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 the good news was that it was only one levee that had failed, and that the others were holding up for the moment. They wouldn’t last—everyone seemed to know that—but people had just bought some extra time to escape. Not everyone necessarily used that time wisely.

  The Indianapolis Star later reported that there were several flood refugees holed up at the YMCA Building, chuckling over a story making the rounds about a man who owned a fancy breed of chickens. He had fifteen and was trying to save them. Animal lovers may understandably admire the guy, but what struck people as really funny was the man’s misplaced priorities. While he raced around the chicken coop, trying to rescue his prize poultry, strangers in a passing boat rescued the man’s wife and children.

  Nobody telling the story was sure if the chickens had been saved, since apparently nobody stuck around to find out.

  As for Mrs. Smith, later that night, people reported hearing a faint sound of what sounded like a woman screaming, although nobody could be positive who it was. The next day, people thought they heard a voice coming from her home, but with the water and piles of debris surrounding the house nobody dared try to reach the place.

  When three police officers went to her house on Saturday, a good five days after the flood, they found Mrs. Smith on her bed. Best as they could tell, judging from the height of where the wallpaper was ruined and from the position of her body, Mary E. Smith had been standing on her bed, with her chin just up above the water. She had done this, it was surmised, for about eighteen hours, until finally she couldn’t take it any longer and sunk to her knees, the fight all sapped out of her. Her problem was that she kept asking the wrong question. She shouldn’t have wondered what would become of her if she left and her belongings were destroyed. She should have considered what would become of her if she stayed.

  6:30 P.M., Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania

  The elements were worsening one state to the east of Ohio. Ethel Weaver, a nineteen-year-old, was clinging to her second-story window, waiting for rescue boats to get her. Her parents’ house was going to go any time; it was a victim of being in a low spot near not only Sugar Creek, but also French Creek, which Sugar Creek emptied into.

  Several men in boats, bouncing and bobbing furiously in the water, had rowed up to the house, and one of them was just below Weaver.

  Poised for a dramatic rescue, the men shouted for her to jump, and she did, right at a moment when the water pushed the boat away. She fell into the water and was never seen alive again.

  Sometime in the evening, Columbus, Ohio

  Everyone was feeling desperate, particularly at the workhouse. The 144 men were panicking and made it clear to the warden—at the first chance they got, they would try to escape their compound, not because they wanted to break the law, but because they wanted to live.

  George McDonald, the superintendent, responded by letting the men know that the guards could use their guns if anyone tried to leave. Not that he was trying to be a cruel and vindictive man, stressed McDonald. He believed that anyone who climbed into a makeshift raft or tried to swim to another building would be dead within minutes. Frightening as it was to be surrounded by water and for the first floor of the workhouse to be deluged, he knew it would be far safer to stay.

  8:30 P.M., Dayton, Ohio

  The rescue efforts near the NCR headquarters continued. Ray Stansbury, the foundry worker who had saved 150 people in the morning, kept at it through the afternoon, though his progress was getting slower as the waters became deeper. He had saved twenty-two lives, according to bystanders, still using his method of carrying people on his back and shoulders, through the water until he reached dry land. But he was getting tired.

  Allan W. Eckert’s 1965 book, A Time of Terror: The Great Dayton Flood, is a fun read in which the author admitted there were some creative flourishes throughout the nonfictional account to make up for not knowing exactly what had happened during the flood (over fifty years later, at the point Eckert wrote his book). But whether he was using his imagination or not, Eckert probably got it about right when he described Stansbury’s final moments as a rescuer.

  Stansbury’s “hands were punctured and gashed in a dozen places where they had encountered bits of glass clinging to window frames or nails or other sharp objects encountered beneath the muddy surface,” wrote Eckert. “Three times nails had driven through the soles of his shoes and into his feet, but it hadn’t stopped him. His back and shoulders were sore where dozens of boards and branches and other floating matter had bumped into him.”

  That may explain how Stansbury lost his balance, falling into the water and getting caught up in the current.

  Given what a life-ending move that usually would be, Stansbury should have died, and would have, too, if he hadn’t managed to grab a guy wire, which helps structures like telephone poles stay planted in the ground. The nineteen-year-old was caught in an eddy, more commonly known as a whirlpool.

  It didn’t take long for people to notice Stansbury floundering in the water as he hung on for dear life.

  Patterson made his way to the crowd, according to some reports, and may have assisted in the rescue. However he got out, Stansbury was pulled from the water unconscious and taken back to NCR where he was soon revived, although it may be that he had a more difficult recovery than he should have had. There’s one anecdote out there of a Dayton youth who rescued many people and then almost drowned—which sounds like Stansbury—and so a well-meaning bystander gave the young man whiskey. So much whiskey that the young man “was in a state of delirium,” according to a news wire report, which added: “He nearly died, but will recover.”

  A little after 9 P.M., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  The Allegheny River was rising, along with every other river in the region. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that a “negro may have perished,” stating that witnesses watched a black man in a skiff coming down the Allegheny River, but when the boat passed under the bridge, it was caught in the undercurrent and capsized. It looked to them as if the man and his boat were sucked underneath a barge. Newspapers were often tinged with light and heavy racist remarks, and near the end of the short news item, it mentioned that “it was ascertained later that a skiff had disappeared from the Dougherty boathouse, situated above the Sixth Street Bridge.”

  The article doesn’t come out and say it, but by putting that item at the end of the story, it does seem to leave the idea hanging there that the man may have stolen the boat. One may also easily suppose that, fearing for his life, he took the boat as a way of trying to escape the flood, but being 1913, it seems doubtful that many readers came away with that conclusion.

  Tiffin, Ohio, probably around 9 P.M.

  Occasionally Ray Hostler, the husband to the eldest daughter of the Klingshirn clan, Mary, lit a match to show their neighbors that they were still in the house and hadn’t somehow magically been spirited away. It was a hopeless attempt, really, to remind everyone that they still needed saving. Water was on the second floor at this point, and everyone was standing on furniture placed on beds, trying to keep their heads above water.

  The Klingshirns kept shouting for help.

  Crowds of neighbors, strangers, and potential rescuers remained on the riverbank, refusing to leave the Klingshirns but unable to do anything to change the equation. The Klingshirns were in the middle of the river, but there might as well have been an ocean between them and the waterlogged citizens of Tiffin. The rain hadn’t stopped, the river hadn’t slowed, and potential rescuers were blinded by the night. It is possible that several of the townspeople had their trusty Eveready flashlight, a product that had been mass-produced since 1902 and could be bought in a general store for about a buck or two, depending what type of model, but one or two flashlights wouldn’t have been any competition against the darkness. Even if they could turn night back into day, there was the river, which was moving swiftly. What they needed was a motorboat, but there were none nearby, and even motorboats were prone to tipping ov
er in these currents.

  Inside the Klingshirn residence, there was no electric, no flashlight; just the matches. Every once in awhile, spectators would see Ray lighting a match to show everyone that they were still there. Horror movies existed in 1913: Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring King Baggot, was making the rounds in theatres across the country. But nothing on the screen could compare with the chilling light-flickering sight of Ray, William, and Mrs. Klingshirn, holding Helen, and the children, all standing on furniture, trying to keep their heads above water.

  10 P.M., Dayton, Ohio

  Before retiring for the night, Governor James Cox ordered the entire state’s National Guard to mobilize. It was too dark and unsafe, even for the military, to travel to Dayton and throughout the state at night; but in the morning, first thing, they would head to the communities throughout the state that were in trouble, which was just about all of them.

  10 P.M., Indianapolis

  The levee on the north side of the Morris Street Bridge crumbled under the pressure of the river. Minutes later, the water was as high as ten to fifteen feet throughout much of downtown Indianapolis. The city was now officially under attack.

  Inside homes and buildings, at least those not touched by the flood, the people of Indianapolis still had electric light and could plan their rescues without squinting. The police superintendent ordered trucks sent to all corners of Indianapolis that could still be reached, where boats were believed to be, including a sporting goods company that furnished thirty canoes, and carpenters began building boats and oars. But a lot of the rescuing was directed by ordinary citizens mobilizing and realizing that if they didn’t do something right away, no one would.

  Once outside, rescuers truly were on their own. Although some streetlights may have been operating, attempting anything was mostly a matter of using a lantern and hoping for enough moonlight. But at least the rescuers had a boat. That was more than the victims had.

  Philander Gray and his oldest son, William, were wading toward Morris Street when the second levee broke, and a wave of water came rushing for them. They were caught by surprise but had been well aware of the flooding, and really never should have been there. Philander had taken his wife, Laura Jane, and the rest of their children to safety, leaving his sixteen-year-old behind at their house to move furniture to the second floor. Then the 41-year-old father, who put up wallpaper for a living, went back for his son and helped him move more belongings and valuables to the second floor.

  According to an account written by John R. Repass for the West Indianapolis Historical Society, around 10 P.M. they were swept off their feet but grabbed onto a railroad switching tower, which was on the northeast side of some tracks. They were able to scramble up the tower for a while and presumably could have remained there. But it was dark, and it was obvious that the flooding wasn’t going to get better any time soon. Repass speculates—and he’s probably right—that Philander and William heard the screams from a family—a mother, father, and two children—in a house just across the street from the switching tower. (A rescuer, I. C. Huddleston, reported seeing the bodies of the four, so the screams were emitted just before a terrifying end.)

  Those shrieks may have been the impetus for the father and son to leave the tower and try to make their way to dry, higher ground, which in this case was the corner of Harding and Morris Street. They didn’t have all that far to go—about a block—and they fared pretty well, or so it seemed. They half-swam and walked and waded together, in the darkness, shivering and frightened, and as William emerged from the water, rescuers swarmed him and took him to a shelter. William believed for days that his father was at another relief station. But once he learned the truth, he realized that somewhere in the last few feet of their travels, his father must have tripped or been knocked off his feet. Obviously, Mr. Gray meant well and was trying to do the right thing by his wife and kids, but as Repass astutely observes, “The family of eight children was left destitute because of a futile attempt to save household furniture.”

  And yet—you can hardly blame Philander Gray and so many other flood victims for trying to save their belongings and not wanting their family to lose everything they had. Flood insurance did not exist in the United States.

  Flood insurance was first sold by a company in Trieste, a city in Austria that is now part of Italy. The company soon gave up the product, though, and then some French companies tried again in 1865, but they, too, soon stopped, citing lack of demand. In 1897, in Toulouse, France, three more companies made the attempt—France was infamous for its floods—but once again, lack of demand killed the idea. That same year, a stock company in Cairo, Illinois, a city well accustomed to flooding, began selling flood insurance to homes and businesses in the Mississippi Valley. But then there was a flood in 1899, and so many claims were filed that the company went out of business—and to add insult to injury, the insurance firm’s head office was flooded.

  So by 1913, no company in the United States had made the attempt to sell flood insurance again, and the only business in the world selling flood insurance was the Swiss National Insurance Company in Basel, Switzerland. Nobody in America would try again until the 1920s. The basic problem, as insurance carriers saw it, was that there were too few consumers interested in flood insurance. The only ones who bought it were those who knew that there was a good chance their home might be flooded, and then of course the insurance companies did not want to sell to them. Someone miles away from a river or creek had no incentive to fork over money whereas with tornado insurance, that was another matter. As long as your state was routinely in the path of a tornado, it made sense for anyone to buy it, and since the demand was there, and odds were good a tornado would be more selective in its number of victims, it made financial sense for an insurance company to offer it.

  There may been other specious reasons. One unidentified insurance agent interviewed by the Indianapolis Star in a story that ran on March 27, 1913 tried to explain the reluctance to insure against the river in this way: “When a flood destroys property, everything is swept away, and if flood insurance were written[,] the company would be forced to take the property owner’s word for the amount of loss. This arrangement would be very unsatisfactory to any insurance company, and for this reason the writing of flood insurance is not practical. In the first place, the people do not fear floods, and for this reason there is little demand for insurance to cover damages done by high water.”

  The insurance agent was right. As a general rule, people didn’t fear floods, but they sure did now. The insurers wouldn’t bite, however. They knew that flood insurance was a losing proposition for them.

  The rest of the country …

  For anyone in a safe, dry part of the country and reading the evening papers or going to bed that night, it must have felt as if the country was washing away, from the center outward.

  In Milwaukee, almost four hundred miles away from the ground zero that was Dayton, the rain turned the streets into miniature rivers while a tornado-like gale blew down seven of the city’s biggest coal conveyors, shattering the massive steel frames into shrapnel. A sign on the top of the city’s famed Majestic Building, which was supposedly the largest one-word sign in the world at the time, was hurled off its foundation, the steel frame landing on the roof of a nearby hotel while hundreds of electric light bulbs smashed into the street.

  In Racine, a hotel was wrecked, barns were blown apart, trees uprooted, and forty windmills and twenty silos destroyed. Nobody had seen anything like it since the Cyclone of 1883. Heaven help you if you or your home were in the path of any one of these flying objects.

  And in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the flooding was at the highest level since 1881. Schools were closed, businesses flooded, and homeowners ran for the second flight of stairs or fled for higher ground altogether.

  Just outside of Erie, Illinois, yet another tornado ensured that nineteen-year-old Lulu Ellison, asleep in her home, came to an untimely end when her house collapsed onto
her.

  In St. Louis, the River Des Peres rose out of its banks, seven feet higher than anyone could remember, and flowed through the neighborhood of Forest Park. While the city came through the flood with minimal damage, ten blocks of houses were submerged and one person drowned: William J. Ross, a 54-year-old African-American carpenter. It was 6:30 in the evening when Ross decided to attempt to wade the current that had surrounded his house. It isn’t known if his wife, Lizzie, forty-eight, was inside the house, but she worked out of the home as a laundress. Perhaps Ross decided to pick her up, given the storm conditions, or he may have been used to seasonal flooding and not been worried. Ross lived in a neighborhood known as the Bottoms, historically an area of the city known for flooding—and poverty.

  The water wasn’t deep, but the current was powerful, and Ross was knocked off his feet. Whatever came next—drowning or a head injury—his body was found just an hour later.

  In Arkansas, in the villages of Leslie and Rumley, approximately ten people were killed by a tornado. One was killed in the town of Clarksville, a little over five hundred miles away from where the first tornado had touched down two days earlier in Omaha.

  “The most terrific rain storm in years combined with a heavy thaw played havoc with railroad systems all over the state Sunday and swelled local rivers and creeks until they are well past the flood stage,” reported the Grand Traverse Herald, the paper of record for Traverse City, Michigan.

  And all the while, it kept raining.

  11 P.M., Tiffin, Ohio

  Sometime during the night, Theresa Klingshirn prepared for the worst. She made a rope out of clothing and tied it around the waists of her two-year-old, Helen, and Catherine, who was four, and possibly eight-year-old Richard. She hoped her children’s bodies could be found more easily if they were all together.

  The family was prepared for the inevitable but not going down quietly. Across the river bank, George Klingshirn could hear his wife and children shouting and screaming for help.