1913 rolled around and the town’s name had long switched to Phoneton, there were houses, buildings, a post office, and other trappings of civilization, mostly to support AT&T’s building, where numerous operators managed the switchboards that kept the calls moving over the phone lines across the country.
Once Bell had connected Dayton to Phoneton, no easy and quick task, he explained the situation to the operator and asked to be patched through to Governor Cox’s office in Columbus.
In the center of downtown, at the Dayton Engineering Laboratory, which everyone called Delco and employed 1,100 workers, the basement began flooding at 8:50 A.M. A crew of workers was quickly dispatched to remove dynamite from the basement, and while they apparently were successful, two employees did not make it back up. Before the day was over, the water would climb seventeen feet into the concrete plant, just eighteen inches from its second story. Many Delco employees hadn’t arrived to work yet and wouldn’t, and many fled for their lives or attempted to race back home to their families, but twenty young executives found themselves stuck in the watch tower, watching the city fall apart below.
At the Western Union Telegraph Company station, the workers found that they couldn’t open their front door—the pressure of the three-foot-deep water wouldn’t allow it. The employees had to escape through a back window and then scale a telegraph pole to the roof.
But it wasn’t bedlam everywhere. Not yet, and not at 415 Wayne Avenue, the residence of one Henry Andrews, his wife, his brother-in-law, and a boarder named George W. Timmerman, a foundry moulder who had grown up in nearby Springfield. Timmerman concluded in ankle-deep water that this wasn’t a good day to go in to work. Oddly, even as late as 8:45 A.M., with rain still dumping over the city, his neighbors didn’t appear to be overly concerned by the flooding, although some people were taking their belongings up to the second story.
This has happened before, after heavy rains, they said.
But fifteen minutes later, the Great Miami River, normally a mile away, came rushing down the street, s
ending Timmerman and his neighbors running into their homes and upstairs.
9 A.M., Dayton, Ohio
A Western Union operator working with another operator out of Cincinnati abruptly cut off a message he was sending and quickly gave him the news.
Stunned, the operator started spreading the word, and before long it was in morning, afternoon, and evening newspapers around the country. Here’s how the first bulletin read, published in the Akron Beacon Journal that evening and countless others:
“Cincinnati, O. March 25—It is reported that the Miami River at Dayton has broken and flooded the city.
“At 9 o’clock this morning a Western Union operator working with an operator in this city abruptly cut off a dispatch he was sending, and said:
“‘Good-bye, the levee is broken.’
“Dayton is on low ground, and the river levees rise 25 feet above the level of the town. Right in the heart of the city the Stillwater and Mad rivers merge into the Miami and during high water, the levees are in great danger. If they have broken, until loss of property and loss of life has occurred.”
Another report in the same paper read: “An unconfirmed report here says that 1,500 people lost their lives in the flood at Dayton today when a levee along the banks of the Miami River went out, and the waters inundated the town.”
Word was getting out. Dayton was drowning.
Chicago, shortly after 10 A.M.
Ben Hecht, an 18-year-old cub reporter for the Chicago Journal, was jostled awake by a phone call from his editor, informing him that Dayton was being swamped by a flood, people were dying, and a big story was breaking fast, so get out and cover it! Hecht remembered getting the phone call at 5:30 A.M., which would have been 6:30 A.M., Dayton time. Dayton was in a flurry of activity and worry and some flooding by then, but the levee hadn’t broken quite yet. Hecht, in his 1954 biography, A Child of the Century, remembered the flood as starting on March 18, 1912, over a year off the actual date, so it’s also possible he was sleeping in later much in the morning than he imagined or cared to admit*. It’s so much more likely that Hecht’s editor had seen a bulletin about the levee breaking go on the wire, and that that’s when he called the cub reporter.
Hecht, eager to prove himself, listened intently to his editor’s instructions. “The cashier’s office is closed,” said Eddie Mahoney, the assistant city editor. “You will have to get fifty dollars somewhere for expenses.” He also told him to catch the train to Indianapolis, and from there he would hopefully find transportation to Dayton.
Hecht lived in a brothel. He spent the next thirty minutes begging his roommates for money, and soon he had forty dollars in cash and was racing for the train station. So were newspaper correspondents from around the country. This had all the makings of a big story.
Hamilton, Ohio, probably around 9 A.M.
Thirty-six miles away from Dayton, Councilman J. Henry Welsh was inspecting the railroad yards when, as the Hamilton Evening Journal would put it, he had a premonition that the city was about to flood. It could hardly be called ESP; after all, it had been raining constantly the previous day, all through Monday and into Tuesday, and there had been that incredible series of tornadoes. A five-year-old who had been following the news and weather might have predicted that Hamilton would soon flood. But in the manner Welsh would later describe it, he just suddenly knew that a flood was absolutely in the making. There was no doubt. He knew.
So he ran from the railroad yards to the police station and asked that they start to ring the fire bells as a warning. Welsh was rebuffed; apparently a hunch wasn’t enough for the authorities to go on. Welsh then became an instant modern-day prophet, warning people in the streets that a flood was coming and that everyone should start moving their goods to higher ground now.
9:30 A.M., Dayton, Ohio
George Cleary, an employee at the Apple Electric Company, was walking down Miggs Street when he and a friend spotted a levee on the verge of breaking. They raced to several houses, pounding on doors and telling people that they had to flee now. Either not believing them, or probably thinking it was safer to stay indoors, they wouldn’t leave. Cleary and his friend were on the street when a tidal wave came racing toward them.
They sprinted ahead of it for seven blocks until they couldn’t run any farther, so they ran into a house that had fifteen other people and began helping everyone move furniture upstairs. But it wasn’t long before everyone simply retreated upstairs as the river started coming underneath the doors and swamping the living room.
Meanwhile, the basement of the Bell Telephone Company, where the batteries to the telephone exchange were located, was flooding and the telephone chief decided that the current needed to be shut off before there were electrical shocks and somebody was hurt or killed. The young female telephone operators had been answering the phones, pretty much nonstop, as all of Dayton tried to reach loved ones, but the main fuse was now removed and the phone lines across the city went dead. Dayton residents and workers were officially cut off from civilization, including the twenty women and fourteen men at the telephone company.
9:30 A.M., Columbus, Ohio
The levees hadn’t broken, but it was just a matter of time. The Busy Bee restaurant, an early chain restaurant—there were three in existence—sent its workers home, and Frank Williams, a cook, hurried to his house to warn his family of the impending flood. Much of his family was there, although explaining his family—a hundred years later—is a bit challenging.
Williams was described in the papers as living with his stepparents, William and Viola Guy, who were married for thirty-four years. It seems likely that one of them was his real parent rather than both of them being step-parents, or perhaps they had both taken him in as a youngster, but no matter: by 1913, Frank Williams was living with the Guy family.
The Guys had five other children, the oldest being Iva, thirty-three, and the youngest Bert, who was twenty-one. Several of the adult children still lived with the Guys. William Guy—at least judging from the 1910 census records—was a factory laborer, and Viola kept the house. Most of the adult children worked in various jobs at a restaurant, possibly the Busy Bee.
Frank told his family that a flood was certain and urged everyone to take their belongings upstairs. Everyone did, but like it would be for so many people, it was a futile exercise. In the midst of all this action, the river came underneath the door, and then underneath the house. It started floating.
There must have been a lot of screaming and shouting and panicking. There were several family members in the house—Frank, William, Viola, their 28-year-old unmarried daughter Nora, and her nephew and William and Viola’s grandson, Luther Wolfe. But by the time they reached the roof, Frank’s group numbered well over a dozen, a hodge-podge of neighbors, all aware that their houses were floating.
Under a pounding rain, the group frantically scrambled from one house to another, each wobbling and close to being carried away by the rising flood. Everyone finally reached a house that seemed safe, and so everyone settled in, making themselves as comfortable as anyone could be when you think your life might end any moment, and you’re in a torrential downpour and looking off the edge of a two-story home and seeing a river where your street once was.
And then it happened: the house, just like the others, came off its moorings. Worse, it began to float away in the current.
There was nothing anyone could do. The group now numbered thirteen. Frank Williams and the Guy family were a part of that thirteen. So was a woman named Mrs. Hunt and her daughter, May. There was a Nina M. Shipley and her daughter-in-law, and Mrs. Shipley’s sister, a Mrs. Vine and three boys who were described as Hungarian. All everyone could do was wait and hope that wherever the current took them, it was somewhere safe. But Viola Gay didn’t have much optimism. She handed her stepson her bank book, reasoning that if someone got out of this alive, it might be him, in which case he might need it.
10 A.M., Hamilton, Ohio
If his fellow
citizens didn’t at first believe Welsh that a flood was coming, some minds changed as the evidence kept mounting. Plus, there was a rumor spreading that a dam had broken north of Hamilton, and everyone was pretty sure that the water behind the dam was coming for them, and they were all going to die.
The rumor started in part because of a completely incorrect message sent to Hamilton, about a dam breaking a hundred miles away. It had been forwarded the previous evening to a telegraph office in McGonigle, a tiny town about seven miles northwest of Hamilton. The operator passed it on, and apparently not much was thought of it when it reached Hamilton, because no panic broke out. But the McGonigle operator left it on his desk and, Tuesday morning, when the rivers were dangerously high and it was still raining, his replacement saw the message, thought it hadn’t been sent, let his imagination go out of control, and then, because the telegraph lines were down, rushed to Hamilton.
Some accounts have said he took an automobile and broke speed records getting there; others later said the telegraph operator hopped on a railroad hand car. Either way, he reached Hamilton and let them know that a dam had burst, and word of mouth spread.
Some people rushed out of their houses, not fully dressed, running for the nearest hill.
But all of the misinformation out there, along with the way the weather was behaving, did spur people to what was ultimately the right decision: school officials decided to send the pupils home and undoubtedly many young lives were saved, including that of J. Walter Wack, a high-schooler. He ran home, plopped his schoolbooks on the kitchen floor of his grandparents’ house, and then ran to High Street to watch the Great Miami River.
As he recalled to his hometown newspaper fifty years later, “Trees and small sheds and lots of debris floated swiftly down the river, and much of it struck the underneath beams of the bridge. Then they closed the bridge to traffic.”
And as the river grew higher, the garbage against the bridge began piling up.
Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Page 11