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

by Geoff Williams

  When all was said and done, the official death toll for Dayton was open for discussion. The Ohio Bureau of Statistics listed eighty-two names of people who died in Dayton, while cautioning, “it is impossible to say how many persons lost their lives directly and indirectly as a result of the flood of March, 1913.” Historian Trudy E. Bell puts the figure at ninety-eight. Other sources place Dayton’s deaths at closer to three hundred, but they may be considering nearby cities and neighborhoods. Whatever the number was, it was too many.

  Away from Dayton

  And people on March 29 were still going to their watery graves.

  The papers reported a Miss Anna Smith, leaving Cincinnati and trying to cross the Ohio River and reach Newport, Kentucky, in a skiff with three men. For anyone who has seen the Ohio River on a good day, one can imagine that it wouldn’t be easy to cross it in a skiff, not the most sturdy of boats to ford wild and unpredictable water. To have done it when the Ohio River was miles wide and at a time when thousands of miles of water was rushing into it seems like madness. The craft capsized, and while the three men somehow made it to shore, Miss Smith did not.

  Ohio River communities were, as everyone expected, still being swallowed up by the second wave of the flood, although Cincinnati was one city unexpectedly not devastated by the flood.

  Cincinnati was considered on the verge of flooding when the water reached fifty feet. The highest anyone had ever seen it was 71.1 feet on February 14, 1884, and by April 1, it was 69.8—perilously high but not a record. The Ohio River expanded into downtown, flooding the Palace of the Fans (later Crosley Field), the baseball stadium; streets like Main and Walnut became rivers. Fifteen thousand people were left homeless.

  But it caught few people by surprise by the time the flood came to these parts of the state, and for the most part, Cincinnati residents were helping neighboring towns, rather than needing help themselves. It also helped that the city is built on a series of hills—one of its nicknames is the City of Seven Hills—so many homes were far from the flooding, and the hills provided easy access for residents who needed to find somewhere to wait out the flood.

  Newport and Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, were also quite submerged, with twelve thousand residents needing to find a place to stay. In nearby Lawrenceburg, only forty houses—out of five thousand—weren’t underwater.

  The flood ravaged Wheeling, West Virginia, picking off ten people there and making twenty thousand people at least temporarily part of the homeless class. Wheeling’s Wheeling Island, the most populous island in the Ohio River, had some houses completely submerged—not even an attic window above the water—and many came off their moorings and went floating down the river. Half of Moundsville, West Virginia, and Bridgeport, and Bellaire, Ohio, were underwater. One of the saddest tales has to be that of William Sullivan in Huntington, West Virginia. He helped his wife and children into a boat, and then rescuers took them from the second story of his house. The waters kept rising and when he became convinced that they would not be able to return for him, he ended his own life by drinking poison.

  Farther away, the James River in Virginia was out of its banks. The Delaware River in New Jersey was higher than it had been in years, sending many families to the second floors, and even as far north as Vermont, the Connecticut River was overflowing. In Massachusetts, the residents were on standby, in case the rising river threatened any mills and factories.

  Rochester, New York

  The rain had been six to eight inches above normal in northern and central New York throughout all of March, but the rainfall that came on March 27 and March 28 dumped 4.4 inches of rainfall over the entire Genesee River basin and was still making plenty of trouble on March 29. The entire Mohawk and upper Hudson River basins were also flooded. Albany, Troy, and Buffalo were all cities enduring flooding and seeing their bridges smashed and their streets littered with hundreds of dead cattle.

  Nobody was predicting doom for Rochester, but the end result of the flooding was that the Genesee River was rushing into the streets like it hadn’t since forty-eight years before, in 1865, and merchants were moving their goods upstairs as fast as possible. Front Street caved in, highways were damaged, bridges went down, and there was one fatality. Police officers heard shouts, and when they ran to see what was the matter, they found a boy clinging to an overturned canoe rushing down Clarissa Street.

  The boy and the canoe sailed through the city as dozens of people gathered along the riverbanks and threw ropes, hung out tree branches, and did whatever they could to save him. Just before he reached the Court Street dam, the boy stopped screaming. He disappeared under the big waves, and the canoe was swept over the dam.

  Hornell, New York

  Maybe people were becoming used to the flooding and assuming the worst was over, and so that’s how seven-year-old Earl Rosier came to be allowed to play outside with his brother. They wound up on an unfinished abutment of the Erie Railroad Bridge, and after the boy stumbled and plunged into the river, it’s safe to assume the parents spent the rest of their days wondering how and why it happened.

  Fort Wayne, Indiana

  A similar situation happened on the same day to a four-year-old boy, William Singer, who walked off a sidewalk and into some fast-moving water and was quickly whisked away. His mother waded in after him but was almost drowned herself until a neighbor pulled her back to shore.

  A railroad man found the four-year-old floating in the water. He was still alive—barely. Two agonizing hours later, after a doctor and the Fort Wayne police chief labored over young William, using a new resuscitating device called a pulmotor, that pumps oxygen into the lungs, they had to call the boy’s time of death.

  It may be impossible to ever really know how many people died in the Great Flood of 1913, because there were surely some people who were never found and weren’t registered as an official casualty. In his memoir, Journey Through My Years, Ohio governor James M. Cox says as much, stating that for Ohio alone, “the number of known dead was 361, but undoubtedly many more bodies were never recovered. Much sickness and many deaths followed the flood. Thirty-two persons were admitted to the Dayton State Hospital, the city’s asylum, their commitment papers expressly stating that their insanity was a direct consequence of the flood.”

  Meanwhile, as Cox implied, when annual totals were tallied for publications like Annual Report, put out by the Ohio Bureau of Vital Statistics, people who died during the flood for reasons other than drowning were not counted in the totals, people like John and Katherine Stotler, seventy and sixty-five respectively. They were victims of the flood as much as anyone but weren’t counted in the final death total, presumably because they didn’t drown. On March 26, in Columbus, marooned in their cottage with the Scioto and Olentangy rivers overtaking their home, the husband and wife decided to commit suicide instead of letting the river kill them. You pick your poison, of course, but newspaper accounts say that they slit their throats, which all in all, doesn’t necessarily seem like a better way to go than drowning, terrifying a death as it is. Their fear, hopelessness, and helplessness must have been beyond overwhelming to take such drastic measures.

  Delia McNerny, a 69-year-old widow, also living in Columbus, died in her house on March 27, with the water still surrounding her home and in the first floor of her house. She caught pneumonia and passed away with two of her daughters, Susie and Annie, looking after her as best they could.

  On March 29, Charles Potter, his wife and six children were all rescued from their house, which was still surrounded by water, and as they were spirited off to safety in a wagon on a muddy road, it overturned. Everyone died, but because they technically weren’t victims of the flood, they weren’t counted as such; but had the flood never occurred, it seems likely that the family would have lived to see 1914 and many years beyond that.

  On March 30, also in Columbus, James T. Aughenbaugh, a blacksmith who had been rescued from a flooded house, died at 12:30 P.M., from, i
t was said, shock and mostly the toll his body had taken waiting to be rescued in a flooding home without heat and food.

  The Evening Independent, the paper for Massillon, Ohio, reported that August Peters, a 68-year-old German-American, contracted pneumonia on March 26, when he had spent most of that Wednesday watching rescuers take stranded neighbors from their homes. Presumably Peters’s house wasn’t thought to be in any danger, but Peters was probably without heat, and chances are the first floor of his home was flooded, and he was breathing in a lot of damp air.

  The Logansport Pharo, the newspaper of record for Logansport, Indiana, reported that on the afternoon of April 2 the baby of one Joseph Ofazio caught pneumonia and died, and probably never would have if it weren’t for the conditions created by flood. The Ofazios’s house had been penetrated by the flood, and after the water receded, they returned to the home before the walls and flooring were completely dry. Soon after, their baby was sick. Joseph Ofazio frantically took the baby to the town doctor, who gave the baby some medicine and warned the father to take the baby home to rest as soon as he could. Ofazio surely tried, but before he reached his house, his child died in his arms.

  At some point in early April, James Robinson, fifty-five, was a flood casualty, but it also seems unlikely that he was counted in the overall death toll. He lived alone in his houseboat, five miles outside of Evansville, Indiana, and was sick; and while his daughter and her husband took care of him, they lived in a separate houseboat within view of his vessel. After the flood, their houseboat was in no shape to cross the Ohio River, and the tiny boats that they had had all been unmoored and carried away. Robinson’s daughter tried to flag down passing boats, most of them distributing supplies along the river, hoping someone would check on her father, who she had initially seen but then he had disappeared inside the boat and hadn’t been seen for days. He was finally found inside his houseboat, not a crumb of food to be found in any of the rooms. He had starved to death.

  The morning of April 25, 1913, Elizabeth Crowe, a fifty-year-old African-American, died. The Indianapolis Star reported that “a nervous shock as a result of flood experiences is believed to have been responsible.”

  Henry Brand, forty-two years old and a blacksmith in Hamilton, Ohio, had been washed out of his home during the flood, but he seemed fine. And perhaps he was fine. But a few weeks after the water receded, the evening of April 28, Brand’s nose began bleeding. It wouldn’t stop. By 3:15 in the morning, he was dead. Speculation was that a latent head injury in the flood had done him in, but nobody could be sure.

  Mrs. Lucy Chalsont didn’t die in the flood either, but she was a casualty nonetheless. The forty-year-old who lived in the river town of Marietta, Ohio, lost virtually everything she had in the flood, reported the Associated Press, which noted in a June 21, 1913 article that the night before, she had waded into the Muskingum River and drowned herself.

  Hamilton, Ohio, Saturday

  Eventually the numbers relating to material damage would start coming in, too. In Hamilton alone, 5,600 houses were flooded, and another 335 completely destroyed. Even after the water evaporated, there was still the matter of getting people fed and clothed and keeping a roof over everyone’s heads. In Hamilton, two bankers were given the disheartening assignment of recovering bodies and managing a morgue. It wasn’t a straight-forward task. Many of the Hamilton residents had been carried miles away from where they lived.

  Underneath the bankers was a team of undertakers from Cincinnati. Bodies were hauled to the lawn of the Butler County Courthouse and eventually taken inside the courthouse assembly room. A local newspaperman later described the sight as “appalling … Scores of dead bodies lay about the room on temporary slabs, awaiting the attention of the embalmers, while as soon as this was done, they were placed in plain caskets.”

  The following day, there would be a funeral for forty-nine victims, the number of people who had been identified. There were thirty-four more victims still to be recognized, and there was another reason the city had to wait until March 30. Its cemetery had been under water.

  It was hardly the calming funeral that the community needed. Mourners were well aware that nearby at the courthouse, the remains of two unidentified women and a four-month-old baby were out on the lawn in caskets, there for the public to view and identify.

  Then during the ceremony, an automobile brought the body of another flood victim, causing an anxious ripple in the crowd, which seemed both darkly amused and terrified. The reverend had just uttered the words: “The grim reaper has been in our midst.”

  EPILOGUE:

  THE DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD

  Chapter Twenty

  Remember the Promises in the Attic

  Denver, March 30

  Sarah Bernhardt, the 67-year-old legendary French stage actress known around the world, gave a benefit performance for the flood sufferers in Ohio and Indiana with John Drew, Jr., an American stage actor known for his Shakespeare performances. He was also the uncle of the famed actors John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore and thus the great-great uncle of future film actress Drew Barrymore. Together, they raised $5,000, which would be added to a $41,000 fund already raised by Colorado residents.

  Everyone seemed to want to send either money or some sort of show of support. In Sacramento, California, at Folson Penitentiary, E. C. McCarty, a forger, drew up a resolution that prisoners there felt bad about the flood sufferers, and the resolution was somehow passed on to the media and published in papers on this day. The convicts said they wanted the public to know how they felt “to show the outside world that the prisoners are not heartless nor heedless of the suffering of others.”

  March 31, Garfield, Indiana

  Farmers organized a bear hunt to try to bring down what was believed to be one of the escaped circus animals from the Wallace circus in Peru—after he appeared on the farm of one George Enoch. Unfortunately for the farmers at least, the bear managed to escape a hail of bullets.

  April 1, Louisville, Kentucky

  A large warehouse owned by the Rugby Distillery Company in the western part of the city, weakened by floodwaters, collapsed late in the night, and so into the river went five thousand barrels of whiskey valued at a quarter of a million dollars. Several employees hastily constructed a dam and saved a number of barrels. Presumably, at least a few Kentucky men went looking for these rogue barrels and saved some for themselves.

  April 1, Fort Wayne

  A full week after the flood began for most people, a poorly dressed and tired-looking man came to the house of one Mrs. Josephine Pfadt, asking for food and explaining that he was a refugee from the flood. She permitted him to come into the house and prepared him a meal. She then left her home for a few minutes to go to the home of a neighbor and when she returned, she learned that he had tried to embrace her little girl. The police were called in but failed to find any trace of him. It’s an interesting story, if only to recognize that even in the good old days, there were some really bad people, and for the language that newspapers used when covering a troubled topic such as pedophile (the headline: ALLEGED INSULTER SOUGHT).

  April 2, Bird’s Point, Missouri

  Forty-eight soldiers from the Missouri National Guard became stuck on a 200-foot-wide and 400-foot-long stretch of an earthen levee after the Mississippi River destroyed most of it. The soldiers had boats, but they were all swept away except for a two-man skiff. The two officers in charge boarded the skiff to make a four-mile trip—against the current—to Cairo, Illinois, where they knew they could get help.

  For the remaining soldiers, it was a long rest of the day—and night.

  “We could feel the dirt crumbling away beneath our feet,” one of the men told a reporter later, “and we were kept on the move nearly all of the time. The section of levee on which we were marooned was under water as deep as three feet in many places, and time after time, we dragged some of the men away from the water as the earth crumbled away. We made it a point to stand as near the up-st
ream edge of our island as possible, so if caught in a cave-in, we would not be washed away by the current.”

  The Chicago naval reserves immediately went after the soldiers, rescuing them the next morning. Incredibly, all forty-eight men survived the night.

  April 2, Missouri and Hickman, Kentucky

  For George Shaver, a Missouri farmer, it was tragedy plain and simple, the flood still reaping victims even after the waters receded in Dayton. He and his two young children saw their house destroyed and his wife and their mother killed by falling timbers in their home. Shavers then put his wife’s body in his boat, and with his two young children, who were clinging to her body, somehow steered them through the Mississippi River to Hickman, Kentucky, which Shaver deemed a much safer place to be. And it was. Soon after, they buried her in a little cemetery on a hillside.

  April 2, New Madrid, Missouri

  A resident, William Smith, and his wife, were reported to have attempted to cross the Mississippi River from New Madrid. They didn’t make it.

  April 2, Washington, D.C. and Catlettsburg, Kentucky

  Senator Ollie James of Kentucky appeared at both the Red Cross and War Department to appeal for aid for the three thousand residents of Catlettsburg, Kentucky, who had to flee their homes. He said that conditions were worse there than Dayton or Columbus, now that the levees had broken and everything had been swept away. That hopefully got their attention.

  April 2, 7 P.M., Paducah, Kentucky

  The river had risen a foot and a half throughout the day and by evening the floors of every wholesale house and many retail stores were flooded. The forecast assumed the river would rise another four feet, flooding almost the rest of Paducah, except for five blocks that seemed high enough to be out of danger. But people weren’t so sure. Paducah was on high ground, in general, but the community had never built any levees. Flooding was completely new to this generation. There hadn’t been a serious flood since 1884.