Rumors were still flying around in regard to the flood, deaths, and now looters. In the Cincinnati Enquirer, on April 3, 1913, there would be an article about how seventeen men had been shot the night before on the steps of the Callahan Bank Building in Dayton. According to the Brigadier-General George H. Wood, the man in charge of the Ohio National Guard, it wasn’t true, none of it, and that day he wired the Enquirer’s managing editor, who printed a retraction the next day. Wood was always emphatic that no looters in Dayton were shot. The city had seen enough death.
The homeowners in Columbus who refused a boat ride to dry land were correct. The worst of the water was over, and yet, emotionally, the worst was also to come: locating and identifying bodies.
Corpses were laid out at a firehouse, and in some cases entire families were set out, waiting to be identified, and rescuers were morphing from rescuers into search-and-recovery mode. A temporary morgue was also set up at Green Lawn Cemetery, where so many people, dead and alive, soon found themselves. Mrs. Edna Keller Burkhart’s body was found near Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus, almost buried in a pile of mud about ten, maybe twelve, feet high. She would have been completely missed, except for some of her hair sticking out, which someone spotted. Three days later, the corpse belonging to a Mrs. Lloyd Lynch would also be found at Green Lawn Cemetery, underneath a mud-covered wagon.
The body of 28-year-old Cleveland A. Turney was found in a tree, taken down, and laid out at the temporary morgue at Green Lawn Cemetery, awaiting identification, where he would then receive either a funeral or a hasty burial in a potter’s field, depending on his family’s resources. It was then that a young boy noticed some slight movement in Turney’s body. He shouted for the doctor, who quickly administered restoratives, which were probably smelling salts. Turney was revived, taken to a friend’s home, and shared his story.
Turney had been with his wife, Junia, when he was separated from her in the flood. Turney hung to some driftwood until he slammed into a tree on Green Lawn Avenue. He managed to climb up to branches where he found a harness, and, necessity being the mother of invention, he tied himself to the tree. Then he allowed himself to pass out until he woke up at the temporary morgue. Turney no doubt regaled friends and family with his tale of the flood until his actual death in 1963, when he was seventy-eight. His wife, who survived the flood, passed away in the same year, several months earlier.
March 29, Dayton
Mildred Grothjan recalled in a letter to the Dayton Journal Herald, “To walk down Main Street was a sad experience. Most of the big plate glass windows had been broken, and they were boarded up. Newsaldt’s at Fourth and Main offered rewards for the recovery of jewelry and silver that had washed out of their store through broken windows. The owner of a shoe store on Main near Fifth had the remains of his stock on tables outside his store, with a sign that read: ‘Big sale of muddy tans’—a bit of humor in an otherwise grim scene. Rike’s had moved from Fourth Street up to Second and had just had a big spring opening a few days before.
“What a different sight their beautiful store was now. The streets were piled high with merchandise that had been shoveled out of the stores, and everywhere was the sickening smell of disinfectant that had been sprayed over everything. The mud—and later the dust—was ankle-deep. That, and the odor of disinfectant lasted all summer.”
Carlos F. Hurd, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter of Titanic fame, wrote that the property damage could easily be compared with the destruction in Galveston and San Francisco and then added: “The very streets have literally been torn away and big slabs of asphalt from other streets are lying all over the brick pavement of Main Street, which is a line of deserted business houses, with windows gone and interiors wide open. Walking on the mud-piled sidewalks is forbidden and in many places would be hardly possible.”
After the flood, the advantage of having those holes that had been cut in the floor proved two-fold, at least those with underground rooms. People would scrub the floors and push everything, the water and some of the mud through the hole so that it would fall into the dirt cellar.
The city was already quickly putting itself back together. Western Union set up a telegraph office in, of all places, the Beckel House. Its first floor was full of mud, but the stories above it were fine. The fire hadn’t touched the place after all. It wasn’t long before telegrams were pouring in from people inquiring about friends and family.
Ben Hecht was still in Dayton, collecting anecdotes and quotes and then telegraphing his stories to his editors at the Chicago Journal.
“Three-fourths of the city is high and dry,” he wrote after stating that he didn’t think the death toll would be too high. “The streets are streaming with people. The weather is bright and warm. The skies seem to be smiling, and the people are taking heart. The apparently impossible tasks of rebuilding the city, of finding homes for the sorrowing refugees, starting again to live as they did before the flood, occupied Dayton today.
“The martial law declared two days ago has been raised for this afternoon to permit refugees to seek their homes. Creeping and splashing through the mud are countless people on their way home. Home often means a half house, torn and scattered across the entire street. But it is home, anyway, and the men grabbed spades to shovel out the mud while women try to cook their meal. Sometimes it isn’t a half house; only a mud hole greets the refugees.”
Then Hecht described how a man named Howard Lowrey found a mud hole on lower River Street. “He stood knee deep in the water watching people pass. A woman carrying a child came trudging along. She was his wife, and it didn’t matter that the home was swept away. The family reunited, laughed and cried and started off arm in arm for a refugee home. There are thousands of similar scenes. They would fill a volume that would bring tears and smiles and tell a story such as the world has never heard.”
Hecht described other surreal scenes: “Some of the steel structures have been twisted out of shape, others are overthrown and scattered along the squares. Mud lies two feet thick on the floors. In the teller’s cage of the First National Bank building, a horse was found. Another animal was discovered on the second floor of a department store.”
Hecht doesn’t mention whether the two horses were alive. It seems likely that the first wasn’t, assuming the teller’s cage was on the second floor, but that the horse in the department store came out all right. In any event, there were dead animals alongside the dead people throughout the city and all were being removed as fast as possible to prevent the spread of disease. Two wagonloads of dead dogs were removed from Main Street on this day, and forty-five horses that had drowned in a bunch were taken out at one time.
“It is not true that cats have nine lives,” declared a story in the Oelwein Daily Register, the paper read by the people of Fayette County, Iowa. “There are thousands of dead cats in Dayton.”
Everyone knew they were losing their city, their neighborhoods, their homes during the flood, but now that the water had receded, people were starting to realize just what had been lost purely on an economic scale. Daniel Rheim, a Fort Wayne saloon owner and resident of Bloomingdale, Indiana, was illustrative of what the flood had done to people’s net worth. The previous fall he had purchased a piano for $550. About a week after the flood, he paid a junk dealer $10 to haul it away.
Orville Wright returned to his house, where he and his brother had lived since 1871, the year of Orville’s birth. The house at 7 Hawthorn Street was still standing, but it was in wretched shape. Orville was stunned to find, though, amidst the wreckage, on a table, a bowl of moldy oranges. The bowl of oranges—a favorite snack of his—had been on the table when he and Katharine left. Similar to what had happened at the Adams residence, the table rose in the water, and the bowl of oranges remained on it, and then when the water levels dropped, so did the table and the oranges.
Mr. Wright and American history was, overall, pretty lucky. A fire broke out in a building near the old bicycle shop where he and Wilbur h
ad worked for many years, drafting blueprints and constructing parts for their flying machine. In the shop were those blueprints as well as diaries and photographic negatives of the brothers’ early experiments. Fortunately, the fire missed the shop.
But the shop had certainly been through the wringer. The Wright brothers’ famous 1903 Flyer, the airplane that started it all, had been dismantled shortly after its first flights and then put in crates in a shed behind the store. The crates storing the Flyer were completely submerged—for eleven days. You might think that would have completely done in the famous biplane, but when Orville eventually opened the mud-covered crates, he discovered that the mud had actually preserved the contents. The 1903 Flyer wasn’t destroyed and it—or parts of it, anyway—since 1948 has been proudly exhibited in the Smithsonian.
There were other casualties of history as well. Lyles Station, Indiana, was a tiny community that began in the 1840s as a settlement for freed slaves, getting its name from Joshua Lyles, a freed Tennessee slave who donated six acres of ground to the community to start a railroad station. It was named Lyles Station in 1886 and by the time 1913 rolled around, it was a community of eight hundred residents with fifty-five homes, a post office, the railroad station, an elementary school, two churches, two general stores, and a lumber mill. The Patoka and Wabash Rivers pretty much ended progress at Lyles Station, however, and today, other than a few scattered homes, a church, a grain elevator, and the school, there’s very little left of Lyles Station.
Libraries throughout the region were decimated. The city of Zanesville, Ohio, lost 5,000 books. In Piqua, the library lost 8,500 books when the water filled the entire first floor. In Hamilton, 13,000 books were destroyed. But the damage was worst in Dayton’s library, which lost 45,000 books, not to mention desks, chairs, bookcases, and filing cabinets. The November 1913 issue of The Library Journal described the destruction at the Dayton library this way:
“Floors were covered several inches deep with black, slimy, sticky mud into which books were imbedded as a thick carpet. Furniture was overturned, wooden book shelves warped and fallen and heavy card catalog cabinets lifted and carried far out of place or overturned face down in the slime, a typewriter on its face in the mud, the office and catalog room closed by the swollen walnut doors. The mud was too wet and heavy for immediate removal, so the building was opened for drying and the following hours spent in seeking workmen, shovels, wheelbarrows, and rubber boots.”
Since the library staff was mostly women, and they felt they could use some male testosterone to help with lifting, “three or four sturdy Germans” were found at a nearby automobile factory, according to The Library Journal, and added to the staff.
But then occasionally, people would shake their heads in wonder and amusement at what wasn’t destroyed. In Dayton, the Newcom Tavern and Log Cabin somehow escaped ruin. It was the city’s oldest standing structure.
It had been built in 1796 and moved and turned into a museum one hundred years later—the move paid for by long-time Dayton benefactor John H. Patterson—and while it had been swamped by the flood, along with just about every other house in the city, unlike so many of its modern counterparts, it stood. It’s still standing today.
There were also telephone lines to restore. As a 1913 issue of the trade publication Telephony explained, “Gangs of cable men in mud-holes with water waist deep and with pumps working over their heads to keep the water down, labored night and day endeavoring to adjust the indescribable condition in which they found their work.”
Most of the wires, Telephony added, were too wet and muddy and had to be replaced.
Outside the Beckel House, fire engines were pumping water from basements of what were considered the most important buildings for the city, like the Bell Telephone Exchange and the Algonquin Hotel.
Of course, what was bad for the flood-battered cities was good for other cities, and all of the work being done in Dayton and throughout the region demanded professional help. A 1913 issue of Electrical World reported that as far as Duluth, Minnesota, linemen and electricians were told that “every man who can climb a telegraph pole and twist a wire is wanted at Dayton and other flooded cities in Ohio and Indiana.”
Not that it was a boon for the economy, since millions of dollars were lost in almost every industry imaginable and unimaginable. In fact, it’s tempting to call the effect the flood had on the economy a wash. For instance, you wouldn’t think of the ice cream industry during a flood, but a 1913 issue of Ice Cream Trade Journal reported seventy-five factories making ice cream as being damaged. “There will be little ice cream sold before July, and then the sales will be from 50 to 80 percent under those of last year,” predicted the journal.
Mayor Phillips called an afternoon meeting of the council. His purpose was to issue emergency bonds to provide money to the salvage corps to remove the dead horses and clear away mud, and then to provide food and relieve the National Cash Register Company and other sources from the tremendous expense that they were going through, caring for everyone; money would also go to help people who were rendered helpless by the flood or unemployed thanks to the flood, and finally, to help strengthen the police system.
Over in the mayor’s office, Mayor Phillips didn’t feel he deserved everyone’s wrath and blame and tried defending himself. “Had council granted my request for a bond issue to dredge the Miami River on January 6, 1913, I am firmly convinced that many persons would have escaped,” the mayor told reporters. “I do not mean that I think dredging the canal would have averted the flood, but that if the obstructions had been removed from the bed of the river, I am convinced that the inundation of West Dayton would have been delayed until many people could have been warned of the situation and given time to make their escape.”
So either Mayor Phillips was pressured to do what he did next, or perhaps he came up with the idea on his own, understanding, after being trapped in his house during Dayton’s darkest moments, that his career in politics was over. He issued a statement praising John H. Patterson and then called on all citizens to recognize the head of the National Cash Register Company as “mayor of Dayton during the emergency period.”
It was quite a turnaround for Patterson, a businessman who had broken anti-trust laws and was still technically awaiting a sentencing that was expected to put him in jail for a year, and for Mayor Phillips who, before the flood, seems to have been well regarded and on his way to a promising political career. Now, Phillips was a footnote in his own city, and Patterson was a beloved hero who could do no wrong. In fact, it came out that day—although it probably wasn’t exactly kept a secret—that Patterson was paying for the coffins and burials of the victims. Small wonder that people in Dayton were circulating a petition, asking the president to pardon Patterson.
“I don’t want a pardon,” Patterson told a reporter around this time. “All I want is a fair trial in a higher court. I am not guilty of anything. If I am, I want to go to jail just the same as any other man.” Two days later, Patterson would wire President Wilson: “I am guilty of no crime. I want no pardon. I want only justice and some federal action that will make Dayton safe from recurrence of such a catastrophe as we have just had.”
Small wonder Dayton loved Patterson, who ultimately was interested in business and not politics. He made it known that he wanted someone to take over and be in charge of the flood relief situation, and he soon found just the man: Edward T. Devine, president of the New York school of philanthropy and a leading social worker in the nation. He volunteered his services to the Red Cross, which sent him to Dayton. Devine had been in charge of the relief work after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
“The situation in Dayton is worse than that which followed the Frisco earthquake,” said Devine, who was referring to not only the vast destruction in the city but lumping it in with the entire state of Ohio and beyond.
Mabel T. Boardman and Ernest Bicknell of the Red Cross seconded that. In a letter written in late March that Ms. Boardman
sent to a prominent New Yorker, she noted, “Mr. Bicknell told me he thought it was the biggest and most difficult field the Red Cross had yet had to deal with. At San Francisco the work was concentrated and here it is spread out, so that we will have not only the jealousy of individuals but that of communities to contend with. Furthermore, I think the responsibility of a really serious disaster over a large territory comes more upon the Red Cross than it ever has before. Of course, this is as it should be, and I hope and believe we can meet it, but it will take time.”
But what really concerned the Red Cross and those involved with relief was the concern of disease breaking out. “The serious feature of this situation is the danger of pestilence arising from unsanitary conditions due to the flooding,” said Devine at the time; and indeed, two children in northern Dayton, according to a Dr. R.A. Dunn, who was interviewed after a trip there, had already died of diphtheria.
The dead bodies, at least the ones that could be recovered, were quickly being buried after being identified.
It was the most depressing of all the tasks. One woman’s body was found in the west side of Dayton, her face disfigured, apparently from a fire, and in her arms was a six-month-old baby. Another woman was found lying across a picket fence, with her face so lacerated that authorities weren’t very hopeful about her being identified. She was in her night clothing, suggesting that the flood had caught her asleep.
Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Page 33