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

by Geoff Williams

  In New Castle, everyone woke up to read in the morning papers that their state still appeared to be falling apart. People in the lowlands of Pittsburgh were fleeing for higher ground as the Allegheny River climbed and at least one man probably died. The streets of Bridgewater, Pennsylvania were five feet underwater. The Beaver River was climbing five inches every hour, and there was now a chasm where the Sharon Bridge, which connected New Brighton and Fallston, used to be. But what must have sent everyone reeling was the news that a beloved police officer, husband, and father of three had drowned. Thomas Thomas and a five-year-old boy who had fallen into Neshannock Creek were New Castle’s only casualties. That there hadn’t been more was arguably due to Thomas Thomas’s efforts, who essentially gave his own life for the cause.

  As for the alderman, John H. Gross, he woke up in his own bed, a physician at his side. The doctor had been there all night, tending to him. Gross soon learned that Fred Moore had been taken to the Shenango Valley Hospital and would live. He learned that William Kerr had a bad gash on his head and was suffering from a severe cold. And then doctors confirmed what he already knew, that Thomas Thomas was no more.

  His body would be retrieved in a few hours, at noon, lodged underneath a beam under Box Car Number 7140. A grim congregation of seven police officials was on hand to assist with pulling out the body, including Lew Thomas, the man who had initially learned that Thomas and Gross were recuperating in a home and had passed the news on to the mayor, who apparently was the well-meaning one who had initiated organizing the ill-fated rescue party.

  Throughout the day, Omaha, Nebraska

  In every age and era, there is always someone out there who is happy to exploit a tragedy. Police officers and bystanders started noticing that several attractive young women and teenage girls, who were homeless and penniless in the wake of the tornado, were being approached by some well-dressed men who were offering the ladies some well-paid jobs in Chicago and St. Louis.

  Their motives were purely humanitarian, the men said.

  F. E. Eilleck, one of the men working at the relief station, didn’t think this was the case. The working theory soon became that these were men who were part of the white slave trade. Police intervened, as far as anyone knew; these shady-looking men left the city—without any young women in tow.

  Rescuers were still finding citizens in dire need of help. The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette tells the story of one unidentified mother who left her house after the tornado. It was apparently not too badly damaged, but the wind had come close enough and terrified her, and the woman was afraid her house might catch on fire. Leaving behind her ill, bed-ridden husband, she ran outside with her baby and sat all of Sunday night in a creek, covering herself and her baby with a wet blanket, hoping to protect herself from fire. Of course, this made matters worse. By the time she was found, apparently several days later, the baby was barely breathing. A doctor was called in, and one can only hope that everything worked out for this family.

  Noon, Parkersburg, West Virginia

  More than half of Parkersburg’s business district was underwater, as were a large number of houses, and the Ohio River was still rising—and widening. The Ohio River is often a quarter-mile to a mile wide, depending on the area of the river; during this flood, the Ohio River, in some places, was as wide as twelve miles.

  The gas, electric, and water plants would be shutting down in a matter of minutes, and streetcars would sputter to a stop.

  The newspaper plants were all flooded out as well, save for the Parkersburg Sentinel, which was too close for comfort to the river and had its first floor flooded, but the printers were evidently able to bring some equipment upstairs. The editors and reporters were brought to the building in boats, coming through the front door. Then they took the stairs up to the second floor, where they worked on putting out a newspaper with as many updates on the flood in their town as possible. It was slow going with the printing of the paper—they were only managing to produce two papers a minute—which meant they had to raise their prices—but they got the paper out to their newsboys, who sold their papers from boats.

  Afternoon, Columbus, Ohio

  After a lengthy conference in the statehouse, Ernest Bicknell and Governor Cox left for Dayton.

  “There will be harmony between the state and the Red Cross,” a weary Bicknell told reporters. “That is positive. All relief channels must be brought together.”

  Throughout the day, northwestern New York

  In Rochester, and throughout the western part of the state, the water was higher than it had been since 1865. The Genesee River flooded Plymouth Avenue and Front Street in Rochester, capped off by a three-inch snowfall. In Lyons, the Clyde River climbed eleven feet, forcing families out of their homes into the freezing wind. In Troy, there were fires and many families fleeing their houses. The villages of Marcellus, Camillus, and Marietta were described in the papers as “threatened with being wiped out.”

  Throughout the day, Dayton, Ohio

  The water came to Dayton fast and furious. It left it the same way.

  It seemed like it would never end, but once the water began evaporating and draining, it was a relatively speedy exit. Jennie Parsons, a resident of New York, who became stuck with her family at a relative’s house, told the story of waiting out the flood to McClure’s Magazine and recalled that Friday morning, she could see the iron fence surrounding the house, and by noon, the lawns were showing. Soon after, neighbors were dropping by, mucking through the mud to come visit.

  “Hello, up there,” was the most common refrain Parsons remembered hearing. “Everybody all right?”

  Parsons added that “the funniest thing was that everybody had forgotten what day of the week it was. It seemed months. And you could hear people saying, ‘What day is it, anyhow?’ We had to get a calendar to find out.”

  About 11:30 A.M., right around the time the Beckel House guests were freed, the owner of the hotel, Clarence E. Bennett, still dying, still in the Callahan Building, breathed his last. He was free of his pain, and so were his guests, who fanned out across the city, perhaps in a daze, but also, at least some of them, in a hurry.

  At least two of the actors from the comedy Officer 666 wasted no time trying to communicate with the outside world. Lorenza Wellen, an actress with the play, sent a telegram to her theatrical managers reading: “Am stranded. Love from company ‘Officer 666.’” But that’s all she wrote, and so while the managers were glad she was alive, they were still just about as perplexed and anxious as they had been before.

  Another actor in the play, Jeffrey French, bought a ticket for the first train out of Dayton that he could get, but the ordeal evidently had been too much for him. While he was at the station, running for his train, he collapsed and died.

  Everyone was in a state of assessing what they had been through. “It was the worst experience, more so than the one I had in the Galveston storm,” declared a Dayton resident who gave his name to the papers as B. Traynor. He added that “in the Galveston disaster, I lost everything I had,” emphasizing that the infamous 1900 hurricane was no picnic.

  This flood was one for the ages.

  Evening, Dayton

  Charles Adams waded through several yards with Grandpa Adams, and they returned to their house to see what they were in for.

  It was as wretched as they feared, but at least the house was still standing. What was left of the furniture on the first floor was piled in corners. Viola’s piano, which Charles and his father and neighbors had so carefully placed on the table, had fallen over backward, “where it lay in a hopeless ruin,” wrote Charles several years later. “We waded through to the dining room where we saw one thing at least, inviting, compared to the mud and grime surrounding it. Over in one corner of the room we found the dinner table right side up and the top of it practically as clean and white as when we left it early Tuesday morning, save for the lapping of the water up around the edges. The cracker jar and a dish of salted peanuts
on the table were perfectly clean.”

  It was a similar surreal sight that Orville Wright and his sister Katharine would find at their home, and at the homes of undoubtedly numerous Dayton residents. Charles came to the same conclusion that Orville had.

  “The only way we could account for this freak was that the table had risen with the water, missed the lighting fixtures and had floated to the top near the ceiling, coming down again with the water, right side up. The high-water mark was just three inches from the ceiling, which was enough to allow the dishes to float clear without forcing the top surface of the table under water.”

  But otherwise, the floor covering was mud, the walls were filthy, and Charles and his father were staring at a veritable domestic disaster. There was nothing to do but start cleaning.

  SATURDAY,

  MARCH 29, 1913

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cleaning Up

  Saturday, March 29, 1913

  The weathermen didn’t predict the flood, but if the public had only asked a psychic for a weather forecast—then everyone living near a river or creek could have moved their belongings inland and so much of this could have been averted.

  Nobody actually suggested that, but the implication was there when Mme. De Thebes, the famous French seer, granted an interview with the press that appeared in papers. “I am in hiding because I do not want to be interviewed,” said De Thebes, who then continued with her interview: “I fear to tell the world what I see, that America is just at the beginning of these awful catastrophes which nature is going to heap upon her this year. I am ill myself with horror at the awful things I foresee. Let those in America who survive this present disaster protect themselves against further cyclones and inundations, for I cannot see any calm returning to America before April 21. September is to be the most dangerous for America, and everybody there ought to be ready to flee from floods, fire, or cyclones any moment. In that month most of the horrors, however, will develop from winds.”

  September 1913 came and went without any major problems.

  Then Mme. De Thebes, still clearly in hiding and not wanting to be interviewed, capped this off by saying, “I truly wish, tell the dear Americans I could be mistaken and that my vision might be wrong, but I know my hope is vain. I have told you what I have seen in the past regarding America, and from that you may tell that what I see in the future will prove true. These catastrophes are the will of God. His destiny is at work, and you in America are helpless—practically so. You can only safeguard yourselves, wait, and endure.”

  She continued, clearly hating the attention and therefore saying very little: “It was three months ago that I predicted how wind, water, and fire would assail the United States in March, and I have kept repeating it ever since to all the Americans I have talked to—telling them the disasters were on the way. The Americans would not take heed—they always hoped that I might be wrong about my prophecy, but you see I was not. I understand their attitude, for I, too, also hope always that I may be mistaken. I have spent a terrible three months awaiting this present disaster.”

  “Is there no way, you think, for us to avoid further troubles?” asked the correspondent, William G. Shepherd, no doubt knowing he had a fun subject and loving every minute of this interview.

  “Alas, no,” she said. “The finger of God is at work in America. It is an occult force. I do not know why it is there, I do not know why it is there, or how it came. None can tell, but all the terrible, hidden influences that generate holocausts are at work in the skies above America, and I cannot see the end. From 1910, America should have taken precautions, putting herself on the defense until 1918, for she is in the grip of terrestrial evolution, and each of these years, the enemies—fire, wind, and water—will assail her. A large portion of her territory will slip into the sea within the next few generations, and I foresee that event will be much more terrible than the present one.

  She was, of course, just one person in a long list of people who have either made a living off of making predictions or found fame predicting doom for a country or the nation, a list that includes Jeane Dixon, who in 1956 predicted in a Parade Magazine article that in 1960, a Democrat would win the election and be assassinated or die in office; and Harold Camping, an 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster who twice in 2011 predicted the end of the world, fortunately to no avail.

  While Mme. De Thebes may sound like a con artist or a kook to most modern readers, the Parisian seer frightened plenty of people, and this was an age in which the occult was, if not taken seriously by the mainstream media, at least reported on fairly regularly. On March 20, just a few days before the flooding, an elderly woman named Mary Finke walked into a New York City police station and informed a lieutenant that President Woodrow Wilson would be assassinated on March 25. How did she know?

  “The spirits told me that President McKinley was to be assassinated,” she said in broken English. “I was told about the Titanic disaster and last summer they told me the Black Handlers were going to get after Governor Wilson.” Mrs. Finke was referring to gangsters who specialized in extortion.

  When the supposedly fatal day of March 25 arrived, Woodrow Wilson was dealing with the floods throughout the bulk of his nation, trying to get a tariff bill passed through Congress, and playing host at a short reception to about five hundred Canadian high school teachers from Toronto. It was an annual affair for these teachers, a visit to Washington, and Wilson wanted to be accommodating to our neighbor to the north. It was, despite the flood, a simpler time.

  But Wilson got through the day unscathed, and in Fort Wayne, the weather forecaster, Walter S. Palmer, felt that Madame De Thebes’s predictions wouldn’t amount to anything. Palmer informed the Fort Wayne News that numerous calls had come in to the bureau, regarding another interview the press-shy predictor had given, indicating that another flood would be coming on April 15.

  “There’s nothing to it,” Palmer told the paper’s readers. “There is not a thing in our indications to show that there is the slightest likelihood of the flood being repeated on the 15th.”

  That said, given that Palmer and the other weather forecasters across the country hadn’t predicted the first flood, his assertion may have not reassured too many residents.

  It was understandable that people wanted to think that some being or reason, whether the occult or God or fate, was responsible for the flood. It seemed too improbable that this could just happen. That all those lives were lost, just like that. In any case, for those who believed in a mystical power, there was no shortage of stories claiming that the floods had been seen before they had actually come. One of the strangest tales was reported in the Bakersfield Californian on March 28, 1913. One Mrs. S.C. Lennox, a resident of East Bakersfield, claimed to have received a letter from her cousin, an Elsie Smith, from Peru, Indiana.

  Smith, like Lennox, claimed to be a clairvoyant. In Smith’s letter, Lennox claimed, it said, “I can see you crying as you read this letter. Don’t cry over me and my troubles.”

  As Mrs. Lennox was reading the letter, a telegram was delivered from relatives of hers in Ohio, saying that her cousin, Elsie, was missing. The next night, Mrs. Lennox saw her cousin’s name listed as having been one of the drowning victims of the flood.

  A cynic might wonder if Elsie Smith wasn’t quite the clairvoyant that she made herself out to be, given that she didn’t see her own fate at the hands of the flood. But then again, maybe she did. The newspaper report of her death turned out to be wrong, and Elsie Smith was alive and well and unharmed by the flood. Her husband, Elbert, a railroad worker, however, was not so lucky, meeting his end on March 27, 1913, along with a colleague, Adam Betts. The two men were trying to get home from Hammond, Indiana, along with another railroad man, Frank Holland, when they were caught up in the flood. Somehow Holland managed to cling to a tree, where his friends didn’t; when Holland finally unwound his arm, it was so stiff that rescuers feared it might break.

  Still, as odd a
s the Elsie Smith story was, it has nothing on the story reported in Xenia’s Daily Gazette on May 9, a tale that if it wasn’t so sad, might make a good campfire story. According to the Daily Gazette, a Mrs. Stella Mercer told her brother, Omar Toy, that he should look for his wife’s body at a farm owned by a family named Dresbach. If the report is true—a big if—Mr. Toy, who lost his baby son to the flood and then his wife after spending a harrowing night in a tree, went to the farm a mile south of Columbus and located a spot that seemed like the one his sister had described to him. It was a pile of mud, about four feet high.

  Then he began to dig.

  Just a foot into the mud pile, Toy discovered a human hand, only it didn’t belong to his wife but to a six-year-old girl, Dorothy Busick.

  Columbus, March 29

  Many rescuers were now being turned away by trapped homeowners, unbelievable as that might sound at first. Some people rightfully felt that the worst of the flooding was over at this point, and they wanted to stay and protect their property.

  There was some reason for the homeowners to be concerned and want to stick around. Authorities and the business community were always worried about looters, although many poor and ethnic residents were arguably just as concerned that they would be seen as looters. One African-American was shot in Columbus because he had seven gold rings on a hand, and while, yes, he may have been looting, he could have just as easily rescued his family’s jewelry and stuck them on his hand, or maybe he simply liked to wear rings. You didn’t want to be black and searching for food in an abandoned home or business and then have anyone white and carrying a gun discover you.

  While surely many people throughout history who were shot for looting were actually, indeed, looting, they at least deserved a trial; but in 1913, you could generally forget about seeing a judge and a jury of your peers. Orders to the militia and police were usually of the “shoot to kill” variety, and indeed, this happened on this day in Columbus. Edward McKinley, a white man, one paper noted, as if so people could express surprise that it wasn’t a “colored” person robbing homes, was apparently ransacking a house, or just had, and had a sack of valuables with him when a squad of soldiers, designated to hunt down looters, fired upon him.