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

by Geoff Williams

  Mothers led sobbing children through the sidewalks and streets, hurrying and hoping to outrun death.

  One policeman tried dragging a woman, described by one paper as a “little foreign woman,” out of her home on Scioto Street. “But I have a—” she started and then was cut off by the officer screaming at her to run.

  “I will not go without my baby,” she shouted back and, good for her, raced back for her infant.

  Another parent wasn’t quite as responsible. One man, carrying a baby wrapped in pink, stopped another man—who turned out to be a reporter for the Ohio State Journal—and said, “Either I must drop this baby, or I will drop myself.” He then gave his baby to the reporter and fled. The reporter, bewildered, held on to the baby and also continued running.

  Another mother, trying to drag her two children down the street, was heard shouting, “Come, or I’ll break your arms.”

  Elizabeth Lewis, a resident of West Second Avenue, gathered all the cash, as well as some gold, that she had in the world—worth between $115 and $180, she would later estimate. She put it all in a black-bordered handkerchief and then joined some friends in the race to get the heck out of Dodge. Then, in the confusion, she dropped the precious cargo and presumably never saw it again.

  Someone with the National Guard released fifty horses, allowing them to race for their lives, running east on Town Street toward High Street, where they almost ran down several people who were also fleeing for their lives.

  An elderly woman, accompanied by a police officer, tried to run, but she couldn’t, and so the police officer, terrified for his own life, left her behind.

  Another woman slipped in the mud, and while two men stopped to carry her, they were so winded that they were forced to drag her down the street toward safety.

  A soldier—probably someone from the National Guard—ran down the street with a screaming child.

  In the midst of this madness, the teenaged Thurber ran, and at one point he was quite certain he was near death when an older man shouted, “It’s got us.” Fortunately, Thurber soon learned that the sound the man had heard was the wooshing sound of roller skates, worn by a kid who was also trying to get out of the way of the oncoming wall of water.

  But as Thurber fans who have read his short story already know, the dam hadn’t broken at all. It was a false alarm.

  It ignited, however, a city-wide panic so full-blown that a crowd gathered around the statehouse, clogging the entrances. Several men started climbing up the building, attempting to scale the dome. A bugle blew, and whistles shrieked, as a mob of people crossed the Rich Street bridge, running to the East Side, where the West Side people assumed it was safe. Many men and women collapsed at the other side, but then police officers urged them to keep running. One woman was seen on the side of the road, wringing her hands and praying.

  Meanwhile, “all the time,” wrote Thurber, “the sun shone quietly, and there was nowhere any sign of oncoming waters. A visitor in an airplane, looking down on the straggling, agitated masses of people below, would have been hard put to it to divine a reason for the phenomenon.”

  Thurber called it the Afternoon of the Great Run, and news of the mob racing for their lives was syndicated to newspapers across the nation. On the east side of the country and the west, both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times ran the Associated Press story that described the rumor gone out of control: “The scene that followed was one of wild panic in all parts of the city. Patrolmen, soldiers and citizens in automobiles, tooting horns, ringing gongs and calling through megaphones a warning to everyone to seek safety in the higher parts of the east side sent thousands in flight, while many, stunned by the supposed impending disaster, collapsed from fear or gave way to hysteria.”

  “A panic was caused at Columbus, Ohio, Wednesday afternoon, when patrol wagons dashed through High Street, warning people to flee for their lives,” said a bulletin in the Statesville Landmark in Statesville, North Carolina. “The police had received a report that the storage dam, which furnishes the city its supply, had broken and was sweeping down upon the city billions of gallons of water. In the downtown district and throughout the city, the wildest excitement ensued until it was found the report was not true.”

  It was more than an hour before the report was officially denied, the Associated Press observed, and stated that the police blamed a military man for getting the rumor going.

  But the news of the Afternoon of the Great Run wouldn’t break in Columbus’s Dispatch for another year, Smallwood told Kinney, explaining, “There was silent agreement among us on the paper that the panic run was best forgotten. It wouldn’t have done much for Columbus.”

  It’s amusing and understandable that Smallwood remembered it that way, but actually all three Columbus newspapers did report the panic. “Never before in the history of Columbus was there such a scene of panic, even consternation,” observed the Ohio State Journal. The Columbus-Citizen Journal echoed the same sentiment: “It was an experience without parallel in the history of the city.” The Columbus Evening Dispatch described it as a “frenzy of excitement,” and while Smallwood may, at the time, have wanted to forget about the wild rumor, his own paper observed that everyone knew about the incident: “By word of mouth and by telephone the word was thrown back and forth until the entire city became aware of it.”

  Thurber wasn’t the only one to find gallows humor in the flood. In a disaster in which children drowned, older people found themselves paralyzed, and there was near incomprehensible levels of suffering, the flood could bring in the funny.

  One letter-writer told his family out East that from his perch in Logansport, Indiana, he witnessed a woman who was helped onto a rescue boat, and then several minutes later, after they pulled away, she started screaming, “My baby, I forgot my baby!” The men quickly managed to get the boat back to the window, allowing the frantic woman to scurry back into her home. A few minutes later, she emerged, carrying … a cat.

  Rescuer John Stanley, also in Logansport, Indiana, would later tell the story of another animal lover whose priorities were either misplaced or very telling: “I rowed up to a house, and a big, heavy woman got three children in the boat and got in herself, carrying a large bull dog. After she was all settled, she asked anxiously, ‘Do you think there is still room for my husband?’”

  And then there was this gem in a Fort Wayne newspaper on March 29: one woman went to the police department and asked if a boat could take her to her house, at the far end of a suburb, so she could get a dress she needed for a party.

  A rescuer in Indianapolis, Dan Balls, bumped his boat into half a dozen porches, tore some of the skin off his hands, wrestling with the oars, and poured several buckets of water out of his frail rowboat, making his way to a woman who kept shouting to him.

  Once he arrived, preparing for her to board, she said she didn’t want to leave her house: she just wanted to know what time it was.

  Balls presumably gave her the time, or an estimate, and perhaps the woman started to rethink her decision to stay. “Where will you be in an hour from now?” she asked.

  “At the bottom of the river, if I keep on the way I’ve been going,” Balls growled, paddling away.

  Another rescuer in Indianapolis, making his way down Mechanic Street, saw an elderly man leaning from a second-story window of a house and waving frantically, as though he only had minutes to spare before the flood or perhaps a fire consumed him. The oarsmen rowed to him immediately, only to discover he had no desire to leave. But perhaps the men could give him a package of tobacco?

  And maybe something was in the water at Logansport, Indiana, because another story there that surfaced later was that of four young men trapped in the second story of a house on the now-appropriately named Canal Street, just one block from the Wabash River. They all wrote letters and stuffed them into one bottle. After the flood, it was found, and the local media had a grand time reporting on their messages.

  “I am in the second
story of a building and can’t get out,” wrote an Albert A. Anderson, a resident of Logansport. “Would like some nice little girl to help me, if you can do anything for me.”

  Another man who gave his name as G. W. Lindersmith wrote, “We are in the flood and can’t get out. Whoever finds this, please answer for a sweetheart.”

  The third writer was even more direct: “I will love the girl that gets this and will answer it. Will marry her. Bye-bye with love, Mr. Harvey Hasket, Logansport, Ind.”

  And the fourth writer said, “Whoever may be the lucky one and deem this worthy, answer, answer, answer. Elmer Hershberger, Logansport, Ind., No. 318 Canal Street.”

  You almost have to admire the men, facing possible death by drowning and using the experience as possible leverage for finding dates.

  5:20 P.M., Columbus, Ohio

  Shortly after the panic in the city, three police officers stood next to their car at the edge of the Mound Street Bridge. They debated whether they should cross it—it didn’t exactly look safe, but it seemed as if it would hold for a while. The officers wanted to get to the workhouse, or at least as close to it as they could, to check on things, and so they decided to chance it. Another police officer and a watchman at the city morgue decided not to.

  The officer and watchman had the better instincts.

  The three men piled into the car and crossed the bridge. Fifteen seconds later, they heard several snaps, and everyone turned around as the Mound Street Bridge began to lean and sway. Then a beam cracked, and there were more snaps. Then the iron bridge crumbled, its remains sinking into the water. From the moment of the first snap to the moment the bridge disappeared under the water, only thirty seconds had passed.

  Around the same time, rescuers were doing their best to remove Anna Greene, an African-American woman who was forty-one years old and, according to the rescuers who lifted her, weighed over five hundred pounds. Her husband, George, presumably had no trouble leaving the home, nor did their two lodgers, Melvin Holty, thirty, and Simpson Galloway, twenty-six, a janitor and a street laborer respectively. George was a hod carrier, which was someone who helped bricklayers lay bricks. It was a demanding job, collecting bricks from the delivery pallet, wetting them down, and generally making sure the bricklayers could continue constantly working.

  They had one child, who had died young. Perhaps it was grief, or just bad biology, that led Anna Greene to such a weight problem. In any event, she was carried out of a second-story window, set into a boat, and taken to the railroad station. She was placed on a flatcar and taken to a railroad station and from there to Memorial Hall, the name of the building that was once a memorial to Civil War veterans and had been reconverted into the library. It was serving as something of a rescue and relief center and happened to be two blocks from James Thurber’s home.

  Evening, Fort Wayne, Indiana

  A. F. Melsching, Ned Miatt, and J. Miller, three young men who worked at the Fort Wayne Electric Works, volunteered to cross over to the orphanage and remain in the building with the women and children until a rescue could be put into action. There were two men already there, Albert Nieman and Ellsworth Grant, but the thinking was that the kids couldn’t have enough adults watching over them.

  Sometime in the evening, Indianapolis

  Mischa Elman, the violinist, and Rudolph Ganz, the Swiss pianist, played an informal concert with their accompanist, a Mr. Kahn, in a concert hall on the ninth floor of the Claypool Hotel for an audience of weary travelers and stranded refugees from the flood. It was, recalled Elman later, “like playing in a hospital ward.”

  Evening, Dayton, Ohio

  It had been a long day for everyone. Ben Hecht, the Chicago newspaper correspondent who we last encountered at a telegraph station in the early morning, had spent the day in a canoe, interviewing rescuers and gathering whatever information he could for a story he intended to file that evening for the next morning’s paper. But at some point at the day’s conclusion, Hecht, understandably exhausted, nonetheless did the unthinkable: he fell asleep in his canoe. Even if he had managed to pull up to shore—he never said either way in his biography, although it’s implied that he was still in the water—it was, of course, a stupid thing to let happen.

  Fortunately for Hecht, some rescuers came across the young reporter, out cold in his canoe that was slowly drifting away, saving his nemesis Chris Hagerty from having to write his obituary.

  Meanwhile, about three miles away from his father’s company, NCR, and at the bottom of what was known as Huffman Hill, now a historic district, Fred Patterson and a couple of other rescuers found themselves on the roof of a house, trying to save a family from burning to death. The water was high enough that the family could no longer get through the windows. How did Patterson even know there was a family in there? He probably heard gunshots, a common strategy—firing bullets into the air—for attracting attention.

  With no way to bring them out through the windows, and no time to spare with the fire—which possibly started from a nearby gas pipe bursting—that was creeping up towards them, Patterson and his men cut a hole in the roof.

  Fred and his fellow rescuers got the family into the boat; but as they were rowing away, they overturned and went into the river. It was a close enough call that Patterson and others in the boat were reported dead by a newspaper in Xenia, but he managed to reach shore, as did his fellow rescuers. The family, weakened from days stuck on their roof without food and water, did not.

  By now, Fred Patterson had seen enough tragedy for a lifetime. He was particularly disturbed when he saw a Catholic priest named Father Rire in a boat with a mother and daughter. The boat overturned, and while someone in a house reached out and grabbed the priest, his passengers—the mother and daughter—drowned. On another occasion, Fred Patterson was in a boat, shouting at a man in a tree, encouraging him to hang on until he could get underneath him so he could fall into his craft. The man did his best, but lost his grip from the branch, plunged into the raging current, and quickly was sucked underneath the water. Right in front of him and yet too far away, all Fred could do was watch.

  In downtown Dayton, the one area Fred Patterson and other rescuers couldn’t successfully penetrate, the Leonhard Manufacturing Company, which made and sold harnesses, saddles, and trunks, was fighting a losing battle against the floodwaters. There were workers inside the Leonhard building as well as men on top of the roof, crossing from an adjacent building, obviously believing that they were moving from a weak building to a stronger one. They were wrong.

  Police officers and other government workers—stranded in the city building across the street—watched aghast as the Leonhard building collapsed.

  Forty men were killed.

  Evening, Illinois and Missouri

  Two states to the west of Ohio, concerned residents read the paper and wondered how safe their own communities were. The Alton Evening Telegraph, the paper of record for Alton, Illinois, which hugs the Mississippi River, ran a story on their front page, stating that “as the result of the heavy rains throughout the country, all of the creeks and small streams are swollen many times their ordinary size. Reports reaching Alton show that the rains are continuing and there is no telling what the next few days may bring.”

  It continued to say that wheatfields were swamped, particularly those in Missouri Point, the nickname for the area just north of St. Louis. Then the Alton Evening Telegraph ended its report with a parting observation that summed up the feelings of many Americans in many states that day. “With the Missouri and Mississippi rising on both sides of Missouri Point, the people are beginning to do some worrying, and some wish they had built more levees than they have done, and talked less about it.”

  Evening, Columbus, Ohio

  Governor Cox would later recall that around this time, he left his office and went out into the town “to get some food,” which probably meant going into a rescue center, since there would have been scant options to procure food otherwise.


  He had been working the phone lines and sending telegrams all day. Zanesville, Marietta, Tiffin, and Delaware, among other places, were asking for him to send troops and food like he had done for Dayton. Columbus was suffering too, of course. As the flooding continued, the rain continued, although it had slowed down with about an inch falling for the day, occasionally interchanging with snow. But at least Cox could see progress being slowly made in Columbus. Dayton, in particular, from his vantage point, appeared doomed. Cox would say about that evening: “Nature never before seemed so pitiless.”

  THURSDAY,

  MARCH 27, 1913

  Chapter Sixteen

  Another Long Night

  The Great Flood of 1913 wasn’t choosy. Whether you were rich, poor, old, young, Caucasian, African-American, a recent immigrant, a citizen whose ancestors came here on the Mayflower—the water didn’t discriminate.

  People were another matter. In 1913, racism was as bad as you might imagine. Schools were typically segregated. Hotels. Restaurants. Public parks. Amusement parks. Life, meanwhile, was separate but hardly equal, which was the law of the land since the Supreme Court favored segregation in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. For instance, Dr. George Edmund Haynes, a well-respected social worker of the time, conducted a survey that he did in 1913 of Negro urban life and reported that “playgrounds in Negro neighborhoods are so rare as to excite curiosity.”

  On March 22, 1913, in the Washington Post, the headline of one news item coming from Decatur, Alabama offers a glimpse of where black people ranked in a society mostly run by whites. The news item’s headline read WHITE BOY KILLED OUTRIGHT, and then in the paragraph-length article, the boy’s name and age were mentioned, followed by “and a number of negroes are reported killed by the cyclone which struck this section last night.”