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

by Geoff Williams

  Somehow, all made it across the ladder straddling the water-filled alley to safety, away from the encroaching inferno.

  They reached the twelve-story Callahan Building, which was at the end of Main Street. They could go no further.

  It was a tall, towering building, impervious—at least it seemed so—from collapsing in a flood, although everyone worried about that nonetheless. But the building, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, wasn’t fireproof, and just a few hundred feet behind the Beckel House group was what Jones described as a “roaring, leaping pillar of flame, devouring everything before it.”

  The choices seemed pretty obvious. Stay and burn, or jump into the icy, muddy water and eventually drown, or fight the current for as long as possible and then die from the cold and exhaustion. Nobody seemed willing to burn to death, but nobody felt like trying the water. Not just yet.

  2:30 P.M., Fort Wayne, Indiana

  The river water was out of control. There were two opposing currents in front of the orphanage, creating a whirlpool. The fire department had strung two ropes up from the bridge near the orphans’ home, allowing the boats to connect themselves by a pulley and make the trip in relative safety. Only it was hardly safe. It ensured that the current could not carry the boat itself away, but capsizing was still a possibility. Only the strongest oarsmen were making the attempt to reach the orphanage.

  The police were now involved. Earlier in the morning, Police Chief Abbott had issued an order that anyone using a boat to save chickens, household goods, or some otherwise meaningless item compared to human life should give up their vessel immediately if it was needed. Well, it was needed now. Abbott ordered all available boats to the orphans’ home. Only three boats would remain in three other neighborhoods—Lakeside, Spy Run, and Bloomingdale. The rest were at the bridge, where the boats were being tied together to form a giant raft. He would soon give his okay for a life-saving crew from Chicago to come in and help, but they wouldn’t be here for hours, and in the meantime, he would try to do what he could. He currently was overseeing an operation in which all of the boats in the city were being tied together to form a giant raft bridge that apparently the children could use to cross from the orphanage to dry land. It wouldn’t work—it thankfully never got to the stage where any child attempted to use it—and the chief probably knew it was a weird idea, but he was running out of other ideas, options, and time.

  Columbus, Ohio, 2:47 P.M.

  Governor Cox, who was plenty concerned about the entire state, and the city he lived in, received word that the entire downtown section of Dayton was now on fire and would probably be destroyed.

  The papers were full of equally dire news for Dayton. A boatman rescuer told a reporter that over at the courthouse, he saw bodies floating like logs.

  Cox was feeling more than desperate. He ended up putting out the statement, remarkable by today’s standards since few, if any, politicians would likely suggest something that might put ordinary citizens in harm’s way: “Farmers and everybody who by any possible means can get boats to Dayton ought to do it this afternoon even at the risk of their own lives. I appeal through the United Press to all the people along the rivers leading into Dayton to try to get boats here. I appeal especially to the people at Troy, where I understand, there is a boat club. The buildings on Third Street in Dayton are now afire and people now in them are dying.”

  Around 3 P.M., Dayton, Ohio

  On Third Street in Dayton, the guests of the Beckel House were on the second floor of the Callahan Building and trying to come up with some way to avoid burning or drowning. Two of the men secured the tools, or makeshift tools, that enabled them to cut a cable in the elevator shaft. They tied one end to the building and the other to what Jones called a “rude kind of scow,” a flat-bottomed boat, possibly created from the elevator, one would think. Wherever they found the scow, it worked well enough. The group sent the scow through a second-story window and into the water and managed to get it across the river to the old courthouse, where there was some high ground around and at least one person there, able to secure the elevator cable.

  But the scow, which everyone envisioned being able to ferry each guest across, then capsized and floated away.

  One man came up in a boat and helped further secure the cable, Jones would recall, but the man in the boat wouldn’t stay and maybe couldn’t. “His craft whirled away on the current,” wrote Jones, adding, remarkably, given how many rescuers were out and about in Dayton: “That was the only boat we saw during the flood.”

  It wasn’t for lack of trying, however. Fred Patterson, John H. Patterson’s son, and a boat mate, Nelson Talbott, were trying their best to get to downtown, but the swiftly moving forces were too powerful and unpredictable.

  “We penetrated almost to the center of the city,” Fred told reporters. “Everywhere persons cried out to us to rescue them, but it was impossible, for we were barely able to keep afloat. Large sums of money were offered us to take persons from perilous positions. The windows of the Algonquin Hotel seemed filled with faces and the same conditions prevailed at most of the buildings we passed. We did not see any bodies.”

  Shortly afterward, Fred’s father released a statement to the public, hoping someone with some influence would help them: “Our greatest need is a dozen motorboats and men to run them.”

  Help would be coming. Governor Cox issued a telegram to the editor of the New York Times, saying that his motive for contacting them was to spread the word that Dayton needed everyone’s attention. “Please give great publicity to our appeal for help,” wrote Cox. “My judgment is that there has never been such a tragedy in the history of our Republic.”

  Cox went on to mention that the next morning at daylight, fifty boats would go into the business district from South Park. The naval militia, with a hundred boats, was scheduled to leave Toledo at midnight. Yes, Cox was sending in the navy.

  For now, though, Dayton residents, especially those downtown, were still on their own, which is how the Beckel House guests came to have an elevator cable stretched across the wild river street but no boat to cross it in. Three or maybe four of the strongest men in the group nevertheless grabbed on to the cable and struggled across it, each of them going across hand by hand, neck-deep in freezing cold water. Several times, they were almost ripped away from the cable but each man hung on until they arrived at the other side. Still, it soon became clear that virtually nobody else had the stamina and strength after two nightmarish days to try this method of escape. They were still stuck choosing between burning to a crisp or drowning in an icy current of filth.

  3 P.M., Fort Wayne, Indiana

  Chief Abbott tasked four Fort Wayne residents—Jack Miller, Bob Wartell, August Melsching, and Ed Hiatt—with taking three jugs of water to the orphanage. If that went well, they would return and take food to the children and adults overseeing them.

  The police and fire chief sent a request to Winona Lake, Indiana, a popular recreational town forty miles northwest, which had a big lake and several boats. They asked for all the motor boats that they had so they could be shipped aboard a Pennsylvania train. Still, the chiefs realized that at the earliest, the motor boats wouldn’t reach them until nightfall, which meant the rescue work would have to be done by lantern light. And possibly in the snow. As the four men ferried over water and food, a heavy blizzard hit Fort Wayne.

  Somewhere in the afternoon, Chicago

  The Chicago Association of Commerce wired $100,000 to the National Red Cross. It was just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations sending money to the flood-relief cause.

  Sometime in the afternoon, Peru, Indiana

  Frank McNally and Icea Hesser, the seventeen-year-old he saved from drowning, were finally able to leave the tree that had been their home for the last twenty-four hours.

  Climbing into the boat, the two must have asked their rescuers about Hesser’s cousin, Delight. Nobody had seen her. Somehow it didn’t matter to McNally that he br
ought approximately seventy-five people from danger and onto dry land. Long after he was warm and dry, McNally would keep thinking of Shields. The guilt was eating away at him. He would overcome his emotions, but not for a while. Weeks later, he would be put on a suicide watch.

  But McNally wasn’t the only one thinking of Shields. As word got around of her accident and other boats overturning, the local populace became terrified, causing some to make arguably irrational decisions. Indiana Senator Stephen Fleming, who was in charge of a relief train sent to Peru from beleaguered but in better shape Fort Wayne, observed at the time: “Many people are still in their homes in the inundated city, frightened at repeated capsizings of rescue boats working to and fro among the stricken homes, positively refuse to accept assistance and almost crazed by their fear, insist upon remaining in the houses, although many of them are standing in water in the second floors of their homes.”

  But perhaps they were right to be so paranoid. There had been a lot of capsizing, not just with McNally, but other men like John E. May, a farmer from nearby Stanford, Indiana. He rowed all of Monday night and by Tuesday morning had rescued 122 people from their homes. Then around ten in the morning, a passenger ended up capsizing the boat—a woman who was said to have had a bird cage wrapped in a shawl, which may have contributed to the accident. Both the woman and May drowned. He wouldn’t be found for another two days.

  Then there was Gilbert Kessler, the man visiting his cousin in Peru. He had been rescuing people, and while he mostly was successful at it, he had two women succumb to madness and jump out of his boat. On the first occasion, he was in a boat full of passengers, heading to the courthouse. The waves were rocking the boat pretty badly, and suddenly a woman stood up and wailed: “Oh, what is the use? We’ll all be drowned anyway.”

  She then jumped into the water, the unbalancing of the boat sending Kessler and another oarsman into the water but apparently leaving the rest of the passengers inside. Kessler saw a “slender arm” in the water and tried to grab for it but couldn’t, and then quickly turned his attention to climbing back aboard the boat. He was then able to row to the oarsman, who apparently had managed to grab on to a tree or driftwood, and save him.

  It happened at least one more time, according to Kessler, who noted that most of his female passengers were as stoic as they came. But he brought with him a frantic woman who leaped into the water, figuring it was better off to die now than wait a little longer.

  “The current swept around street corners with tremendous force, and only the most experienced oarsmen could propel the craft with any degree of success,” said Kessler of the flood. Which is why it may have been, as uncomfortable and dangerous as it was, that some people stranded on their houses were better off remaining there.

  Late afternoon, Dayton

  By 4 P.M., the Beckel House crew was spread out over the Callahan Building, minus the four men who had managed to cross the river via the elevator cable. Judge Jones maneuvered himself between two rooms on the second floor of the Callahan Building, which had about twenty-five or thirty people in it as well as, improbably, a horse. How the horse got into the room, he never found out.

  Everyone stood or sat about, grave, whispering, trying to figure out some strategy for survival. Jones watched a mother, sitting quietly, her features fixed in a serious-looking, desperate manner, clasping in her arms a boy who looked to be seven or eight years old. “The child clung to his mother and tried to be, and was, brave,” wrote Jones. “Once in a while a tear trickled down his face, but the mother never wept.”

  Everyone could see the fire in the reflection of the river, but nobody was certain what it was doing or just how close it was to closing in on them. The only direction they received was what was shouted at them from some men on the roof of the Phillips Hotel, men who fortunately had some megaphones.

  Megaphones were a device that Thomas Edison had invented in 1878, but these were makeshift megaphones that the Phillips guests had constructed out of cardboard and calendars.

  It wasn’t quite as good a system as seeing the fire for themselves, but it would do. The Beckel House guests learned that the Beckel House was still standing, although the fire was creeping closer to it, and by proxy, closer to where they were now. Anyone who offered up their opinion on the situation agreed that long before morning, everyone would be dead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jittery Nerves

  4:30 P.M., Columbus, Ohio

  James Thurber, the famed author and humorist, recalled years later, in a classic short story, “The Day the Dam Broke,” that at least one neighborhood in Columbus was traumatized when everyone learned that a storage dam had broken and they were about to be engulfed by their own personal tsunami.

  The West Side of Columbus was “under thirty feet of water,” wrote Thurber, but he explained that on the East Side, the flood waters would have had to have climbed another ninety-five feet to devastate the homes. But understandably, with public schools closed, at least four bridges in the city washed out, no running water working in the city anywhere, and people drowning across the state and in surrounding states, everyone was nervous on the East Side as well.

  Thurber included. Eighteen years old and in his senior year at East High, Thurber spent part of March 25 on High Street, a lengthy street that effectively cuts through the center of the city, dividing the east and west portions of the community. Thurber and a friend, Ed Morris, came out of a store and into the cold rain and saw a couple of police officers on horseback who were shouting to everyone that the dam had broken and that everyone should go east and find higher ground.

  In his essay, Thurber would write, “There are few alarms in the world more terrifying than, ‘The dam has broken!’” Thurber didn’t panic when he heard the policemen shout, but he didn’t stick around to see if they might be wrong either. As detailed in the fine biography James Thurber: His Life and Times by Harrison Kinney, Thurber put a humorous spin on what happened next, but his account was absolutely factual—and when put in context with what newspapers reported at the time, the melee that broke out was simply incredible.

  The first man to run looked to be a businessman, speculated Thurber. “It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late,” wrote Thurber. “Whatever it was, he ran east on Broad Street (probably toward the Maramor Restaurant, a favorite place for a man to meet his wife). Somebody else began to run, perhaps a newsboy in high spirits. Another man, a portly gentleman of affairs, broke into a trot. Inside of ten minutes, everybody on High Street, from the Union Depot to the Courthouse, was running.”

  As Thurber described it, “Two thousand people were abruptly in full flight.” They were shouting, too: “Go east! Go east! Go east!”

  Among the throng were George Smallwood and his colleagues, nineteen-year-old Gus Kuehner and Bill McKeanan, Columbus Dispatch reporters who had just a short while earlier found their car, dangerously close to being swamped at the Town Street Bridge. They had just parked it on higher ground when they heard someone cry, “The dam has broken,” and they, too, broke into a feverish run. Kuehner, thinking he was being helpful, quickly stopped to free some animals in a livery stable and, between two white horses, ran up the hill on Town Street.

  It was pandemonium, according to Thurber, who reports that his aunt was in a theatre on High Street at the time, and that the panicked crowd stormed out into the street, the male patrons behaving the worst. “And east they went,” wrote Thurber, “pushing and shoving and clawing, knocking women and children down, emerging finally into the street, torn and sprawling.”

  Indeed, Thurber was in the midst of a full-fledged panic, one that actually engulfed both the east and the west side. Thurber treated the incident with his usual whimsy but at the time, it was quite serious; and looking back, oncoming floodwaters aside, it’s amazing that nobody was killed in this particular mad rush to get out of the way of the oncoming water. People ran do
wnstairs, jumped and climbed out of windows, sprinted through alleys, and pushed others out of their path, as a throng of terrified people did everything they could to escape what was obviously a tidal wave chasing them. Policemen darted into stores, screaming at customers and shopkeepers, “Flee for your lives, the dam has burst!”

  They fled.

  Children on roller skates, delivery wagons and heavy trucks, automobiles, women pushing baby buggies, peanut vendors with push carts, and even one man on horseback—they all raced down High Street and to Third Street, heading away from the river.

  Telephone operators, hearing the news, started calling people on the East Side who hadn’t heard the news, warning them to get ready to run for their lives. Mothers, fathers, and children panicked, preparing their house for an onslaught. Word got out to newspapers in nearby cities. The Lima Times Democrat put out a bulletin, getting the time of day wrong: “With a great roar, the levee at the foot of Broad Street let go shortly before 11 o’clock today, sending a deluge of water that swelled the Scioto River covering a great area.”

  Some rescue workers left their posts, heading toward High Street to help with the onslaught of this new flood.

  Early versions of what would become the ambulance siren had only recently come on the market, and some drivers were having fun hooking up “automobile sirens” to their cars. But in this instance, drivers turned on their sirens and sped down the street at top speed, trying to get out of harm’s way.

  One woman left her house and then screamed that she had left her cat on the second floor. “I won’t go without it,” she shouted and turned to run back in the house. The journalist who took down this scene in an account of the panic admitted, “The reporter was in a hurry himself and didn’t stop to see whether she saved her pet or not.”