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

by Geoff Williams

  And people were going to be sick and dying whether there was a flood or not. The Newark, Ohio paper reported that on March 25, the day the flood erupted, fifteen-year-old Harry Loughman was seized with convulsions, probably an epileptic attack. His elderly doctor couldn’t make a house call the normal way, and so a neighbor, Ben Slate, who thankfully was a husky young man, was called in to help. Slate carried the 175-pound town physician on his shoulders for a hundred feet through the knee-deep water to the Loughman family’s home.

  A three-month-old baby’s funeral in Newark was delayed a day, and a Mrs. Charles McNeal wouldn’t be arriving in Newark any time soon; the Texas resident, who was coming to town for her mother’s funeral, was trapped on her train in Indianapolis, which couldn’t make it any farther since so many railroad bridges had been destroyed. Grave diggers in Newark found their jobs next to impossible, for obvious reasons: water kept rushing into their holes. But that was a better situation than the cemetery in Tiffin, Ohio, where coffins were dredged up out of the dirt by the flood and were spotted floating down the Sandusky River. Meanwhile, bodies of missing people, who had died somewhere but hadn’t been found yet, were revealed thanks to the flood as well.

  The badly decomposed body of James Kearney, a Columbus merchant, would be discovered in a tree on March 29, to everyone’s surprise. He had been known to have drowned—several months earlier.

  In Peru, Indiana, something similar happened. The body of George Baker, a 53-year-old steel mill worker who had been missing since January, was found soon after the flood began, washed up in a tree. Dead men tell no tales, but people were soon telling them at his funeral, remembering an earlier tragedy Baker had been involved with.

  Baker married his bride, a Peru resident, Flora Bannon, on July 6, 1887. He was twenty-seven; she was twenty. Unfortunately, Flora’s stepfather, James Christianson, was none too happy about the union and vowed he would kill Baker the first chance he got. That July day, Christianson, stinking drunk, stormed to his daughter’s new home and asked her to come outside. She did, and not realizing he was about to demonstrate that she was smart for getting married and leaving his home, he beat her to a pulp. Or he would have, if neighbors hadn’t come to her rescue, including a Dr. North, who worked for the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific railway and just happened to be walking by.

  Christianson, realizing he was outmanned, ran for cover and dashed into the woodhouse. Moments later, they heard a gunshot.

  Dr. North assumed the madman had realized what a monster he had become and, full of grief, killed himself.

  Or at the very least, injured himself and needed medical attention. Dr. North ran to the woodhouse.

  Dr. North’s assumption was wrong. As he opened the door, Christianson pulled the trigger, and the bullet pierced underneath the physician’s arm and went straight into his liver and kidney, killing the good doctor. The neighbors managed to wrest the gun away from Christianson, who was then taken to the jail at the courthouse. By the next morning, a mob had gathered outside of the jail—and by 12:15 P.M., they were storming it. Christianson was dragged to the Broadway Bridge. A rope was thrown over a beam, Christianson was fitted with a noose, and after he was hanged, about a thousand people gave three hearty cheers.

  None of this could have been healthy for George and Flora’s marriage, for while they had two children, they eventually divorced. In 1899, Flora remarried, and George moved in with his sister and her family. That is, until something happened to him in early 1913 and he went missing, and then ultimately resurfaced, his lifeless body found in a tree. And, in a sense, the entire drama surrounding Baker and his stepfather-in-law was finally finished, for the Broadway Bridge where Christianson had been hanged was demolished in the flood.

  Roughly 2 P.M., West Lafayette, Indiana

  The timing of the flood couldn’t have been much worse for college students, many of whom were on their way home in trains and cars for spring break. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio was on high enough ground that their campus didn’t experience any serious flooding, and the flood’s timing was such that school’s officials forbid the students who were still on campus after Easter Sunday weekend from leaving, thus ensuring their safety, although there were a number of petrified parents who, without telephone access to the University, had no idea if their child was safe on campus or stuck on a flooded train car somewhere between Oxford and home.

  Miami University fared well; other colleges did not. In Bloomington, Indiana, the home of Indiana University, the land that hosted the university was high enough that the school didn’t fare too badly. The northeastern and southern sections of the city were almost under water, however. The “River Jordan,” an amicable nickname for a tiny, easily crossable creek—you can just jump over it in places—that runs throughout the campus, literally became a river. East Kirkwood Avenue, a road leading to the campus, was under more than two feet of water, and the flood was two feet deep in Indiana University’s power plant. East Fourth and East Sixth streets were underwater. Indiana Avenue was turned into a lake. Fortunately, it was more inconvenience than calamity, unlike towns around them, like Nashville, where Salt Creek swallowed up and destroyed quite a few homes.

  But some universities had serious problems. At Purdue University, most of the students were safe on parts of campus not in the flood zone, but the situation was becoming worse by the hour. Initially, though, the rain and flooding was more a curiosity than anything else, and so students unwisely went on what one of them called “an inspection tour,” checking out the Wabash River that separated West Lafayette from its sister city Lafayette.

  The townspeople came out as well, among them Paul Wangerin, a cashier at the Burt-Haywood Company, a publishing house. Arnold Herbert, one of the younger owners of Kimmel & Herbert Book Store, was in the mix as well as William L. Oilar, the advertising manager of the Journal and Free Press, one of Lafayette’s two newspapers. Among the crowd of onlookers, Wangerin, Herbert, and Oilar stopped at the edge of the bridge, discussing the river and how bad the flood might get.

  Wangerin then suggested that they cross the bridge to look at the water from the other side of the river, but with the churning water splashing onto and over the bridge, Herbert and Oilar gave it an uneasy look and decided to pass on the idea. Wangerin didn’t see a problem, however. This was a modern, sturdy bridge, after all. The asphalt pavement over the bridge, for instance, was an innovation when it had been built just nine years earlier, replacing a wooden predecessor that had lasted for sixty years.

  Wangerin started across the bridge and was joined by Charles Burkhouse. Burkhouse, a 44-year-old carpenter who everyone called Charley, may or may not have been friends with Wangerin, but they were both born in Europe. One student would later refer to them as “foreigners,” perhaps not unkindly; but as men who were making their way through small-town America, they at least had that bond in common. Wangerin was born in Germany and had moved to the United States sixteen years earlier; Burkhouse originally hailed from Holland.

  People, including college students, had been walking across the bridge all morning and throughout the early afternoon. Crossing the bridge may have seemed adventurous, but probably not dangerous.

  Back where Wangerin had left Herbert and Oilar, they began talking with William F. Stillwell, president of the Henry Taylor-Lumber Company. The 56-year-old Stillwell, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, had moved to Lafayette in 1877 and likely brought up the infamous 1883 flood that sent many families and business owners fleeing in West Lafayette. But, still, the casualty level of the 1883 flood was blessedly low, other than the occasional hapless individual—an eighteen-year-old collecting driftwood around Indianapolis met his doom in the White River. Having seen his share of floods, Stillwell probably wasn’t too concerned.

  Instead, paying little attention to Wangerin and Burkhouse or the river beneath them, Stillwell and the others were watching their side of the riverbank. The water was chewing up the dirt, and mice and rats were fleeing, following
their instincts and doing their best to avoid the rising flood. After observing the adventures of these rodents, Stillwell felt he had better things to do and left. A few minutes later, Herbert and Oilar heard a crash. Rather, they felt it. They said later that it was like being in an earthquake.

  At least one pier—the vertical support that holds up a bridge—broke away, followed by two spans—the flat section between the piers that people and vehicles cross on. The bridge, in other words, was collapsing due to the erosion of the riverbank, engineers would later determine, and Wangerin and Burkhouse were both walking on the disintegrating structure.

  Like the rats, Wangerin and Burkhouse’s survival instincts took over. What was behind them was tumbling into the river, but what was ahead of them wasn’t. They broke into a run.

  They reached the levee that the bridge was attached to, just as the bridge behind them sank into the raging river.

  But they swiftly skidded to a stop. Part of the levee, the part in front of them, had broken apart as well. So there was no bridge behind them, and the river now flowed on all sides of the piece of the levee on which they stood. Wangerin and Burkhouse were marooned on their own little dirt island.

  But it wouldn’t be an island for long. The river was now rushing past their waists.

  The hundreds of horrified bystanders—a number growing exponentially with each passing minute—started screaming, yelling, and pleading for somebody to do something. Confusion abounded. Herbert and Oilar could see two men standing on a broken chunk of the levee but weren’t sure if it was Wangerin and Burkhouse or two other unfortunate souls. City officials, now understanding what they were dealing with, rushed to rope off the Main Street Bridge, lest they have people crossing during its collapse. In the chaos, two Purdue students who had come to see the river decided that they weren’t going to stand and watch two men die. They grabbed a canoe.

  Bystanders warned Leland Philputt Woolery, a 22-year-old freshman from Indianapolis, and George Beckwith Ely, a junior, not to go.

  It was too dangerous, and the current was too fast and unpredictable, they were warned, but the young men couldn’t be dissuaded by the rational suggestion that they could lose a fight against Mother Nature. Woolery, in particular, may have been on an adrenaline high. He had just been accepted into a fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, and would soon be initiated. His first year of college was going, well, swimmingly.

  Leaving the Main Street levee, they rowed into the muddy brown mess that was now sixteen feet deep, with the onlookers fearfully watching. Then, about thirty feet from the new shoreline, a wave crashed into the canoe’s side, and Woolery and Ely were pitched into the rushing rapids.

  When Ely emerged from under the water, he spotted a roof—of a coal barn, it would turn out—and swam toward it. The crowd broke into cheers, and once he reached it, he fought to hang on to the roof. It took a while, but he managed to pull himself out of the water and scramble up the slippery slope. For the moment, he was safely above the water.

  Woolery didn’t have as much luck.

  As the waves beat against him, he found the top of a tree, but he lost his grip when the overturned canoe crashed into him. Then the current sucked Woolery away from Ely and the coal barn and toward what was left of the Brown Street levee, where Wangerin and Burkhouse watched, incredulous.

  Woolery was an agricultural student. It is possible that he didn’t know how to swim, or, like most men of the time, couldn’t swim well enough to save his life, especially in an erratic current and while weighed down with wet clothes, so it’s also plausible that even an Olympic swimmer couldn’t have defeated the Wabash River that day.

  The thousands of people watching could only stare and shout in terror as Woolery was pulled through the river and then abruptly disappeared underneath the water. When he resurfaced, he seemed to be either unconscious or dead. Then the river took him again.

  Later that day, Woolery’s father, Frank, received a heartbreaking telegram from one of his son’s soon-to-be fraternity brothers. Frank Woolery was informed that at 2:10 P.M., his beloved son Leland had drowned in the Wabash River while trying to save two men.

  The rest of the details were left to Woolery’s imagination.

  On the roof of the barn, meanwhile, Ely was standing on borrowed time. The river was climbing, six inches every hour, and lashing out. Ely didn’t fear that the barn would be underwater any time soon, but if a steel bridge didn’t have any hope against the Wabash, what were a barn’s chances? Any minute, it seemed, the barn would separate into a million splinters, or eventually, given enough time, it and Ely would be swallowed by the Wabash River. Further down the river and still waist-deep in water, clinging to the levee’s railing, Wangerin and Burkhouse were worried about the same fate.

  By now, Ely’s mother had been called, and she watched from the shore with the other residents. She was frantic, hoping against all hope that her son wouldn’t meet Woolery’s fate, and police captain John Kluth was well aware of her presence. It must have felt surreal. Everyone had been safely watching what was a curiosity, and now, within minutes, Lafayette had lost one young man and three more men’s lives were in danger.

  But Purdue University was known for its schools of agriculture, pharmacy, and engineering, and Kluth made all of the college’s engineering students proud that day.

  Kluth didn’t feel he could send any of his officers in a boat to bring back either Ely or Wangerin and Burkhouse, not after what everyone had just witnessed. It would be a suicide mission. But Kluth surveyed the situation and thought he might be able to save George Ely.

  Kluth noticed that a telephone wire ran from the shoreline to the roof of the office at the coal barn, and then all the way across the rest of the river to the Main Street levee.

  First, Kluth directed his men to cut the telephone wire on the shore’s end, across the river from the levee. Then an officer tied a rope to the end of the wire, and, shouting to Ely, they made it clear that he was to pull the wire until he had the rope on the roof. Then he was to untie the rope.

  Once that was done, Ely had one end of the rope, and the police officers had the other. To the end of the rope that they had, they tied a boat. Ely soon understood. He needed to pull the boat through the waves and to him. Once he did, he could attempt to row back to shore.

  It was a clever plan, but the waves whipped the boat so badly that it was soon clear that Ely would need the strength of ten men to pull the boat to the barn.

  Kluth had another idea.

  Meanwhile, one of Purdue’s professors, a veterinary surgeon, Dr. Roy Birmingham Whitesell, determined that someone might be able to row out for Wangerin and Burkhouse if coming from another direction and leaving the shoreline at a point much closer to the two men. The thirty-year-old secured a canoe and embarked into the choppy waters.

  Kluth was still putting his plan in motion. Either Kluth or one of the deputies got the boat back to the shore and thus had one end of the rope that led back to George Ely. From there, they tied a pulley to the end of the rope, and Ely was able to bring the pulley through the water and to his roof. Then Ely fastened the pulley onto the telephone wire that led back to the Main Street levee.

  Ely climbed onto the pulley, and as Purdue’s student newspaper would put it, he “made a slide for life.”

  As soon as he reached the shore, Ely, assuming the best, asked where Leland Woolery was. Someone broke the news to him that his pal had drowned, and reality came crashing over Ely. He fainted. Then he was carried to a car, with, one hopes, his mother trailing after him. When the car Ely was in drove through some water at the edge of the river, just before speeding away, the crowd broke into a roar of applause and approval.

  But the danger wasn’t over yet. Wangerin and Burkhouse were still stuck on the Main Street levee, and Dr. Whitesell was risking his life, fighting the waves, doing everything he could to get his canoe to the two men. It took a while, but eventually, he reached them, and the men clamored into the boat. One hope
s that they, or anyone else in the crowd that day, never walked across a bridge during a flood again.

  2 P.M., Middletown, Ohio

  The bridge over the Great Miami River collapsed, after being hammered by house after house hitting it.

  2 P.M., Columbus, Ohio

  On the west side of the city, a plant owned by the Beck Electrical Supply company burned to the ground, but adding to the confusion: for the longest time, firefighters—who were having trouble reaching any fire due to the rivers in the surrounding streets—thought it was the Barch Brothers’ Junk Shop that was going up in flames. That alarmed everyone, because residents knew that if the junk shop went down, two more houses next to it would go, and then a carriage factory beside it.

  It was a confusing afternoon.

  True, most of the 120,000 residents of Columbus were either safe enough on the second story of a building or out of reach from the affected areas, but you couldn’t travel far without finding some part of the city that was underwater. Two main rivers, the Scioto and Olentangy, travel through Columbus and meet up just west of downtown, and there were other waterways, such as Alum Creek, Big Walnut Creek, and Darby Creek, to contend with.

  For the thousands who were in the water’s way, it was a miserable existence. William Bard, a contractor, was rescued by a police officer from the second story of his home; but after their boat capsized, the two men had to wait at the top of a pile of lumber for an hour until another police boat could pick them up.

  Albert B. Gore, who isn’t an ancestor—not a direct one, anyway—of the future vice president, was a mail carrier and after finishing his morning delivery, he heard that his house was surrounded by water. The 54-year-old postal worker immediately dropped whatever he was doing and set out to rescue his wife and daughter. The only way he could envision getting to his house was to cross the Scioto Bridge, which was in danger of collapsing. Police officers tried to stop him, but Gore crossed and managed to find a boat and rowed six blocks to his house. He took his wife, Flora, and his 23-year-old daughter, Edna, away from their home, but not before promising a girl next door that he would come back for her. Gore brought his wife and daughter to the Rich Street Bridge, which had become something of a landing for refugees of the flood, and then he kept his promise. About two in the afternoon, he went back for the girl.