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

by Geoff Williams

  10 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  The telephone bell rang in the office of the National Red Cross at the War Department.

  “Miss Boardman, this is the office of the Associated Press,” said the voice on the other end of the phone line. “The Miami River is rising in Ohio, and the town of Dayton is partly under water. Other rivers are rising, and it looks like there might be serious trouble.”

  Mabel Boardman took down the information and sent a telegram to Ohio Governor James Cox, asking if he needed a hand, and then she returned to her main focus: getting help to Omaha.

  Governor Cox telegraphed a reply, basically saying thanks, but everything’s fine.

  But a little later, Miss Boardman received another telegram from Cox, which read something to the effect of: matters were getting worse. Another telegram soon followed: the water was still rising, and there were already many deaths. And another: Ohio would be glad to have the assistance of the National Red Cross.

  Miss Boardman flew into action. Their director-general, Ernest Bicknell, was on a train somewhere, on his way to Nebraska, but she knew he’d want to eventually head to Ohio, and so she telegraphed a Red Cross executive, Eugene Lies, in Chicago, to travel to Omaha, and a Mr. Edmonds of Cincinnati to take care of the situation in Dayton until Bicknell arrived.

  10 A.M., Dayton, Ohio

  It was estimated that the Great Miami River, usually a few hundred feet in width, was now three miles wide.

  10 A.M., Columbus, Ohio

  Governor James Cox was concerned. He knew about LaRue’s flooding problems and had heard of a few more communities experiencing some flooding, but the Red Cross was asking him about Dayton?

  The Red Cross had to be wrong. Dayton was Cox’s hometown. Cox, less than a week away from his forty-third birthday and just over two months into his new job as governor, owned the Dayton Daily News, an arrangement that probably wouldn’t go over well today. But the people of Ohio, if at all bothered that the most powerful person in the state also owned one of the most prominent media outlets, were impressed with their new governor’s business acumen and ambition. Cox had managed to buy a newspaper at the age of twenty-eight, in large part due to a former employer who believed in him enough to invest $6,000 in his quest to raise $26,000 to buy the Dayton Evening News. Cox had some money saved up himself, borrowed yet more money, and then managed to raise the rest of the money by selling stock in the paper. If media critics ever questioned whether it was healthy for the governor of a state to own a city newspaper, or if the cozy relationship hurt the Dayton Daily News’ journalistic integrity, there’s no question that during the flood and its immediate aftermath, it was a connection that would end up helping everyone, if only because Cox had made his mark in Dayton and was a passionate advocate for the city.

  It seems likely that Cox was spending most of his time checking on LaRue and monitoring the state of affairs in his current residence, Columbus; but as far as his memoirs and other documentation suggest, he didn’t yet realize that the state was in serious disarray. After all, he lived in a time before CNN, smart phones, and the Internet, and Dayton’s rudimentary phone service was already cut off. Cox would have relied mostly on telephone calls and telegrams, and very few had landed in his office, as the regions in the most trouble had already lost service.

  The city workhouse—which held prisoners behind bars for nonviolent crimes like drunkenness and embezzlement—was in the process of moving its female prisoners in boats to the county jail while the male inmates remained behind. The river was rising fast, and because of that, about twenty prisoners from the workhouse were ordered to reinforce the levee near the prison. It was a nice but pointless attempt to delay nature. The river not only rushed over the levee, it caught the prisoners and washed them away.

  Most of the inmates struggled toward a house and then began swimming from house to house, escaping the flood and, even though it was unintentional, the city workhouse.

  At least two men appeared to have drowned, observed Casper Sareu, a prisoner who managed to find a roof to hole up on. Sareu, being dumped on by the rain, trapped on a house that looked as if it would soon be overcome by the flood, was no more free than he had been when he was behind bars. In fact, the prison was starting to look pretty good to him. But for now, he would remain trapped on the roof of a house, sharing the predicament of thousands of other of his fellow citizens.

  10:30 A.M., Pulaski, Pennsylvania

  Just over the Ohio border, the Shenango River was on a tear, overflowing its banks just under Pulaski’s bridge, sending people out of their houses at the crack of dawn. But at 10:30 A.M., Miss Lena Book, a news reporter with the paper, telephoned her editors in New Castle, Pennsylvania, to warn them that the Shenango River was rising rapidly, and that, if they hadn’t already, they would soon see flooding.

  10:30 A.M., Dayton, Ohio

  People were panicking. Someone at the Beckel House once again shouted “Fire,” and this time the warning seemed serious, causing the guests to flee into the rain and up the fire escapes onto their roof, and then scamper to the roofs of adjoining buildings. There the scared guests stood, among them Melville Shreves, the office supplies salesman from nearby Lima, and C. C. McDowell from places unknown, drenched as the sky dumped whatever it could on them, and they waited … and waited … and collectively everyone realized that there was no fire.

  Most of the guests retreated back into the Beckel House, while others started exploring other buildings, looking for an escape path to dry land somewhere. Melville Shreves, C. C. McDowell, and a few others, not feeling comfortable staying in a hotel that had its northwest corner collapse, felt that since they were up on the roof anyway, they should attempt to leave.

  They were able to cross over from the Beckel House to an adjoining building fairly easily and get into there, but after that their trek became a series of finding windows and doors and fire escapes to help them go from one building’s roof to another. In another spot, there was a ten-foot alley between buildings, but with a ladder that they found, they could reach the new Callahan Bank building.

  The Callahan Bank Building was just as much an island as the Beckel House, but it was made from concrete and other modern, non-floating materials and was much stronger, and clearly would be more formidable against the flood. It was also twelve stories high, including the first floor, and at the top of the building was a rooftop that had a sturdy wall to look out over, as well as a clock tower adjoining a sign that said “City Bank.”

  If water covered this building, it truly did mean the Atlantic had moved inward, across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and into Ohio. And it wasn’t going to fall into the flood. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  From the roof, Shreves, McDowell, and the others could see the river carting merchandise out of smashed storefront windows and through streets and alleys, boxes and pieces of furniture bobbing up and down, and dead horses, chunks of houses, and overturned buggies floating in the water. It was demoralizing, and the sights gave the guests an idea of what fate they might soon be facing.

  Still, the Beckel House across the street had a couple of things going for it that this place didn’t: beds and food.

  10:40 A.M., Columbus, Ohio

  The police and firefighters ordered everyone near the Scioto River in downtown Columbus to leave their homes and find high ground, and fast.

  You are not to stop for clothes and valuables, the people were told. In other words, get out of here—now.

  Just before 11 A.M., Columbus, Ohio

  The downtowners learned just why their police and fire forces were adamant that everyone leave.

  A wave of water came over the levee at Broad Street, swamped several buildings, including the three-story brick building of the Columbus Linen and Towel Supply Company. It evidently wasn’t all that well constructed. Half of the building collapsed into the water. Fortunately, the employees had already abandoned the place.

  A few other nearby structures were ripped
off their foundations and floated down the river. “Imagine yourself at the top of a perfectly safe skyscraper looking over ninety square miles of water punctured by thousands of homes—15,000 or 20,000 at least—swirling water carrying them away one by one, or sometimes literally in swarms, and you will have some conception of what we saw in Columbus Tuesday and Wednesday, March 25 and 26,” wrote Glenn Marston, a correspondent of the Chicago Journal and colleague of Ben Hecht, bound for Dayton. Marston just happened to be in Columbus when the flood began. The skyscraper he referred to was presumably his hotel.

  Marston was able to state that, at least at first, this was not a flood hospitable to canoes and skiffs or any kind of vessel. “No boat could live in a moment in the rushing current, which took houses, bridges, railway tracks, telegraph poles—everything—in its overwhelming sweep,” wrote Marston.

  About the time his fellow city dwellers were running for their lives, Governor Cox received a call from the man who would soon become his favorite phone operator, Thomas E. Green. “We have word from Dayton,” said Green.

  Cox had been worried about Dayton, ever since the Red Cross had said an hour earlier that the city was destroyed; but soon after, the news started to flood his office. It had been quiet because other communities were having trouble reaching the governor’s office through the phone lines. But now he knew that Piqua, near Dayton, was in trouble. Sidney, quite a bit north of Dayton, was flooding, with the electric and gas both out, which was pretty par for the course in almost every community in the state. The city of Troy was also in trouble.

  Middletown, too. And Hamilton. From Miamisburg, Defiance, Napoleon, Ottawa, Fremont, Tiffin, Warren, Ravenna, Franklin, Youngstown, Delaware, Zanesville, McConnellsville, Marietta, Pomeroy, Middleport, Gallipolis, Ironton, Portsmouth, Manchester, Chillicothe, Fremont, and on and on came pleas for help via telephone calls and telegrams. In his own city, the Columbus Coal and Iron Company’s plant had flooded and then caught on fire. The fire department managed to get the fire out, but, with the waters rising, they were forced to unhook their horses and allow them to run for their lives and leave their water-spraying machines in the buggies.

  The entire state was imploding.

  “This building was almost a madhouse,” Cox said later, “people coming here from every community in the state seeking to gain some information.”

  Cox, however, at least at first, didn’t have any to give. Ninety-four cities and towns, it was later determined, were adversely affected by the flood. Cox would later estimate that in highway and bridge destruction alone, there was $50 million worth of damage, which today would be almost a billion dollars.

  So when Cox was patched in to talk to John Bell, on the rooftop of the Bell Telephone Company in Dayton, the governor couldn’t be more grateful to get some first-hand information on what was happening in the city.

  Bell gave Cox a bird’s-eye view of what he saw, and while exactly what was said has apparently never been recorded, it must have been bleak. Water had almost reached the second floor of the Bell Telephone Company. The city streets were under water. Hundreds of people were dead. Maybe thousands.

  11:00 A.M., Middletown, Ohio

  Two hundred homes, it was estimated, were under water. Residents were seeking shelter in schools, churches, and city buildings.

  11:30 A.M., Columbus, Ohio

  City officials asked Governor Cox to bring out the national guard to patrol the capital city. Cox issued the order.

  It was needed. Columbus was under siege. The city prison was having trouble, having to move prisoners in solitary confinement and in danger of drowning in what were basically holes in the ground to cells upstairs. Meanwhile, 144 men at the workhouse—apparently not including the twenty that were swept into the river—were marooned.

  One of those prisoners who was swept away, Casper Sareu, found a raft about an hour after reaching a roof and the tops of other buildings, trying to stay dry.* He boarded his craft, aiming it for the workhouse, but the current wouldn’t oblige. Sareu was carried right past the workhouse with the superintendent watching him go by. If the superintendent had had a rope handy, he could have thrown it to him, he was that close, and Sareu, not pleased by his situation, would have happily grabbed it.

  The North Side Day Nursery was a godsend for single mothers—single white mothers—who were forced to work during the day because their husbands were dead or disabled. From 6:30 A.M. to 6 P.M., every day of the week except Sundays, for just a nickel to fifty cents a day, mothers could drop off their young children, from nine months to twelve years old. Seven kids had been at the nursery when it began flooding; a grocer who worked next door took charge of the youngsters and brought them to an office of Associated Charities, which served the deserving poor.

  “It was awful,” George W. Davis said later of this period. The water broke through one of the levees near his home on North Central Avenue. “I was standing on my front porch when I saw the water break through,” he told a reporter. “It came in a wall ten feet high. The three houses located directly across the street from me were in its path, and they were crushed like eggshells. I saw three little girls run to the porch and fall into the flood. They never reappeared. Everything on the street was washed away clean, and I know that a few minutes before there were several people in them. They couldn’t possibly have escaped. I’d rather die than witness such a scene again.”

  Charles Ford, who worked or owned a laundry, was at his house, trying to save some neighbors, when he realized they would have to figure things out on their own: his own house was breaking apart. He climbed out a window and scrambled to the top of their front porch and started to help his youngest daughter, Mary, eight years old, when the house simply gave way and began moving.

  The next thing Ford knew, he was swimming in the river for about a block when a neighbor was able to help him into a boat. Ford never saw Mary alive again.

  He also lost his wife, Addie, and his daughters, Gladys and Catherine. Several days later, Ford would be missing. Friends believed he was searching for the bodies of Catherine and Addie, who hadn’t been found yet, but they were worried because they hadn’t seen him. If Ford considered the unthinkable, he didn’t do it, possibly pulled back from the brink because he realized how devastating that would be for the one child he had left—his fifteen-year-old son Robert, who was at high school when the flooding began.

  Patrick J. Masterson, a police officer, raced home to warn his wife and four daughters that a flood was coming. Moments later, he and his family were racing up the stairs, trying to outrun the river. But soon it was clear that being on the second floor wasn’t high enough. They would have to get to the roof.

  They did, but before climbing to the top of their house, Masterson had the foresight to grab two objects, and they each turned out to be very handy: a hatchet and a clothesline.

  They were useful because almost as soon as the Masterson family reached the roof, the house came off its moorings, began bobbing up and down, and clearly was in danger of floating away; at that point, their fate was anyone’s guess. Masterson stared at his hatchet.

  He came up with the idea that he would chop through the slate and then the rafters, so that the roof would be a makeshift raft. It was wildly unrealistic to think that he could do this effectively and quickly, but it seemed a better plan than doing nothing and simply staying on a floating, unpredictable house. As he began chopping, he, along with his wife and daughters, shouted back and forth to their neighbors, the Wilcox family. They, too, were on their roof and terrified. But their house hadn’t been removed from its foundations.

  Fortunately, Masterson didn’t have to learn how to be captain of either a floating house or roof. As he chopped away with his hatchet, he noticed a large portion of a floating picket fence. This is where his clothesline came in.

  Masterson lassoed the fence and drew it to him.

  Once he and his family had the fence, they steered the other end to the Wilcox residence and shoute
d for the family to grab hold.

  They did, and everyone realized what Masterson had done. Their picket fence had become a bridge, stretching from one house to another. Several feet below it was the wild river.

  The Masterson family then gingerly made their way across the bridge until they reached the Wilcox home. Before eventually being rescued, they would remain there for the next twenty hours, all the while watching their house float away and marveling how a clothesline had saved their lives.

  When he realized Columbus’s levees were breaking, Harry E. Keyes, a 43-year-old bookkeeper for the Central Ohio Natural Gas Company, thought of his 85-year-old blind and ill mother, who lived in one of the most flood-susceptible areas in the city.

  He arrived just as the water began to overtake his mother’s front lawn. He carried her out and hurried down Avondale Avenue and then to State Street. The water was now up to his hips, and Keyes, huffing and puffing, decided to run down Sullivant Avenue. His choice of streets didn’t matter. It was flooding everywhere. Running through water and carrying his frail and thin mother was sapping Keyes of his strength. But he ran, undoubtedly trying to shout words of encouragement to his mother, who one can imagine may well have been urging him to leave her behind.

  She must have seen so much in her life, starting out in the world in 1827, born in Virginia and eventually moving to Ohio where she and her husband would raise six children on a farm. One can only wonder what went through her mind, unable to see but knowing her son was trying to outwit and outrun a flood.

  He couldn’t do it. He ran until he fell, stumbling over something—perhaps a fire hydrant—and dropping his mother. The river grabbed Elizabeth Virginia Keyes. Harry hugged some floating wreckage and was carried into a tree. He scrambled up the branches and surely scanned the street, looking for his mother. She was nowhere. Two days later, he laid eyes on his mother once again, this time at the morgue.

  Louis H. Mack was a 42-year-old grinder for barber’s tools, which meant he was constantly sharpening barbers’ blades and scissors. It was an occupation that wasn’t considered healthy, due especially to the specks of metal and dust that invariably went into the workers’ lungs when they used their tools to manufacture and sharpen whatever they were grinding. But Mack was never in more danger than when the flood began. His house was at least ten blocks away from the Scioto River, but it didn’t matter: the water rushed down Sullivant Avenue and as it became clear that their house was going to become a casualty, Mack hurriedly put together a raft made of wooden boxes, and he and his wife, Catherine, and their four children climbed aboard. It didn’t look pretty, but it saved the family from drowning.