It was time, several people shouted.
The judge spoke up sharply, trying to sound reasonable, hopeful, and confident, three characteristics he was not actually feeling. He told people that they had lasted this long, that going into the water was certain death, while waiting a little longer might keep everyone alive. Perhaps because of his years of training, speaking with authority from the bench, everyone remained. It was quite likely the longest night of everyone’s lives; but by morning, thanks to Jones’s calm and reasoned demeanor, everyone would be alive. The fire missed all of them.
* It’s always fun when you come across in your research how much someone’s salary was back in 1913. Miller’s job paid $4,000 a year. The average salary in 1913 was $585 a year, and $1 in 1913 would be like having $22 today.
Chapter Seventeen
Light at the End
6 A.M., Fort Wayne, Allen County Orphanage
The children who were sleeping were roused awake and given their breakfast. It was just another morning, if they could ignore the grownups standing around, the boats outside moored to the front porch, the horrific flashbacks of the drownings from the day before, and the sense of foreboding that filled the entire room.
Early morning, Dayton, Ohio
Ben Hecht woke up with a start. He was on a bed—well, a cot, really, and wearing a peculiar nightgown, peculiar because it wasn’t his own. Baffled at first, Hecht gradually recognized where he was: the National Cash Register plant and surrounded by Red Cross staff and bedridden patients.
He had fallen asleep in his canoe, been “rescued,” and then brought here.
Hecht shouted for his clothes. A nurse came up to him and told him he couldn’t leave until he had been examined by a doctor. Hecht protested—he was fine, he had just fallen asleep, he needed to go so he could file a story for the first edition of the Chicago Daily Journal. The nurse wouldn’t be dissuaded. Hecht stood his ground, “yelling in my skimpy refugee’s nightgown, as unlike a journalist as could be imagined.”
Suddenly, Hecht was joined by his old pal, Christian Dane Hagerty. He had been collecting information about the flood’s refugees.
“Tell them, will you,” begged Hecht, looking imploringly at Hagerty. “Tell them I’m a newspaperman and not a goddamn refugee.”
Hagerty looked him over and smiled, as if he was considering telling the nurse otherwise. But then to Hecht’s utter relief, Hagerty offered his confirmation: “He’s a newspaperman.”
Morning in Dayton and Columbus
Governor Cox dreaded the thought of calling John Bell. Not that he didn’t want to talk to him, but he knew the telephone operator was famished, weary, and wet, and, judging from the skies in Columbus, he couldn’t imagine what Bell and Dayton were going through now.
Still, he asked Columbus operator Thomas Green to put him through.
“Good morning, Governor,” John Bell said, happy as a clam. “The sun is shining in Dayton.”
Snow would fall on the city later in the day, and Bell became less buoyant as the day wore on, but both men would later agree that it was a turning point. There had been hours of doubt, but now they knew that the flood couldn’t last forever.
Approximately 7 A.M., Fort Wayne
Seven-year-old Opal Jacobs, who remembered vividly the terror of her last boat ride, refused to board. Some of the men forced the screaming girl on the boat, who was then held and comforted by a woman from the First Presbyterian Church.
Four boats took all of the children, all at once, with the remaining adults in a fifth boat. Just as the last boat left, as if on cue, one of the porches of the home, the one connected to the fire escape, broke free from the house and floated a short distance into a grove of trees. That was the closest thing to anything going wrong on this boat ride. The sun was peeking through the clouds and the rain had finally stopped falling.
March 27, morning, from approximately 8 to 10 A.M., Peru, Indiana
Sam Bundy was finding it increasingly challenging to steer his boat. After fifty-five hours of rowing down streets and plucking people out of houses and trees without even a nap, his body was finally begging for him to call it quits. But when Jake Marsh offered him two hundred dollars to rescue his wife and daughter and several other family members, trapped in at least two different places in the city, Bundy found himself torn.
The money would help out on the home front, and if he refused, and if these people didn’t survive the flood because he hadn’t gone after them, it would gnaw at him for the rest of his days.
It may not have been the smartest course of action in his exhausted state, but he said he would go.
Bundy only needed to travel three blocks in downtown Peru, but nobody else would take their boat for good reason. Those three blocks contained a raging current that still had not abated. When Phillip Landgrave, a local school official, watched Bundy board, he couldn’t help somberly thinking, Good-bye, Sam. But to his and everyone’s relief and surprise, around 10 A.M., Bundy returned with the mother and daughter, two hours after he set out.
Landgrave explained Bundy’s success to a reporter: “He did not do like the others, but he took his own time and did not become excited. He used his own sure method and came back with the folks he went after.”
But Bundy was depleted, and he knew if he tried another trip to pick up the rest of the family members, he wouldn’t return. Bundy tracked down an extremely competent rescuer, Irwin Baldwin, and offered him the $200 instead, the whole enchilada, if he would make the second trip. Baldwin agreed and, to Bundy’s relief, returned safely with the rest of Jake Marsh’s family.
Bundy decided he was finished with rescue work. He had gone at it for fifty-seven hours straight. “I am glad that I came, even though it might be some time before I fully recover,” Bundy told a reporter. “I saw some harrowing scenes but no one can say that I faltered when duty called me. I’m going back home now to sleep—to dream of the flood.” Then he added, sincerely: “I hope not.”
Morning, March 27, New Castle, Pennsylvania
The city woke up to learn that civilization as they knew it was regressing. The west side of the city was hit the hardest, but people in all directions were without gas or water, and without much food. The grocery stores were mobbed, and by noon they were cleaned out.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the handful of crooked officers on the New Castle police force were men like Thomas Thomas. Aside from having a memorable name, Thomas was, by all accounts, an ethical, likeable man, not to mention a husband and father of three. He had only been on the force for about a year and a half, appointed by the mayor after working at the city’s tin mill. He had been in the flooded streets of New Castle since Tuesday, leading and rowing people to safety. If the reports are true, Thomas Thomas hadn’t taken a break since then.
For the last forty-eight hours, he had been rowing families to safety. Affected by the gratitude of those he helped and the cries of people whom he hadn’t reached yet, Thomas apparently couldn’t stand the thought of stopping. Even when it began to snow, he continued rowing.
Thomas was pushing himself too hard. He didn’t realize it, but if he didn’t stop and take a long break soon, his luck was going to run out.
Morning, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Judge J. Frank Mungovan turned loose ten drunks who had over-celebrated the fact that they worked a couple of hours helping to secure the Lakeside dike and at other danger points. He turned them free, the papers reported, because the jail was in such an unsanitary condition as a result of the failure of the water supply that he didn’t want to send any more men to it.
Thursday morning, Indianapolis
Mischa Elman, the violinist, and Rudolph Ganz, the Swiss pianist, heard that the first train out of Indianapolis would be leaving that morning. Many of the guests decided to stay put, fearing that their train would crash through a bridge like so many had already done, or become embedded in a riverbank somewhere, but Elman and Ganz reasoned that with people already gettin
g sick in Indianapolis, and the potential for disease spreading in the flooded city, wherever they went probably wouldn’t be much worse than staying where they were.
They took the first train. Elman was struck by the fact that there were no porters, which was eerie and inconvenient. He had to lug his Stradivarius and Amati with him.
It would take ten hours to make the two-hour trip to Goshen, Indiana, and as Elman told the New York Times, “We saw many dead bodies floating in the swollen river. Terrible! We also saw submerged houses, many, very many, poking their roofs out of the yellow swirling water that ran like a mill race, and other houses that leaned like drunkards up against bridges. We all felt shaky, of course, whenever our train passed over a bridge. At Goshen we caught a train for Toledo, where we had the good luck to make a close connection with the Lake Shore Limited. We were without food all day, except for a hot dog at one little way station. There was a man there who kept cutting open rolls as fast as he could and slapping in a piece of sausage. Those tasted good.”
But Elman found a lot of beauty and wonder in being in less than ideal circumstances with so many fellow travelers, saying, “It was a wonderful experience, and I would not have missed it for anything—but I would not care to go through it again,” and then he added, “Yes, I intend to compose a piece describing my feelings—and also my cold feet.”
Mid-morning, Fort Wayne, Ohio Another day, another crisis.
The headline on a late morning edition of the Fort Wayne Daily News gave everyone a start. It blared: DAM AT ST. MARY’S RESERVOIR BREAKS.
With the second headline, right underneath: THE FLOOD WILL REACH FORT WAYNE IN FROM FOUR TO SIX HOURS SAYS WEATHERMAN PALMER.
So the dam at St. Mary’s was broken. Just what the city needed. The paper didn’t say how much water was behind it, but every resident over the age of six years in Fort Wayne knew that just twenty-five miles south of the city was the largest artificial body in the world, which had been completed in 1845 as a feeder for the Great Miami and Erie Canal that went from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. In fact, it held over 13,000 acres of water, 2 billion cubic feet of liquid, and the way everyone saw it, a wall of water would hit St. Mary’s first, and then go into Rockford and Willshire, both villages in Ohio. From there, it would take out Pleasant Mills, Indiana, Decatur, and then aim for destroying Fort Wayne.
The alarm had been sounded by someone manning an oil-pumping station near the dam, and he had said on the telephone, “Can tell no more. Must run for life.”
Morning, Dayton, Ohio
Dayton residents heard the news. St. Mary’s dam had broken. Men dashed through the streets, shouting, “Flee for your lives,” and, “The reservoir has broken.”
The paper in nearby Xavier described the situation thusly: “Without waiting for confirmation, the now thoroughly frightened people are leaving the city like rats from a sinking ship. People are frantic. Children are separated from their parents, women are throwing their babies away in their terrible fright. The streets on the east side are black with hundreds and thousands of fleeing people. They have only one thought and that is to flee.”
One has to think and hope the reporter was mistaken and a little melodramatic himself—babies being thrown away?
But, sure enough, similar to what had happened the day before in Columbus, there was absolutely no foundation for the alarm. And once again, there was an understandable panic in the streets. Of course, it may seem as if there weren’t any dry streets to panic in, but there were plenty of neighborhoods in Dayton, particularly in the northwest and southeast parts of the city, away from the rivers, that were relatively untouched by the flood. Hundreds of individuals and families in Dayton gathered their kids and important papers and hopped into their horse-and-buggies and automobiles, clogging the streets that were drivable and made haste to the National Cash Register headquarters, pushing themselves past guards, storming offices, and threatening to overwhelm the already-overcrowded facility.
The mob didn’t settle down until Patterson stepped forward and spoke, explaining that if the dam had broken, it was sixty-five miles away, and that the water wouldn’t make their situation much more grave than it already was. In fact, some professor later calculated that even if the dam and its 17,000 acres of water had become free, and assuming there was no water on the ground across the several million acres that it would have spread over, the area would have been one foot deep. Not nothing when you own a half-sunken two-story row house, but not a tsunami either.
The Thoma family were among the people in the crowd at NCR. Norma Thoma’s father Albin, an optometrist, wasn’t sure how much more fearing for his life he could take. He just wanted to get back to his home in Piqua, although he couldn’t have been sure he would have been much better off.
His house was far enough away from any waterways, as far as he knew, but Piqua had serious flooding as well. Years later, on September 12, 1983, Gene Rees, an 89-year-old farmer, told the Shelby County Historical Society of how he had visited Piqua with his uncle, where they saw a house leave its moorings. On top of the roof were a man, a woman, and a little girl. Rees and his uncle were horrified—and completely helpless to do anything but watch. The parents and girl were all crying for help—until it hit a bridge and they plunged into the water and disappeared.
Sometime in the afternoon, Columbus
Even while some people were still trapped in their homes, including 250 very hungry and cold people at the Sun Manufacturing Company, there was a morbid, grim sign that the flood would eventually end: two trucks, full of dead bodies, rolled out of the west side of the city. Relief trains, meanwhile, with food and clothing were coming in, and fifty armed deputies patrolled the city, all with orders to shoot any looters.
2 P.M., Fort Wayne
It was determined that the St. Mary’s River had gone down three inches since 5:30 A.M. With the rain slowing down to a trickle, the end of the flood finally seemed to be in sight.
Throughout the day, Oil City, Pennsylvania
While waterways were going down in the region where the flood first began, Oil Creek was rising at three inches an hour. The river gauge measured twenty feet, instead of the usual foot or two, or even zero, since often the creek bed was dry. The entire business district was under water. The city’s newspapers and industrial plants had also shut down since their power rooms were flooded. But what was really unnerving to the residents was that about four thousand barrels of oil had washed away from the Carmania Refinery plant.
People were afraid that this would be a repeat of June 5, 1892, when something similar had happened: miles of the river had caught on fire and dozens of people had died.
When people heard about the oil barrels, succumbing to humanity’s voyeuristic instinct, they ran to the river to look at the barrels rather than getting as far away from it as possible. The railroads were ordered to make sure their locomotives extinguished their fires, and a government order went out saying that nobody was allowed to light a fire. Not even a match.
Throughout the day, Adams County, Pennsylvania, March 27
Adams County, scene of the infamous 1889 Johnstown Flood, saw their streams two inches higher than they had ever been since that fateful day. Every cellar in the city was full of water, footbridges were destroyed, and travel was virtually impossible. Still, the bigger bridges held, and there were no deaths. Which was something of a minor miracle, or simply better geography than some of the other flood-prone cities. In the days and years after the Johnstown Flood, there was no legislation, in the city, county or state level, that attempted to protect its residents from future floods. Although it was considered a manmade disaster—the dam, for starters, was poorly maintained—the courts saw it as an act of God. The survivors not only received no money for their damages, they had no assurance something like this couldn’t one day happen again.
Afternoon, Dayton, Ohio
“Don’t send us money. We can’t use it,” said J. C. Hale of the National Cash Register com
pany, who was in charge of the relief and wanted food, clothing, and actual life-saving goods. That sentiment would change later, but for the moment there was a cash shortage in Dayton, rendering the checks useless at the city’s banks. That may have inspired Governor Cox to give the state a ten-day banking holiday, knowing full well that people weren’t going to be able to pay their bills on time.
Meanwhile, that afternoon, NCR’s founder, John Patterson, sent a message out that went on the news wire across the country. It was an urgent yet calm missive, furnishing directives on exactly what the city was going through and what it needed. And it’s easy to see why later, after the disaster would pass, the citizens would come to the conclusion that they needed something that a few scattered communities across the country had begun employing: a city manager.
Patterson’s message read:
“Situation here desperate. All people except on outskirts imprisoned by water. They have had no food, no drinking water, no light, no heat for two days. We have had no house to house communication by telephone for two days. Dayton water works stopped two days ago. Fire raging for 24 hours in center of city and now spreading. Beckel Hotel burned.”
(He was wrong about that last part.)
“Weather suddenly turned cold with strong wind and snow; water current too strong for rowboats and rafts,” continued Patterson’s message. “Need help. Can reach us today from nearby cities. Help should be in form of motor boats and people to run them. We need good rowboats. We need troops for protection and help. Fire engines, motor trucks, and automobiles are needed, also provisions, clothing, and medical supplies. Our factory is safe, it has its own power, heat, electricity, and water plant. We and private houses are caring for many people, but they are only a small part of the sufferers.
“We cannot reach central, northeastern, northern, or western parts of the city. Consequently, cannot answer any of the telegrams of inquiry about safety of the people that are coming in. Railroads reaching Dayton are practically all out of use.”
Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Page 30