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

by Geoff Williams

  Jones and his fellow guests also kept a close eye on their own building. Nobody knew why the northwest corner of the Beckel House had collapsed. While the water seemed a likely culprit, the collapse had occurred quite early in the flood, and several people speculated that a small boiler might have exploded in the basement.

  “We made and enforced a peremptory order that not a match should be struck in the house,” wrote Jones later in a religious newspaper, the Herald of Gospel Liberty, published by the United Church of Christ. “From the very first, the dread of fire was on the heart of everyone. One fellow tried to light a pipe but was properly taken care of. We had, as far as I know, no other such creature among us.”

  Many Dayton residents were afraid—if not for themselves, for their loved ones who they couldn’t find. Still having no idea where their father had been taken, or if the canoe he was in might have overturned, Orville Wright and his sister Katharine posted signs in the neighborhood they were staying in that alerted passers-by that they were looking for their father. They also told any stranger they encountered that they were searching for Bishop Milton Wright. But so far, as the day wore on, they had heard nothing.

  John P. Foose, then a 74-year-old Dayton resident and the Civil War veteran who sent his daughters to look at the river after being awakened at 4:30 A.M., was certainly worried, if not for himself, for his city. He described what he saw Tuesday from his home in a letter to his brother: “Boats moved past the house with old men and women in the last stages of dejection and despair. Some sat in boats with bowed heads, holding to the sides, expecting every moment to be overturned. Some boatmen were unable to manage the boats for there was a terrific current sweeping past the house. Small and large sheds and stables, even small houses swept past.”

  Probably only the children managed to enjoy the flood. Dayton resident Rita Rosemary Abel Gabel recalled in her memoirs of helping her father carry books upstairs and then walking on the floorboards, unable to hear the usual sound of her footsteps on the wooden floor and being told that it was because water was right on the other side. Not long afterward, a rescue boat—probably one from NCR—came for her family, and they climbed into it from the second-story window.

  “I remember Daddy, the last one into the boat, turning around and carefully closing the window,” wrote Gabel. “There we started up the street toward the Main Street Bridge with the man telling us to be sure to duck under the streetcar trolley wires. I, clutching my beloved teddy bear, wasn’t the least bit scared, just excited at all that was going on.”

  2:30–3:30 P.M., Dayton, Ohio

  On the roof of the building that housed O. G. Saettel’s and William Paterson’s saloon, Lydia Saettel prepared to board the boat with her eight-month-old baby, Oliver, Jr., or Ollie, as they called him. Her father-in-law, George, warily eyed the rescue boat and the current and suggested she leave the baby with him.

  “No way,” Lydia is said to have said, and with the baby and the store’s cash wrapped in a baby blanket, left with the rescuers. Her husband, Oliver, had already gone ahead, which sounds a little odd at first—isn’t it women and children first?—but the Saettels’ thinking was that Oliver could find a place for them to stay and either return or send someone back for them.

  George stayed behind for reasons unclear, and so did another two tenants: Caroline “Carrie” Schunk, the 36-year-old wife of a barber, and possibly her baby. It may be that there wasn’t room for them, and the rescue boat was going to come back; or, it seems more likely, since George wanted Ollie to stay behind, that neither Carrie or George liked the looks of the water and felt that they were safer waiting out the flood on the building. It’s understandable—climbing into a boat from your second-story window, when the waves are splashing into your home, has to be a terrifying idea. Even so, it was a tragic miscalculation on their part.

  For about an hour later, there was an explosion in the building. A neighbor, Lillie H. Kilpatrick, believed it came from the saloon, although some would suggest it was a gas leak in the basement, and still others said Mrs. Schunk was lighting the stove to warm up milk for her baby.

  People for miles heard the explosion. George Saettel and Carrie Schunk were hurled into the air, along with burning embers, or wood, which landed in the loft of a nearby stable, still untouched by the water and filled with hay. It quickly caught on fire. Then the flames shot across the street and onto several other homes. That the other homes were damp and drenched didn’t matter; they caught on fire anyway. The interior of the buildings’ walls, not to mention the second stories, which still had ample carpeting, bedding, clothing, and furniture in them, provided plenty of fuel for the fire.

  Incredibly, when Saettel came crashing onto terra firma, he was alive, and he landed on another roof.

  A floating roof.

  She should have been blown into oblivion, but Mrs. Schunk landed in the water and incredibly had enough presence of mind to cling to a spike in a telegraph pole about twelve or fifteen feet away from one of the buildings. But Carrie Schunk, while alive, was not well. Her clothes were in shreds, and so was the skin on her face and hands. She shrieked for help.

  Saettel wasn’t much better off than Mrs. Schunk. Like her, he was injured and the roof he landed on wasn’t attached to a building. It was a rogue roof, wedged against the building Harry Lindsey lived in and across the street from the grocery store.

  Saettel had family members who also lived across the street, and he was about two buildings away from his sister-in-law Mellie Meyer’s home, where she, her son Ralph, her niece Norma Thoma and the rest of the Thoma family were camped out. Some of the family and possibly all of them saw the patriarch of their family clinging to the floating roof.

  Across the street, George Timmerman, the moulder trapped in an attic with a mother and three kids, had heard the explosion and ran to the window to look across the street and see the walls of the grocery store collapsing into the wild river. If Timmerman and his group saw Saettel and Mary Schunk, and he must have, he didn’t say. What his group positively saw was the fire. It quickly spread to a stable and then a stack of hay. It wouldn’t take long for an inferno to skip from the stable and mow down the buildings until it had reached them.

  Everyone in the immediate vicinity was terrified, and everyone tried something different to escape the burning homes, which burned slowly enough, possibly because everything was so wet from the rain; but by the end, nine homes on the east side of Main Street would go down and then spread to the west side, where four more houses went down in flames. In order to escape, Lillie Kilpatrick and her uncle and some neighbors had to get to a bakery, ten feet away from their own building, which they did by building a bridge made of bed slats. After that, they climbed into a shed and used it as a raft.

  Harry Lindsey had thirteen neighbors and family trapped in his home. They all went from building to building until they were able to hail a rescuer in a boat who made multiple trips to bring everyone to safety. After three trips, though, the rescuer pled exhaustion and wouldn’t make any more. There was just one more trip needed and three people to save; people pleaded, and after begging and offering the man fifteen dollars, he finally relented.

  After shouting unsuccessfully for help, Timmerman and his group quickly climbed up to the roof, where they started going from one building to another. They didn’t have a lot of time to waste.

  Meanwhile, injured and weak, both Carrie Schunk and George Saettel were still floundering in the water, still trying to stave off the inevitable. Nobody could reach either of them, although two young men got into a boat and rowed toward Mrs. Schunk. The current sent them flying past her, though, and they were unable to catch hold of her, which may have been just as well since their boat capsized. The men swam to the barn, stopping there only for a moment since it was on fire, and navigated their way to a tree and then to another home.

  It took about half an hour or maybe even sixty minutes, but Carrie finally lost her strength and became lost in the watery
, yellow churn. George Saettel could only hold on to his floating, unsteady roof, which was bobbing up and down violently—and then watch disbelievingly as about twenty horses passed him in the water, struggling to swim and stay afloat, their hooves frantically struggling to find firm footing. Around Saettel and his loved ones and neighbors watching him, the fires only grew in intensity. Making matters worse, other houses, unmoored and floating, crashed into the fire, making the blaze instantly bigger.

  Driftwood and debris kept ramming into it, chipping away at the only thing holding the 66-year-old man up. Finally, the roof Saettel was holding on to couldn’t hold his weight, and the grocer was adrift again and flowing with the current. He was never seen alive again. His family—and Harry Lindsey, who had been helping his son move his goods earlier in the day—would be haunted by the experience for the rest of their lives.

  As Saettel and Schunk fought for their lives, smoke was blowing toward Timmerman, the mother, and children, with the flames closing in, and they were all screaming and crying, running up one roof slope, down another. The houses were close enough, or adjoining, so they could go from roof to roof, but it was an exhausting run across about a dozen roofs, with the flames slowly but methodically giving chase.

  And then they suddenly realized they could go no farther. They were out of houses.

  Timmerman looked around in the water, hoping to find something useful, like a boat; but all he saw within reach was some driftwood and some hulking figure in the water, possibly a dead horse or maybe a human. There was something else that he found himself looking at, but he could hardly contemplate what he was considering. Telephone wires were jutting out from the home, stretching over the water, and he could see that, far off, maybe six blocks, there were people in buildings. They might be trapped, too, but it looked as if the people were in a lot better control of their situation than Timmerman and his comrades were of theirs. Certainly, there was no fire six blocks away.

  But it would be insanely dangerous and impossible for the children to attempt.

  Timmerman, however, believed he could walk along the telephone wires, and if he could get somewhere else, maybe he could send help to the mother and child. The mother agreed, although she probably felt she didn’t have much choice but to agree.

  He started onto the wire, the way everyone did—hands on one wire, and feet on a wire below. If his foot slipped, he would have to hope that his hands could hold his weight. Therefore, he promised himself he would not slip. He walked as carefully as possible and as quickly as he dared. But it wasn’t just a nerve-racking exercise; it was actually exercise. His muscles tense, Timmerman sweated in the cold March air, constantly wondering if there would be a point when his arms and legs would simply give out and he would drop into the water.

  It became painfully clear to George Saettel’s family, once their patriarch was gone, that they couldn’t remain where they were.

  There was no time to pull a Timmerman and walk along the roofs, looking for an escape route. It was right there in front of them, and they would have to do what many Dayton residents, including Timmerman, as it turned out, were doing: walk across the telephone cables.

  Using a wooden plank, sticking out of the window, one end weighted down inside the home and the other end resting on a telephone wire, Mellie Meyer, Ralph, and Norma walked onto the wood. Their feet were planted on one wire; their hands grabbed on to one of the wires above it. Then they began to walk along the cable. Norma’s father may have been there, holding one of Norma’s younger sisters. Even if that wasn’t the case, there are accounts of several parents who navigated the wires, with their young, terrified children hanging on to them.

  Norma, like many girls, changed out of her dress and put on men’s clothing, knowing that it would be warmer and easier to maneuver in. She and her family carefully made their way down the street on the telephone cables. Below them was the water, rushing past them and between the buildings in downtown Dayton, carrying everything from nails and plywood and dead horses and Model T Fords to fallen trees.

  One newspaper account in the Hartford Herald, Hartford, Kentucky’s paper, described Mellie’s maneuvering over the telephone wire: “When just over the boiling torrent beneath, she swayed as though faint, slipped and the crowd stood with abated breath. By a lucky chance her senses came back to her in time and she grasped one of the wires.”

  George Timmerman kept walking the wires. It was exhausting, and he kept having to try and stop, recalibrating his grip and, while doing so, doing his best to rest. The crowd, six blocks and less away, had now noticed him and were shouting words of encouragement. Timmerman even saw some people he knew and heard them shouting his name. But Timmerman, every step of the way, was sure he was stepping his last. Then his cap blew or fell off his head, and he could hear the crowd gasp, as if anticipating he would go next.

  Finally, after six blocks, Timmerman was able to climb down a telephone pole to what was actual dry land, a hill where rescuers were waiting for him. Timmerman had reached the National Cash Register headquarters. By now, Timmerman was described as being in a “semi-hysterical condition,” sobbing, crying, and quivering, but he did sputter to self-appointed rescuers that he had left a mother and three children behind who desperately needed saving before passing out. Along with numerous other flood refugees, he was carried into the National Cash Register headquarters.

  About the time a boat was being sent for the stranded mother and three children—they were rescued, Timmerman would later be told—Norma Thoma and her family members had walked the wires for three blocks. At that point, a rescuer, possibly alerted by Timmerman to the fact that other people still needed help, was waiting and climbed the telephone pole to help the family down into a boat, where they were carried to safety.

  Eventually, the family made their way, like so many, to the NCR headquarters. A reporter captured the exchange that Norma had with one of the workers who was taking the names of the flood refugees.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Norma Thoma.”

  Apparently, Norma was wearing a hat with her men’s clothes because the registrar sounded surprised. “Norma?”

  “Yes, I’m a girl,” she said.

  Ralph Meyer, Norma’s cousin, was with her. According to the reporter, Meyer was accompanied by his wife and their three-month-old baby, which would be news to Ralph’s descendants. He was only seventeen at the time, and, to the best of their knowledge, not married yet and not a father. Still, even if the reporter got some of the names and information wrong, it sounds as if there was some set of young parents and a baby that day who made their way across telephone wires to safety.

  Over on the top of the telephone building, John Bell remained at his post, patching the city’s most important people through to the outside world when he could, and keeping both the governor and the occasional reporter informed of what was happening in the city.

  Bell could only know what he was seeing, but from the top of his four-story building, he saw enough to know that his city was falling apart. Far off in the distance, he watched buildings on fire. There were at least two going on: the one that started at Saettel’s, and another that had broken out at an ice cream factory just outside the business center. Meanwhile, the entire business section of Dayton was like a stormy lake, at least ten to twelve feet deep, he told a reporter listening in Phoneton.

  Bell was wet—it began raining again—and he was exhausted from lack of sleep but supremely grateful to be on a building that didn’t seem to be planning on going anywhere. His gratitude expanded whenever he saw someone who would have given anything to have traded places with him. He watched two men rowing a boat, desperately trying to keep it afloat. They were unsuccessful. They managed to grab a lamp post, however, and clung to it for half an hour before someone managed to throw a rope to them. The men were pulled into the second-story window of the nearest building.

  Bell saw quite a few objects floating past the building that looked like bundl
es of clothing. He eventually came to the sickening realization that he was seeing bodies.

  But what must have been even worse, the stuff post-traumatic stress is made from, was the sight of a woman and a child on top of a house floating by. The woman was screaming and begging for help while her child lay still at her feet. Bell watched from afar until the house was carried over a dam and he could see them no more.

  Chapter Nine

  Desperation

  3 P.M., Columbus, Ohio

  Casper Sareu, the workhouse prisoner who was caught up in the flood and then a passenger on a raft, was coming to the end of his travels. For a while, he had drifted among voting houses, which were popular in cities and were just what they sound like. They were small houses built for the express intent of voting for elected officials; they began to go out of favor as the population grew, and communities started using schools and other public buildings more frequently to give a place for people to vote. The voting houses had easily come off their foundations and were bobbing up and down, menacingly. They were small buildings, but they were still buildings, and they came close to crushing Sareu.

  From there, Sareu’s raft took him past a butcher’s shop, where stranded men unsuccessfully tried to throw ropes to him.

  After Sareu’s raft took him between two floating houses, which threatened to flatten him into a human pancake, he began to lose any hope of being rescued. His luck started to turn, however, when he floated near the car barns, or garages that housed the streetcars and where maintenance workers did repairs. Some of the car men saw Sareu and threw a rope. He grabbed it, but knowing he lacked the strength to hang on to it if they pulled him in, he tied it around his waist. They did reel him in, and Sareu spent the rest of the day and night with his saviors—with very little food among them. The next morning, a boat picked him up and took him to dry land, where Sareu would give himself up to an incredulous police officer.