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

by Geoff Williams

  The message then abruptly ended, and an Indianapolis Star reporter, in relaying the contents to the readers, speculated, “It was assumed by officials here that the operator was forced to swim from his post.”

  The Midwest was falling apart, and with everyone seeking higher ground, telegraph poles were in danger of becoming more useful for their height than as instruments for communication. It was extremely frustrating to Governor Cox, not just seeing his state in disarray, but not being able to procure any hard facts about what was happening. Before he bought the Dayton Daily News in 1898, he had been a reporter himself. One story about the governor places him on the scene of a terrible railroad accident, and while the other reporters naturally made their way to the destruction, the future governor first went to the town’s only telegraph office. In a move that would have impressed Hagerty and Hecht, he hired the telegraph operator to transmit the Bible to his newspaper. He did that, knowing that the current laws dictated that once a message began, it couldn’t be interrupted by other people.

  Then Cox covered the accident and wrote his article. He came back to the telegraph office, which was full of impatient and angry reporters all waiting to use the telegraph. Cox handed his article to the telegraph operator who transmitted it, allowing the future governor to scoop all of the other reporters.

  But now, Cox was governor of the state and was virtually single-handedly relying on his Columbus operator, Thomas Green, and his Dayton operator, John Bell, to patch him through to others or furnish him with the scant flood information that was out there.

  What Cox was hearing about Dayton was alarming. Over a hundred thousand people were estimated to have sought refuge on the second floors of buildings, many of which seemed in danger of collapsing. At the city prison, sixty prisoners were without food and water and, behind bars, were promising the superintendent that if they escaped, he and his family were as good as dead. The superintendent, probably through John Bell and the city’s only working telephone line, got word out that he needed the national guard’s help, and he needed it now. Three hundred people in the Algonquin Hotel were trapped, with the water up to its third story; men, women, and children stuck their heads and arms out windows, begging for rescuers to bring their boats and save them. No one did, unable to manage the currents or figuring the hotel seemed sturdy and probably fearing a riot if they brought their tiny vessel to a crowded window.

  What Cox didn’t know as he ran the relief efforts from the governor’s office, but could imagine, were the tales of individuals who were suffering. In Dayton, John Gartley, his wife, and three young children sat on the roof of their house with nine neighbors. They had two loaves of bread and rainwater to subsist on for about thirty-six hours until they were rescued.

  Also in Dayton, Marcus Furst, his wife, and nine-month-old daughter all sat on a roof. The only food that they had was a box of crackers that Marcus had retrieved, just as the floodwaters hit their kitchen.

  Those crackers were hard fought, too. Furst barely got out of the kitchen alive. But he did, dashing upstairs, where his wife was nursing their baby, and at that moment Marcus realized that he wouldn’t be eating any of the crackers. His wife needed them, and in return, their baby would get them. What he couldn’t have realized was that they would be trapped on their roof until Saturday with nothing else for his wife to eat. For a drink, he and his wife stuck their hands into the muddy water lapping their roof and sucked on their fingers.

  But that was more nourishment than Dorothy Wright, her parents, and her 96-year-old aunt Anna Caise had. They were trapped in their attic in Dayton for fifty hours with no food or water, very little ventilation, and no warm blankets or warm clothing. By the time they were rescued, they had all virtually given up hope.

  In Richwood, Archer Vaughan, his wife, and their eight-year-old granddaughter sat on a bed on the second floor of the house, the water lapping up against the mattress. For the next three days, they sat there, without food and drinking the muddy water to survive. Mrs. Vaughan, meanwhile, was haunted by what had happened before they were forced to climb onto the bed.

  When the water had been rushing by their house, the levels right up to the second-floor windows, Mrs. Vaughan had spotted one of her neighbors struggling against the current. As he came past the window, he screamed for help, and she had reached out toward him, missing his hand by a few inches. Later, she would learn that her worst fears were founded; he had drowned.

  In Columbus, the papers told of a mother, Mrs. Fanny Turner, and her daughter, handing over some of what little food they had, on a pole, to a neighbor with a baby. Mrs. Turner and their daughter hoped the neighbor’s baby would be all right, provided her mother could eat food and then nurse the infant. There was, indeed, a happy ending in that everyone lived, but Mrs. Turner, her daughter, and the neighbor were stuck on their rooftops from Tuesday until Friday night.

  These were the types of people Cox, the Red Cross, and the National Guard were powerless to help.

  Intermixed between the hunger and fear was boredom. The residents of the Algonquin Hotel were hungry, but the staff had collected enough rainwater so thirst wasn’t a problem. So, hungry and bored, but not fearing for their lives, a number of guests amused themselves by making fishing rods out of their room’s brass curtain poles. They then attempted to fish what they could out of the swift current. Among the items they caught: boxes of cigars, panama hats, automobile tubes, ladies’ hose, and boxes of handkerchiefs.

  In Middletown, Ohio, John McLaughlin, a superintendent at the W. B. Oglesby Paper Company, stayed at the factory longer than the other workers and found himself trapped, alone. For the next twenty-four hours, he drank river water that he ran through a piece of felt as a filter and ate oats that he found in a stable. The 55-year-old attempted to catch a hog that floated through a window, but the hog didn’t appreciate that and escaped. McLaughlin himself eventually managed to make a break from the factory in a boat.

  At 10 A.M., Governor James Cox did what he probably should have done the day before; but like many people of the era, any era, he hated to admit that he needed help. He fired off a telegram to the Red Cross’s Mabel Boardman. His telegram read:

  “Latest advices are that the situation at Dayton is very critical; more than half of the city is under water to a depth of 5 to 9 feet; horses have been drowned in the business section; the entire downtown commercial district is under water.

  “At this time there is no means of knowing the extent of human loss. Piqua, Hamilton, Sidney, and Middletown also badly in need. The maximum of our military strength is being used in different parts of the State. We have appeals from some parts by telephone to the effect that women and children in the second story of their homes await rescue.

  “Boats are being rushed overland by wagon, as railroad traffic in flooded districts is practically suspended.

  “We greatly appreciate the interest and cooperation of the Red Cross.”

  Mabel Boardman didn’t need to hear any more. She immediately—or as immediately as possible in 1913—dispatched T. J. Edmonds and C. M. Hubbard, of St. Louis, who were currently working in Omaha on tornado relief, to get to Dayton as soon as possible. Not long afterward, the mystery of Bicknell’s location was cleared up when a telegram arrived at the Red Cross. For the last six hours, he had been stuck at a train station in Wellington, Ohio, far up north in the state, about 170 miles away from Dayton. He was hardly alone, of course. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were stuck, trying to get from one place to another. One story that made the rounds in papers was that of a Miss Wilkins, a nurse who traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to visit a sick sister. While there, she heard about her family—in Omaha—and how her mother had been seriously injured. She took the train to go see them but became held up for an interminably long time in the flood chaos.

  And as horrific as the situation was throughout Ohio and Indiana and its surrounding states, people in Omaha were still suffering. Before Wednesday, March 26, was over, tw
o more people had died from their injuries sustained in the tornado, and another man, Thomas Barron, 48, was reportedly despondent after the destruction and, in the privacy of a hotel room, with a gun, he ended his life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Greed

  The morning of March 26, New Castle, Pennsylvania

  The city slowly came to a standstill. The Shenango River didn’t rush onto the streets like the Miami River rushed into Dayton and other towns, but it came nonetheless. School was called off, the electric light plant was flooded, the city water had been turned off, and just as it was unfolding in communities throughout states in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast, people were stuck on second stories and roofs without food and clean drinking water. It was estimated that at least one thousand homes were flooded, and police, firemen, and volunteer rescuers were manning boats and trying to help people to safety.

  But some police officers had a funny way of helping people. It wouldn’t become public knowledge until later, but at some point on Wednesday, a few officers apparently decided that their salary wasn’t high enough.

  Constable William Kerr asked resident John Standard, who lived on Mahoning Avenue, dangerously close to the river, for two dollars before allowing him on his boat.

  “I only have one dollar,” said Standard.

  “All right, give me that,” said Kerr.

  Standard, who must have been fuming inside, fished a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to a red-haired police officer at the front of the boat who then gave it to Kerr, at the rear of the boat. Standard was far from the only person asked to pay passage before being ferried to safety. Peter Kowalcruck, also of Mahoning Avenue, was also told he needed to fork over money. He and five other men asked Kerr for a ride away from Kowalcruck’s house and was told: “If you have got a dollar, we’ll come back and take you out.” The officers came back, and the six men gave them six dollars.

  Walter VanHorn, a 37-year-old Mexican or Spanish immigrant who is said to have not known much English, was told the going rate for being saved from the flood was five dollars, a whopping sum for someone of his socioeconomic status. VanHorn, who worked as a steamfitter at a steel mill, paid up. He had a wife and three kids to worry about.

  Dominick Dimucco of Center Street also paid five dollars, to a man who didn’t have a uniform on, in order to get his sister, her husband, and their seven children out of their house. He claimed it was a fireman and one other man who insisted on receiving money for transporting his family, although in court he would acknowledge that the fireman himself didn’t take the money and may have been unaware of what was going on around him.

  Whoever was receiving the money, profiteering was a sad reality. William Kerr and several other men of authority were benefiting, particularly from ethnic minorities and women, who they believed wouldn’t speak out, and the price kept going up with the water. It later came out that on Preston Avenue—which is no longer in existence—people were being charged twenty-five dollars each before being taken out of their flooded homes in boats provided by the city.

  Naturally, some people, honest and not, used the flood as an excuse to make a buck. The Morris Bros., a store that specialized in selling candy, ice cream, magazines, and newspapers in Van Wert, Ohio, began advertising their souvenir postcards of the flood on March 28 when much of the community was still underwater. The ads appeared on page three of the Van Wert Daily Bulletin, three columns over from the daily column with the headline DEATHS AND FUNERALS. Readers could learn how Mrs. F. A. Ward was fifty years old and a victim of the “terrible flood,” and of how the body of Nolan McElroy, who drowned with Charles Morris and two horses in a flooded quarry near Ada, Ohio, had just been found. Then, if they were feeling nostalgic, they could go over to the Morris Brothers for some of their famous oysters and some postcards featuring flood scenes.

  Nobody in town was particularly surprised that the Morris Brothers would find a way to profit off the flood. After all, J. W. Morris, the oldest of the brothers, had been in trouble with the law, complete with a warrant for his arrest, just a few years earlier for making some sales on a Sunday.

  In May of 1913, in Titusville, Pennsylvania and undoubtedly other papers in the area, the First National Bank of Warren ran an advertisement, noting that when their city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania had its nefarious flood “24 years ago, the 31st of May, many people who saved their lives not only lost their household furniture and personal effects, but their money, as many families had money hidden about the house. In the recent flood here,” the ad continued, “in our own state and in the states of Indiana and Ohio, there was a smaller percentage of loss of currency, but a number of cases have come to our notice where money secreted about the home was washed away or destroyed.”

  So the bank was literally trying to use the flood to drum up business, but at least their message—your money is safer in the bank—had the virtue of being true.

  Picture houses, in the days, weeks, and months after the flood, helped to draw in crowds by promoting footage of the flood. “As usual, the management of the Jefferson put one over by securing the Dayton Flood Pictures and showing them FIRST,” boasted an ad in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette on April 4. “Note: If it is WORTH showing, the JEFFERSON will have it FIRST.”

  You might think that the Fort Wayne public had seen plenty of water in person, but the management of the Jefferson certainly didn’t think so, splashing the Dayton Flood Pictures at the top of an ad, which then told potential moviegoers about their other films that weekend, including The Clown’s Revenge, a Danish film short (with sixty scenes, the ad promised) and Bachelor Bill’s Birthday Present, a comedy starring Edwin August, who had a thriving film career during the silent era but, by the time of the talkies, would be reduced to playing extras in Hollywood films, some of them classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Magnificent Ambersons.

  “A big special feature program has been arranged for the auditorium tomorrow which contains six reels of pictures and thirty-six views of the Ohio floods all shown to these delightful strains of music rendered by Schmidt’s orchestra,” announced an article in the Newark Advocate, the paper of record for Newark, Ohio on April 12. The following day in the same town, at the Orpheum, guests would “have a rare treat in store for them when 2,500 feet of flood pictures will be shown. These are moving pictures of the different Ohio cities that suffered from the recent high waters. The films have been receiving the highest praises wherever shown, and every Newark resident should take advantage of these pictures being brought to this city.” A three-reel feature would also be shown. Admission, only a dime.

  It wasn’t just Ohio and Indiana theatres trying to pull the public in with disaster voyeurism. Around the country, theatres were touting their flood pictures. In San Antonio, Texas’s paper the San Antonio Light, an article promoting the Wigwam Theatre raved about the new flood footage that Pathé’s Weekly, the first American newsreel, would be showing. “This week’s Pathé will be unusually interesting because of the fact that pictures of the recent floods in Dayton and other Ohio towns will be shown as well as scenes taken in Omaha shortly after the tornado there.”

  In an age when television news didn’t exist, nor radio, many people around the country who had family and friends in the flood zone naturally craved information about the disaster. It would have been a disservice not to promote the flood pictures, and yet one can smell the greed when the article continues, “When Pathé’s Weekly shows pictures, they are good. It is obvious, then, that you will see the best flood pictures yet shown.”

  On March 30, when many cities were finally drying out but some were still losing citizens to the unforgiving waters, the International Bible House in Philadelphia put on an ad in the Indianapolis Star, the Fort Wayne News, and other cities affected by the flood, and plenty that weren’t, in states as far away as Montana, explaining that “agents can make $10 to $20 selling $1 book on ‘Horrible Disaster by Flood and Tornado,’ greatest opportunity fo
r agents since ‘Titanic’; enormous demand for authentic book; 350 pages, 50 illustrations. Representatives sent to scene of disaster for true account and photographs of appalling calamity. Big profits for agents who begin at once. Part of publishers profits contributed to Red Cross relief fund; purchasers thus help sufferers; highest commission, 50 percent of better; freight paid; credit given; extra inducements to general agents or crew managers; outfit free. Act quick; be first around and make $10 to $20 a day.”

  The International Bible House had competition. The J.S. Ziegler Company, in Chicago, had a similar advertisement, stating: “‘TRAGIC STORY of America’s Greatest Disaster,’ flood, wind and fire; the biggest money-maker agents ever had; $15 daily if you start now; large $1 book 100 illustrations; outfit free.” Anderson Supply, also in Chicago, had an ad running for a book called “Horrors of Ohio Flood.” Agents would buy the book for 15 cents and sell it for $1. The American Educational League, another Chicago company, didn’t mention the title of their book but promised that it was the best one out there. In Altoona, Pennsylvania, and other papers across the country, there were ads for Our National Calamity—By Flood, Fire and Tornado, by the author of “Titanic,” of which millions of copies sold, the ad raved.

  The author was Logan Howard-Smith, although the ads never said that. Howard-Smith, whose pen name was Logan Marshall, knew his name wasn’t what sold. It was the tragedy. He was twenty-nine, a 1905 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and had already written the Life of Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 and the aforementioned The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters the year before. But what he did, at least with his book about the Great Flood of 1913, could hardly be called writing. Howard-Smith’s book, Our National Calamity—By Flood, Fire and Tornado, which can today be purchased on Amazon.com, was little more than copy taken from dozens of newspapers, word for word, and slapped onto pages and then bound between covers. It was gripping reading, full of juicy stories and crack reporting, all right, but he himself had hardly written a word, except perhaps for the preface of the book and a scattered number of passages or segues.