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 it was a wild ride. Soon after, the raft broke apart, with Mack and the oldest son, seventeen-year-old Carl, on what was now a smaller raft, and on the other was Catherine and their other three children: Norman, fifteen, Louis, fourteen, and Lillian, twelve. As Catherine and the kids hung on, going for the ride of their lives and possibly their final ride, they realized that a woman was rushing down the river alongside them.

  She was clinging to a piece of driftwood and holding a three-year-old.

  “For God’s sake, take care of my child,” the woman begged, successfully handing off a young boy to a stunned Catherine. “His name is Troy.” Then the woman disappeared into the current.

  It isn’t known if Troy’s mother survived or not. That she had the presence of mind to find a family who seemed able to look after her son gives one hope that without having to worry about him, she was able to remain on her driftwood until she was able to reach some sort of dry or secure land. The entire Mack family, and Troy, did survive the flood. At least by 1920, when Troy would have been 10, he wasn’t living with the Macks, according to the census records, and so one would presume that he either was reunited with his mother or went to live with his father or other relatives.

  The party of thirteen—with Frank Williams, the Guy family, the Hungarian boys and more—were still on top of their floating house. Nobody could quite believe it was holding together in one piece, but it did, despite continually colliding with other debris and wreckage. Still, nobody held out much hope that they were going to get out of this alive.

  * To be fair to the women, too, the son of the hotel owner, who wasn’t there, later said he had heard that many of the female guests had been far braver than the men when it came to keeping their emotions in check.

  * For those who aren’t up on their mill terminology, a planing mill takes boards from a sawmill and turns them into smooth finished lumber.

  * A 1913 issue of Engineering News states that the water supply for the city of Indianapolis was interrupted from 12:30 P.M., Tuesday, March 25, until 7 A.M., Friday, March 28. That means that either Elman’s memory was faulty, or that the young violinist had a habit of sleeping in and believed it was morning, or that some select places throughout Indianapolis, like the Claypool Hotel, began losing their water before the rest of the city did.

  * Later, Miss Lester told reporters that if the owner of the horse couldn’t be found, she would keep him. Whether she actually did end up keeping him is unknown.

  * To be fair to Hecht, it was over forty years later when he wrote his biography, and he didn’t have the Internet to instantly check things, and he does appear to have had a spot-on memory for the locations that he visited during the flood.

  * How he found a raft on a rooftop is anyone’s guess, but just about anything you wanted was flowing in the river.

  Chapter Six

  Everyone on Their Own

  March 25, Tuesday

  Animals across the Midwest were doing their best to survive with mixed results. People, passing through Indiana in trains, reported seeing rats and cats on tree branches, taking refuge from the river; days later, passengers would see emaciated cats and rats still stuck in trees.

  In West Middletown, a farmer had 276 pigs, waiting to be loaded onto a train. Most of the animals were washed away.

  One of the more surreal sights in Logansport, Indiana was a very live cat on a very dead horse, floating downstream.

  When they were able, people tried to help animals. One report in a Columbus newspaper surfaced of a blind horse and a pony, which shared several rooms with forty people trapped in a building. Two police officers in the same city reluctantly went back in a boat for a little girl’s dog, after she implored: “Please, Mr. Officer, won’t you go back and get Brownie? He made such good company for us when we were afraid.”

  When they couldn’t be helped by their human counterparts, the animals were often just as creative at finding a way to survive as the humans. Mrs. C. M. Sipes, the woman who, with her husband, survived the Johnstown flood in 1889, returned to her house in Columbus after the flood to hear her tomcat weakly meowing. He was behind a picture hanging on the wall. He apparently had hung on to the back of the frame for five days.

  Aron Dillon, the name of a horse in Columbus, was owned by a man named W. A. Grimes and was an extremely intelligent animal who knew a lot of tricks. His intellect must have saved his life, because when the flood invaded the barn, two colts were swept away, but Aron Dillon climbed up the stairs—possibly it was some kind of ladder—and reached the loft, which was stocked with hay. Five days after the flood began, a humane officer found the horse, alive and relatively happy.

  In Dayton, two horses found a cement platform in the back of the Algonquin Hotel and remained there from the beginning of the flood until the end.

  In Fort Wayne, Indiana, one man would return home after the flood to discover a cow and thirty-four chickens on the second floor of his house, although the cow admittedly had some help. The man later learned that seven men had led the cow upstairs.

  And a terrier named Felix somehow became separated from his owner, a Mr. Rhodes, who was the manager of the Lyric Theater in Richmond, Indiana. Felix managed to stay away from the wrath of Whitewater River and traveled twenty-seven miles due south, dodging flooded waterways like Cedar Falls Creek, until he reached the college town of Oxford, Ohio, which managed to stay high and dry during the flood.

  By now, Felix was half starved. Fortunately, some Beta Theta Pi fraternity boys found him, checked out his collar, and then wrote the mayor who passed on the news to Mr. Rhodes. Several days later, Mr. Rhodes and Felix had an emotional reunion in Oxford. Mr. Rhodes pulled up in his car and shouted for Felix. The excited dog ran from the college men and into the arms of his relieved master.

  12 P.M., Dayton, Ohio

  The rain had stopped, or was at least intermittently slowing down, but the bad news was that the bulk of the floodwater from the river was just getting started.

  From the Delco plant, employees spotted two men trying to escape from the Egry Register Company, which made supplies for automatic registers, a relatively new machine that helped business owners make copies of bills of sale, receipts, and other paperwork. The Egry men’s boat clearly couldn’t withstand the current, so the Delco men threw ropes and were able to bring the men into their building. The executives and workers then heard that the Egry factory held approximately forty-five other people, including a five-year-old boy who the group had rescued from a log.

  Before being brought into Egry, the boy rode the log down the wild and wooly streets of Dayton with his father, traveling through a nightmarish maze of debris.

  Where was the father? Floating in the streets somewhere. As he was on the log with his son, two pieces of timber came crashing through the current, decapitating him.

  About the time the Delco employees saved their Egry neighbors, a house was floating down the Great Miami River and toward a bridge. Panic-stricken people—many of them stranded on their roofs—watched as a door opened, and a man was seen looking outside, squinting in the sunlight and shading his eyes with his hand. His door wasn’t opened in the direction the house was floating, however, and he couldn’t see the bridge. Behind him stood a woman and, behind them, another woman with a baby in her arms.

  People watching from their roofs shouted at him to jump into the water, but the man, apparently not hearing the cries of panic, shut the door as if it were just any normal day, and he was tending to his business inside. A moment later, the cottage crashed into one of the bridge’s concrete piers and was smashed into oblivion.

  Charles and Viola waited out the flood at the home of their Uncle Ottie, or as the neighbors more formally knew him, the Reverend W. Otterbein Fries. He and his wife Fannie lived in a house with a large tree on the front lawn and, more importantly, with a front porch approximately seven feet above the street level, with a railing around the porch.

  Charles and Viola thought that Ott
ie and Fannie’s place was a pretty shrewd one to come to, but at noon, the river was rushing west down Warder Street, marooning them. They had already moved to the second story and knew if they had to, they could wait out the flood in the attic. Charles and Viola discussed finding a new place, however. The cellar was flooded, wiping out their coal-burning stove and heat source. Ottie and Fannie had no drinking water available and little food. The adults weren’t worried for themselves, but Charles and Viola were anxious about their babies. Mary, meanwhile, worried about her husband Emerson, who hadn’t returned yet.

  For the moment, Charles and Viola would stay put, but they kept talking about leaving since the water seemed as if it would be sticking around for a while. In fact, reports—and they would be later borne out to be true—were already spreading that in some parts of the city, the water was twenty feet deep. Two bridges were washed out. They were hearing a lot of things, although a lot of misinformation was getting out as well, although from a safety perspective it was probably better for communities to overhype the flood than undersell it.

  “They’re dying like rats in their holes, bodies are washing around in the streets, and there is no relief in sight,” said Frank Purviance, a Dayton resident and an employee of the Terre Haute, Indianapolis and Eastern Traction Company, which managed railroad and streetcar tracks. He was correct in his assessment that people were dying, and the city was falling apart with few odds of it getting better any time soon, but for accuracy’s sake and the sake of not overly panicking the rest of the country, he could have stopped right there.

  Instead, Purviance, when asked how many people he believed were dead, in his fear, he answered that it was probably around 8,000. He was off by about 7,000 people, and if one judges the figure by strictly Dayton, he was off by about 7,900.

  But that was just the beginning of it. One headline in a Benton Harbor, Michigan, paper early on screamed:

  Dayton’s Awful Story Lies

  Beneath Seething Sea; Even 10,000

  May Have Perished

  Dayton Is Burning!

  But the early newspaper accounts, while wildly off base, were still correct in one respect. Tens of thousands of people may have not drowned, but tens of thousands—really, hundreds of thousands—of lives were threatened by the flood. That more people didn’t drown was—take your pick, or perhaps it was a mix of all three—miraculous, a lot of random luck, or a testament to the will of human survival.

  Half-truths and wild rumors abounded. A Dayton school building, with four hundred students, was underwater, and “as far as can be ascertained all of these little ones have gone to watery graves,” one widely circulated and absolutely inaccurate news report stated. One story that was repeated in the newspapers for a couple of weeks as a tiny item that was apparently used as filler, was an item stating that a commuter train from Loveland, Ohio, to Cincinnati, had gone through a bridge, and all two hundred passengers were killed. Not true, although the Loveland Bridge was wiped out. The entire town of Miamisburg, several miles away from Dayton, and its four thousand inhabitants were washed away, papers morbidly informed their readers. The number turned out to be closer to twenty-five.

  People were often listed as dead when they weren’t, and at least one of the deceased was mistakenly linked to a prominent name of the era. Esther Jones, a fifteen-year-old girl in Delaware, Ohio, who was being ferried from her home to safety by the Delaware mayor, or would have been if the boat hadn’t capsized and she was swept away, was the daughter of Sam Jones, a foreman at a lumber company. However, some newspaper reporter or editor, thinking of the then-well known evangelist Sam Jones, assumed this was the daughter of that Sam Jones, never mind that the well known preacher, known for preaching against sin and hypocrisy, died seven years earlier and never had a daughter named Esther.

  Newspapers were always hearing it from their readers when they misspelled a name or got a minor fact in the society pages wrong, but now editors and reporters were killing people off left and right.

  Springfield, Ohio’s paper carried a report that Hamilton, Ohio Police Chief George Zellner came into his house after working tirelessly all day Tuesday and much of Wednesday. He had been assured that his home was out of the flood zone, but instead he discovered it underwater, and his wife’s drowned body in the kitchen. Insane with grief, he pulled out his gun and shot himself. None of this was true, however. He actually had come to his house at 2 A.M., on Wednesday, after spending virtually all of Tuesday directing the rescue efforts. He wanted to check on his house and his wife. Finding his house surrounded by water, Chief Zellner waded into it, the water coming up to his chest, and entered his home. His wife was there and doing as well as one could expect.

  After a fitful night’s sleep, when Zellner woke up the next morning, the river had risen by another six feet, it was estimated, and he realized he and his wife weren’t going to be going anywhere. That’s when the gossip mill began churning. But Zellner was in good company. Six of his fellow police detectives and officers in Hamilton were, at one time or another during the flood, reported dead, only to turn up alive later.

  But it’s understandable. The newspapers were only going with the information that they had, and often the people who one would think would know what was going on, didn’t. Edward Hazlett, of Columbus, saw his nineteen-year-old brother Claude drown on Wednesday morning after a boat he was in overturned.

  A grieving Edward then reported Claude’s death to the police, and the local press dutifully reported it. But Claude was found later, very much alive, and lived for many more years to come.

  When it was all over, Ohio’s Bureau of Statistics would count eighty-three deaths in Hamilton, but it’s difficult to know if that number is accurate. In October 1913, a time when one would think Hamiltonians would have a pretty good idea of how many citizens they had lost, the Hamilton Evening Journal pegged the number at approximately 250.

  Given the destruction, one can hardly blame Purviance or anyone for overestimating the number of deaths in the flood. But Mother Nature was dealing with people, not rats. That there weren’t more deaths was due to peoples’ ingenuity and the will to use every strategy they could come up with to survive.

  In Brookville, Indiana, John Bunz, a 45-year-old junk dealer, was wading through water on the first floor of his home when he lost his balance and found himself underwater. He scrambled to the surface for air and bolted for the stairs as the water chased him. If he didn’t quite realize what had happened—his house had been ripped off its foundation and was floating down the Whitewater River—he would figure it out soon enough.

  That Bunz and his 78-year-old mother, Margaret, who lived with him, weren’t killed seconds or minutes later was because the house came to a sudden stop when it lodged itself into a tree. But after that fortunate break, everything they did was all about trying to outwit or at least outlast the flood. As the water entered the bedroom and began to fill it, Bunz then propped up his mother as high as possible, holding her in his arms, with the icy water eventually reaching his shoulders. He kept her that way for the next seven hours until he realized he had lost her. Bunz was rescued another two hours later.

  Grover Brown, a 24-year-old railroad worker living in Cambridge City, Indiana, also floated down the Whitewater River on this day—for sixty miles. Twenty-three hours later, he wound up in Harrison, Ohio, where twelve people reportedly died, and the water was twelve feet deep on the well-trafficked State Street. He spent his time on the river, clinging to the floor of a building that was swept away, and he could have easily died, and by all rights, he should have.

  Brown was stark naked for those sixty miles, having taken off some of his clothing to lighten his load when in the water, helping his family escape. Then he lost the rest of his wardrobe from the pull of the river. He came close to freezing to death, and he would have, except that he found some drowned chickens in the water, plucked their feathers, and covered himself as best he could. He was probably too frozen to be embarrassed
when two men later pulled him off the roof and away from the water. He couldn’t have been too scarred by the experience, though, or at least he must have liked the looks of Harrison. After marrying a woman named Irene Delacroix later in the year, who probably did not see the chicken-feather incident, they moved to Harrison.

  James Wrinkle, a wealthy manufacturer of washtubs, created a boat out of his washtubs and was credited with saving 125 of his neighbors. The river had chased him up to the second story of his office building, and as the water swirled around his ankles, Wrinkle found himself staring at a pile of about fifty washtubs. He hastily nailed together eight of them, creating a boat that allowed for seven passengers, and then he grabbed a long pole with a hook on the end, which he normally used for reaching high objects.

  With it, he braved the mad waters, using the pole with the hook to grab onto tree branches, pushing him through the river-streets and allowing him to reach houses in his neighborhood. He ended up making thirty trips, taking anyone he saw to high ground.

  “Well, I couldn’t leave those people to drown, could I?” he responded when a committee of city officials later showed up to thank him for his service. Then he waved them off.

  Throughout Ohio, Indiana, and parts of Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, many homeowners were collectively preparing a clever flood-fighting tactic that undoubtedly saved many lives and homes. For those who didn’t want to leave their house or no longer could, due to the water surrounding them, many people started preparing their homes on the fly. It could be agonizing and against every homeowner’s instincts to welcome in the water, but that’s what many families did. While Charles Adams was concerned about currents moving through his house, many people willingly opened their front and back doors and windows of their home, and then—most painfully—some even cut a hole in the ceiling of the first floor.