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 now the Axlines’ worst fears finally began to come true. There was a series of ear-splitting cracks. The home ripped from its foundation. The Axlines were adrift.

  William and Addline must have had, at first, a stab of hope. After all, the house was floating upright, flowing with the current down Washington Street. This was much different than their fellow Tiffin citizens, the Knechts, whose house left its moorings but soon split apart, and the tragic Klingshirns, whose home splintered apart immediately.

  If the river parked their house on dry land, they’d be able to walk out of their home without a drop of water on them. And their luck held. The house dodged a mountain of metal that was once the Monroe Street bridge, and it kept going.

  But then the Axlines’ home floated toward the Baltimore & Ohio railroad bridge. Spectators were on the steel bridge, and according to reports, some of them, as the house made its way toward the bridge, incredibly didn’t leave. This bridge was not going anywhere. Some people couldn’t watch, and yet others couldn’t turn away, for what they saw unnerved and encouraged them.

  The Axlines were standing at the window on the second story of their house. Addline’s face was buried in William’s shoulder, and he was patting his sobbing wife on the head. He kissed her. Some spectators swore that they saw a rope tied around each of their waists, in the hopes of staying together once they were in the water.

  The house slammed into the bridge, and then appeared to duck underneath the bridge because the current pulled it directly underneath.

  Except for the roof, which was shorn off. The windows exploded, and the siding almost came off but somehow hung on. Several townspeople on the bridge, watching the house, would never forget what they saw next.

  The house was still upright and floating down the river.

  What’s more, inside the bedroom were William and Addline, standing, hugging each other, miserable and terrified. But alive.

  The house traveled another fifty feet. The Axlines were still beating the odds.

  And another fifty feet.

  Then the two-story house without a roof did the unthinkable and ruined this feel-good survival story.

  It capsized.

  The house tore into fragments. Moments later, William Axline could be seen, being pulled through the current, clutching driftwood and holding on to Addline. Moments later, William let go of Addline, but she, too, clung to some of the debris that may have been one of the floorboards in their bedroom or kitchen. Then a few minutes later, two blocks from Washington and now over Minerva Street, William and Addline were separated.

  Addline’s body would be found some time later on Abbotts Island, a land mass in the Sandusky River, five miles north of Tiffin. William Axline’s body wouldn’t be found until early May and was the last of the nineteen Tiffin residents to die in the flood. He also was located at Abbott’s Island, which is where most of the victims of Tiffin were dumped by the river. Dutiful husband to the end, around his waist rescuers found a rope.

  Addline’s hair was so entangled with the branches and garbage that it had to be cut in order to remove her body, observed at least one newspaper. Oddly enough, it’s difficult to imagine a detail like that being shared with readers today. While the mass media today reports many intimate details about people’s personal lives that someone in 1913 would have found astounding, editors and reporters often resist painting too gruesome a picture of how a victim, whether of a natural disaster or at the hand of a gun, looked when their bodies were located or discovered, among the reasons being that it’s unnecessary sensationalism and upsetting to the grieving victim’s family. It may be that reporters in earlier times wanted to gin up their articles and make them more exciting to read or satisfy readers’ innate curiosities. Probably all of that is true.

  But there may be another reason papers easily offered up grim details of how a body appeared when it was found. This was an age when you could easily find your life snuffed out by a flood, when a raft of diseases from measles to typhoid fever to whooping cough could end your life prematurely, in a time when stillbirth deaths were frequent and childhood mortality from a variety of diseases (which we are vaccinated against nowadays) was rampant. If you were alive into adulthood during the early 1900s, it was almost a miracle. Mellie Meyer, one of the flood refugees who walked the wires after the Saettel grocery store blew up, could have told anyone that. Her husband, William Meyer, a jeweler, had died six years earlier in a freak accident at thirty-eight years old, after stepping on a match.

  In 1907, many matches were still made of phosphorus, but that type of match was losing its appeal as a household product because the fumes were known to cause bone disorders in the workers manufacturing them. The initial appeal when they were first invented, however, was that these matches were “strike-anywhere” matches. All one needed to light one of these phosphorus matches was a bit of friction.

  William’s shoe, stepping on the match, was just enough for the phosphorus, and the spark it produced might not have mattered had it not been for the pan of gasoline that happened to be on the floor near him. A fireball erupted, catching William’s clothing. He ran out of his jewelry store, down the street, and into a grocery store, probably Saettel. Then he fell onto the floor, shrieking in agony, while everyone inside the store did what they could to extinguish the flames. But they couldn’t do enough.

  In 1913, you could be doing just about anything and find yourself in mortal danger. It may be that reporters offered grim facts about the flood’s victims to spell out that but for the grace of God, what happened to this person happened to you.

  * At least one account, if you’re wondering about his girth, puts him at 210 pounds, which for 1913 standards was probably pretty hefty. Hecht himself was quite lean, and so everyone looked heavy to him.

  * Hecht had an impressive vocabulary. Spavined means to be marked by damage or ruin, but since it was a term often used with horses, he was probably trying to suggest his comrade looked like a dying animal.

  Chapter Twelve

  Waterworld

  March 26, Wednesday

  Early morning, still dark, close to 7 A.M., just outside of Dayton, Ohio

  Ben Hecht and Chris Hagerty bid their pump-car companions farewell before the sun peeked out over the watery horizon. The Italian-Americans wanted to go down a different track away from Dayton, and Hagerty knew that a telegraph station was nearby and, with Hecht, started lumbering down a road leading to a faroff building illuminated by some electric lights, an oasis of power on the edge of a darkened city. Hagerty’s age and physical condition were showing, but when Hecht asked if he needed to rest, he was met with a hoarse “Keep going!”

  Suddenly, a gunshot ripped through the air. There were several more shots, close enough that bullets sprayed snow down on them.

  Hagerty dove off the road and into a snowbank. Hecht jumped in after him. Wet and shivering, they could hear voices.

  “What the hell are they shooting at us for?” asked Hecht.

  “Deputies,” Hagerty said, breathing hard. “Shooting down looters. They don’t know that we’re not a pair of ’em.”

  “I’m going to tell them,” Hecht said.

  “You goddamn dumb cub,” Hagerty said, “stay put. And keep out of sight. If they see us, they’ll pinch us and throw us into the can—either that or the morgue.”

  It should be noted here that with the benefit of hindsight and a broader knowledge of the state of law enforcement in Dayton during the flood, it seems virtually impossible that deputies would be shooting at Hecht and Hagerty. There were indeed some deputies in Dayton who were on the lookout for looters, but not in these early days of the flood when most of the force was focusing on search and rescue. It’s also unlikely because Hecht and Hagerty were on the outskirts of the city, away from shops. Dayton was becoming something of a No Man’s Land, so it’s possible that farmers or well-meaning but misguided citizens had taken it upon themselves to shoot first and ask questions later. However,
it is most likely that Hecht and Hagerty heard gunshots from people on roofs in distress, trying to attract someone’s, anyone’s, attention, or even worse, a rare but occasional occurrence during the flood: someone ending their own life.

  Whatever happened, about fifteen minutes later, Hecht and Hagerty began walking again—this time through deep snowbanks, away from the road—and the bullets.

  “It’s about another mile,” said Hecht after a while. Then he looked at Hagerty, who had stopped walking.

  “Go on, kid,” said Hagerty. “You’ve lost me. I can’t go any farther.”

  Hecht felt sorry for him and elated at the same time.

  “Go on,” Hagerty repeated, casting a long look at the city below them. “It’s your story. That’s Dayton down there. It looks like quite a flood.”

  “I’ll send somebody back to get you,” said Hecht.

  Hagerty nodded. Hecht couldn’t help but think his road companion might be dying. “But he did an odd thing for a man dying,” wrote Hecht. “He walked to a telegraph pole and started climbing it. I stood watching him, sure he had gone mad. I watched his paunchy, exhausted body lift itself foot by foot up the pole.”

  Hagerty, as it turns out, had been a telegraph repairman before going into journalism, and was able to nimbly scale the pole despite his otherwise weakened condition. He removed a pair of pincers from his pocket and, after a few moments, Hagerty slid down the pole and passed out in the snow bank.

  Hecht was baffled. It was only later that Hecht would learn what his friendly nemesis had been up to, and that at six A.M., in the Chicago office of the Associated Press, a bulletin arrived, via Morse Code through a telegraph wire, and that bulletin tersely offered up a one-word update on the flooding and scooping Hecht: “Dayton, Ohio—A.P. Everywhere. Hagerty.”

  Hecht and Hagerty were not the only reporters rushing to Dayton. Although many communities had their share of reporters coming to cover the flood, as the most affected city, Dayton was where reporters from all corners of the country wanted to be, and they were willing to do almost anything to get there.

  The day before, two Cincinnati Times-Star reporters, a photographer, and an Associated Press reporter piled into a car and set out for Dayton. It wasn’t easy driving in the rain to Dayton—the dirt roads were mud pits—but the machine, reporters wrote later, “splashed, slid, skidded and bumped splendidly until Muddy Creek,” a waterway between the towns of Mason and Lebanon. About two hundred yards of the road was covered with Muddy Creek, and in the middle of the road was an old, dilapidated wooden fence. The men were pretty certain their car could get through the road with the two feet of water, but the fence needed to be moved.

  Two of the reporters took off their shoes and socks and waded into the icy water—the rain was still pouring down, too, mind you—and moved the fence. Then they hurried back into the car, and onward they went.

  In Toledo, Dwight F. Loughborough, another Associated Press reporter, was told to make tracks for Dayton. He was refused a ticket on a relief train full of food and rescue supplies being sent to Dayton, so Loughborough volunteered to work as a train employee if they’d just let him on. They did.

  When Arthur J. Peglar of the Chicago American, an afternoon paper, reached Toledo, he was refused passage on the relief train but sneaked aboard anyway. He was soon discovered by a captain in the National Guard and thrown off. He then managed to get a phone call from Toledo through to Xenia, a town sixteen miles east of Dayton, where he talked to the editor of the local paper, interviewed him, and filed his story with his editors in Chicago. From there, he managed to find a train to Springfield, just twenty-six miles from Dayton, and from there made his way to the beleaguered city.

  St. Louis sent its star reporter Carlos F. Hurd, a 36-year-old who had gained local and national fame the year before by being the only reporter on the rescue ship Carpathia when the Titanic went down. Hurd, who was on the Carpathia taking a vacation with his wife, quickly recognized that he had stumbled on the story of a lifetime, but he was forced to do his interviews in secret, writing down notes on any random piece of paper he could find, including toilet paper, because the Carpathia’s captain, figuring the Titanic wasn’t going to be good publicity for the shipping industry, refused to help Hurd and did what he could to stop him from writing about the sinking ship. Hurd was banned from using the ship’s telegraph, and the stationery from the ship’s staterooms was taken away.

  Nevertheless, when Carpathia reached New York Harbor, Hurd threw the five-thousand-word manuscript—sealed in a cigar box and buoyed by champagne corks—over the railing to Charles E. Chapin, city editor of New York’s Evening World, who was waiting in a lifeboat with other eager reporters anxious to interview the Titanic survivors, and that’s how the first in-depth news of the now-infamous sinking reached the general public.

  For Hurd, Dayton’s flooding would have seemed almost hospitable. The survivors of Dayton and the Miami Valley were anxious to tell their stories and get the word out to friends and family in other parts of the country, who were just as eager to learn what was happening in the heartland.

  But once the reporters arrived in Dayton, there was no telegraph or telephone to relay information; and so once the journalists had conducted their interviews, they scattered to the nearest working telegraph station. For the journalists—the Cincinnati Times-Star reporters, anyway—that meant traveling to the town of Lebanon, twenty-seven miles away, one way, along muddy highways through rain and snow—and then driving back to Dayton to collect more information. A United Press journalist later reported that he and two other reporters traveled to Lebanon in a car that broke down. They hired a horse and buggy to take them the rest of the way, but the buggy became stuck in the mud. The information highway in 1913 was slow and fraught with peril.

  Dawn, Peru, Indiana

  Most of the men who had started rescuing people the day before stopped to sleep, having been hard at work for twenty-four hours, giving others a chance to take over. Sam Bundy, or Chief Bundy, as they called him, was the only original rescuer who still hadn’t taken a break, still rowing in his canoe, plucking out children from attic windows, stopping for frightened mothers on a roof, and helping men clinging to tree tops. His endurance was superhuman, and dozens of people now owed their lives to him.

  Early morning, Dayton, Ohio

  Judge Walter Jones awakened in his chair at the insurance building, unsure if he had actually slept. He decided he’d try returning to the Beckel House, in hopes that the hotel was serving some sort of breakfast. To his surprise and pleasure, they were. He and the guests received what he described as “cold meat and fried potatoes,” and, to everyone’s utter relief, they were given a glass of water and a cup of coffee.

  That was about the only good thing they experienced. Outside, they could tell that the water had dropped a little, but it hardly made a difference, as the current was still moving fast, and at every window they could see people looking back at them. Nobody was shouting for help any more. Everyone knew that nobody would be coming.

  Some guest or staff member came by and took Jones’s name and added it to a list. There were about two or three hundred people in the hotel, Jones learned, including those who had come from the street the previous morning. Someone nearby quipped, “May be useful when it comes to identifying remains.”

  Several people grunted a laugh, and then the room, except for the roar of the water outside, became quiet as everyone suddenly understood. The guest wasn’t joking.

  Charles Adams had hardly slept and, by the time light started to emerge, he was looking out the second-story window, searching for a boat. He was a jumble of so many mixed emotions. He was still euphoric that his son and wife had been saved, but the re-realization that his little baby girl Lois was gone forever, and that he would never hold her again, never make her laugh, never see her grow up, hit him hard. It was a long, miserable night.

  But it was morning now, and it wasn’t long before he spotted his two re
scuers, Jack Korn and Warren Marquardt. He started to flag them down, but as it turned out, they were coming for him anyway. “Come on, Charley,” said Marquardt, “your wife and babies are up at my house.”

  Charles stopped short. He must have heard wrong. “Babies?” he asked.

  After Lois Viola Adams had been pulled by the current from her father’s grasp, she had floated downstream, the water filling up her lungs. Two rescuers, Bob Whyte and Howard Ooly, turning onto Warder Street from Brightwood Avenue, spotted a woman waving frantically at them. The woman—whose name the Adams family never learned—had been looking out her window from the Folsom Apartments—the same place where someone would later spot Charles, Jr.—and saw Lois hurtling downstream. She shouted at the men to grab her. The perplexed men spotted the floating baby, snatched her up, and rushed her to the shoreline, where they found a policeman who had just taken a course at the Y.M.C.A. in life-saving techniques. He went to work trying to revive her.

  Lois was blue and, according to eyewitnesses, had swallowed her tongue. The police officer removed her clothing and began rolling the water out of her stomach. Once Lois began breathing again and emitted a cry after an interminable amount of time—some accounts say an hour, which seems ridiculously long, but clearly it was a long and agonizing wait—the officer wrapped her in a woolen blanket and took her to a nearby cottage belonging to a Mrs. Young. Not long after that, it was also Mrs. Young’s home where Lois’s twin brother Charles was brought.

  Grandpa Adams soon caught up with both Lois and Charles. But he had to do some serious talking to get the woman watching Lois to give her up. Mrs. Young was convinced that Lois’s mother had drowned and planned to keep the little girl as her own. Eventually, she relented, though, and agreed that Grandpa Adams could take her with him to the rescue station, where he found Viola.

  “What do you mean, babies?” Charles asked.

  “Both babies and your wife are up at my house, and they are all well,” said Marquardt, who must have enjoyed the shock and joy registering on Charles’s face after all of the dismal news that had engulfed the city. “Get your hat and coat, and we’ll take you up to see them, and you can stay up there.”