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

by Geoff Williams

  May, 1913, Dayton

  Almost a year after the passing of his brother Wilbur, on a Thursday afternoon on May 1, Orville Wright flew in an airplane for the first time. It wasn’t simply any typical flight, either. He was piloting a new hydroplane, seven miles north of Dayton on the Great Miami River. Wright told reporters that he hoped the machine would be useful in future floods, such as the one that had driven him out of his home.

  Indeed, there seemed to be promise. Wright’s plane, piloted by Orville and an assistant, William Jacobs, took off on the waters of the Miami River and then soared in the sky, gracefully curving around the edge of Dayton, and returned, skimming above the water until it came to a safe landing. He had already flown it about four hundred feet above the river, with hundreds of curious spectators watching below, but this was a more ambitious flight.

  Orville Wright wasn’t the only one soaring. It was a lift to the beleaguered city of Dayton, which was naturally still cleaning up and rebuilding. Wright flew approximately a hundred flights throughout May, June, and July.

  Things were happening on the ground, too, though. The next day, on May 2, the Dayton’s Flood Prevention Committee formed. Poor Mayor Phillips was nowhere to be found; John H. Patterson was designated the Flood Prevention Committee Chairman, and he appointed local business leaders to join the organization and share in the heavy lifting. The idea that Patterson might spend a year in jail, very real just a couple months before, seemed more improbable than ever.

  In the aftermath of the flood, water-weary government officials and their constituents across the nation, even in states that hadn’t been affected, demanded change.

  In Pennsylvania, the state legislature passed an act allowing a dam in the northeastern quadrant of the state to be built, and creating a sixteen-mile lake, protecting towns from the Shenango and Beaver rivers. Indiana christened a flood protection commission, and throughout the state, new laws were passed, and dams and levees were built and rebuilt. Legislation involving flood control that had been stalled in states like Texas and California suddenly passed as the nation read about the ongoing difficulties in the Midwest.

  But no community moved as fast to prepare for another flood as Dayton. The flood prevention committee quickly offered a job to Arthur Ernest Morgan, who was recognized as a brilliant water control engineer. He was hired by Dayton to prepare a flood plan to fight the flood plains, once and for all.

  Morgan was born in 1878 in Cincinnati, grew up in Minnesota, lived in Washington, D.C., and was now based out of Tennessee. Morgan was an ambitious go-getter that stemmed from growing up in Minnesota as a sickly kid. As a teenager, he vowed to become healthier. He got a job outside and started pushing himself harder than most able-bodied people ever do. He slept in a tent in northern Minnesota when it was 30 below, and after his high school graduation, he traveled thirty miles down the Mississippi River on a three-foot wide log with just a buck fifty in his pocket.

  Then he began making his way to Colorado, doing odd jobs like picking fruit and mining coal. According to his biographer Mark Bernstein, who wrote the book, American Biography: Arthur Ernest Morgan, Morgan bought fifty 30-cent editions of authors like Emerson and Kipling and attempted to sell these works he so loved to miners.

  Morgan ultimately lived in Colorado for a time and completed his college education at the University of Colorado. After he finished, though, not having money or a job, he returned home and ended up joining forces with his father’s surveying firm. They named it Morgan & Morgan, instead of Morgan & Son, at Arthur’s insistence, feeling he was his own man, and after what he had been through, he had arguably earned that. He soon married and started a family.

  It was during this period that Arthur Ernest Morgan realized he had an aptitude and personal affinity for water control and decided to become a water control engineer. There weren’t many water control engineers in the country, as there were not many competitors, he liked his odds of getting work somewhere and continuing his very basic training in the field. Minnesota didn’t have any statewide standards for drainage control, and so in 1904, Morgan, twenty-six years old, volunteered to create them for the state engineering society. Morgan threw himself into the task, and the following year, the society embraced his ideas, which were then written into state law. The governor then offered Morgan the job of state engineer.

  Morgan actually declined, having set his eyes on a job opening as an engineer on a federal level, working for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Drainage Investigation. His biographer posits that Morgan also may have wanted to move away from Minnesota. His wife, Urania, died four months after the birth of their son, Ernest, and he may have wanted some distance from the tragedy. Understandable, but as his son was left in the care of relatives after his mother’s death, he was also distancing himself from his young son, Ernest, Jr. Still, it was a different time, and a father’s role in rearing children was not given the same gravitas it is today.

  Morgan developed a reputation for being a supremely ethical and dedicated water control engineer, and by 1910, he left Washington and went to Memphis, starting the Morgan Engineering Company. He also married again. He was just shy of thirty-six years of age when Dayton found him.

  Of course, hiring Morgan—and his staff of engineers—to canvass the land and draw up plans and build a flood control system would cost money, a lot of it, and so the city of Dayton devoted the weekend of May 24 and 25 to the sole goal of raising two million dollars to hire them. This was no small feat, considering that the city had lost an estimated $128 million in property. The neighboring city of Xenia’s newspaper reported that “men and women, led by five bands, paraded the streets and stood in lines before subscription booths.” Everyone from business owners to home owners, some who reportedly took out a second mortgage, pledged or gave money to the fund. Every church in the city on Sunday morning collected money for the rebuilding cause.

  “Flags and banners floated from every house and store, and when the whistles announced the completion of the fund, the streets were thronged with thousands who sang religious hymns and danced and shouted in a great thanksgiving service,” reported Xenia’s Daily Gazette. The banners and the words on everyone’s lips were the slogan of the flood prevention committee: Remember the promises you made in the attic.

  In other words, the slogan was saying, in its own way, remember how you hoped, prayed and vowed this would never happen to you, to your city, again? Dayton as a whole was determined to make good on its promise.

  But by the end of the weekend, the committee still hadn’t raised enough, and late that afternoon (or perhaps in the evening, according to Bicknell’s recollection), John H. Patterson wound up running a meeting in the large assembly hall in his factory, a meeting that every important businessman in Dayton was urged to attend.

  Ernest Bicknell—finally in Dayton—later wrote about the meeting, saying that the big hall was full, and that the men in the meeting were “filled with uncertainty, not to say apprehension. They had been very hard hit by the flood and had given liberally to relief.”

  All weekend, in fact. “But they literally dared not stay away from the meeting. They could not afford to disregard the moral pressure of their neighbors and their powerful business associates,” wrote Bicknell. “Mr. Patterson took charge of the meeting and ran it virtually single-handed. I was fortunate to be present that evening and witnessed a demonstration of moral and mental power which made an ineffaceable picture in my memory. As the hour of eight o’clock struck, Mr. Patterson rose and looked searchingly over the faces of the audience. Apparently satisfied that the people expected were present, he walked to the entrance of the hall, closed the double doors, locked them and without a word put the key into his pocket. Then returning to the front of the room, he began to speak. He spoke of the pride which those present had taken in the beauty and prosperity of Dayton and of the tragedy which had now laid her in ruins and had taken the lives of many of her people. With deep feeling but with inf
inite skill he brought that doubting and apprehensive crowd of hard-headed men into a malleable and sympathetic mood. Then he spoke briefly, touching on the plans under consideration that would forever prevent a repetition of the calamity.”

  According to Bicknell, Patterson said: “Before we can go forward with these plans, we must have at our absolute command $2,000,000.”

  It isn’t clear how much the city had already raised that day, but they were well short of two million. “An audible groan rose from that crowd,” recalled Bicknell. “Murmurs of dissent were heard. Men turned to each other and shook their heads muttering. Mr. Patterson paid no attention to these signs of protest but went right on with his appeal. Then, doubtless by prearrangement, he turned to a leading citizen, called him familiarly by his Christian name and asked him what he would give. This man made a fervent little speech and named an amount that made the others gasp by its generosity. This started the business in the right direction.”

  Everyone began pledging, including Patterson’s son, Frederick, who upped his donation by $12,000, but still when it was past nine o’clock, the city was short a quarter of a million dollars. Patterson, whose company already had given a quarter of a million dollars, announced that NCR would double that amount and give half a million instead, and although Bicknell, who wrote about the event twenty-one years after the fact, remembered it as a somber occasion, contemporary accounts note that the crowd went wild. Men ripped off their coats and waved them around the air. The bands present began playing, “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” Grown men were openly weeping. The total pledged, from NCR and from 22,000 individuals, was now a healthy $2.125 million. Morgan could now begin.

  The summer and fall of 1913

  Arthur E. Morgan hopped in and out of Dayton and surrounding cities like Piqua, Troy, Hamilton and Middletown, meeting with engineers, speaking at chamber of commerce events and going to gatherings like the Dayton Flood Preventing Conference in November. But what became more than patently obvious in all of this planning and winning hearts and minds was that laws would have to be passed to get this flood control system up and running. Morgan envisioned a conservancy with a board of governors that could have the power to condemn lands, issue bonds, and exercise police powers, all under court review. The conservancy act that he wanted and ultimately got would be able to regulate, widen, and deepen stream channels, reclaim wet and overflowed land wherever possible, and improve drainage.

  1914

  It took the help of Governor James Cox (who needed no convincing) and a Dayton attorney, John McMahon, who wrote the language for what would become the Conservancy Act, allowing the creation of conservancy districts in the state of Ohio. From here on out, the district’s electors, like the mayor and councilmen, could tax their district and create an organization that would have the authority to plot out, develop, and even operate the water supply.

  The conservancy districts, if officials set them up, would be allowed to do whatever they needed to do, to ensure that the waterways in their own district wouldn’t flood, and that the water would remain clean for drinking, bathing, and swimming, and that the rivers, creeks, and streams in general would remain free and clear of garbage. As one U.S. government engineer would tell a crowd of Ohioans after the flood, the flood didn’t occur in the rivers as God made them, but in rivers obstructed by debris, by buildings in the channel, and by bridge piers. Conservancies, it was hoped, would prevent that.

  The Ohio General Assembly passed the Conservancy Act in February of 1914.

  1915

  John H. Patterson didn’t want a pardon, and thus, he didn’t get it. It took a while, but in 1915, the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the lower court and sent Patterson’s case back for a new trial. Eventually, the matter was dropped entirely.

  It was also this year that the Miami Conservancy District was formed, devoted to protecting the Miami Valley, where Dayton lives and portions of nine Ohio counties, from flooding. Morgan, however, was just getting started. Ultimately, he was spearheading a plan that required twenty-one draglines (a piece of heavy equipment used in engineering), twenty-nine trains, and two hundred dump cars, sixty-three automobiles, many miles of railroad track, over a hundred pumps, over a hundred transformers and, was the largest public works project of its time, employing two thousand people.

  There were five camp villages with 230 major buildings, 200 sheds and various buildings. Bunkhouses were put up with running water, and each camp had a mess hall and a store. Each camp village existed to build an earthen dam, dams made up of impervious clay and silt, sand, gravel, and boulders, all which would protect Dayton, Hamilton, Middletown, Piqua, Troy, and a slew of communities in the area that had all been besieged by the 1913 flood. These weren’t any ordinary dams Morgan’s crew ultimately made. For instance, the dam near Englewood, Ohio, is said to have enough dirt to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza. It can hold 6,350 acres of water. The area in the Miami Valley that was flooded took up 3,285 acres. There would have to be a flood twice the size of the Great Flood of 1913 for Morgan’s work to be diminished.

  When the rivers through the Miami Valley flow normally, the water passes through the dams without any trouble, and behind the dams is no water whatsoever. If the Englewood dam were to reach its maximum capacity, it would take twenty-three days for the water to drain and evaporate.

  But when there are heavy rains, and the water starts to overflow its banks, the extra water travels through special conduits in the dams and collects in a space called the retarding basin, which is upstream of the dam. If it sounds confusing, it is the stuff engineers live for, and Morgan was clearly in his element. He would oversee the dams until they were all finished in 1922.

  1920

  Mrs. Ida Overmeyer gave her resignation to the orphanage after a quarter of a century of service and would live out her final years in St. Louis with her son, his wife, and their two daughters. Around this time, Theresa Hammond was married according to her niece, Sara Houk. Miss Hammond ended up marrying Dr. James Francis Dinnen, who everyone called Frank. He was the doctor who had cared for the orphans that fateful week more than eight years before.

  He was married when he and Miss Hammond met, and the romance came well after the flood and his divorce, as far as the family knows, and that may be true. The doctor continued caring for the orphans and Miss Hammond remained teaching there for years to come, and so it may be that it took some time before love blossomed.

  Because Dr. Dinnen was married in the Catholic Church, and he didn’t want to scandalize his ex-wife, he and Theresa married in secret, in a civil ceremony, and eventually moved to Cleveland. They both lived into their seventies and passed away during the 1950s.

  Charles Gebhart, Hammond’s boatmate during the terrible tragedy at the orphanage, was accused several days after the incident of being drunk when he was rowing. At the time, he was a saloon owner—he also had been a gardener for many years—and the charge that he was inebriated during the rescues could have stuck, except that he had about thirty people, including Miss Hammond, sign a petition stating emphatically that he hadn’t touched a drop that day. Gebhart claimed he hadn’t had a drink for at least three months.

  Gebhart himself, however, seems to have lived otherwise a fairly sedate and normal life free of tragedy and disasters. He gave up his saloon about a year after the flood, and during the 1920s, he was a truck farmer, the term used for a local farmer who sells directly to consumers and restaurants. On March 17, 1932, he passed away quietly, hopefully with his wife Tracy and their three sons and daughter at his side.

  1921

  The dams were meant to save communities, but one community was something of a casualty of Morgan’s vision. In February of this year, the town of Osborn was moved to a new site. The land was purchased as part of the conservancy reservoir, with the idea being that it would store up flood water and pass it down to Dayton in reasonable amounts. The state was going to wreck Osborn’s buildings but decided to sell them to be moved
to the new site and gave the old owners the first chance to buy them. A company was formed to manage the moving, and bids were requested.

  It was a major undertaking, as described in a December 1925 issue of Popular Mechanics that told the story of E. W. LaPlant, who had made moving large buildings his specialty. One of his finest moments was when he engineered the transport of a 4,800-ton department store in Montreal, Canada.

  But with the town of Osborn, LaPlant designed a move that required 552 buildings to be hauled out of a valley to a hilltop a mile and a half away. The town is still on that hill, at least in part. Never able to regain its former self-sufficiency, Osborn and the neighboring town of Fairfield merged to become Fairborn in 1950.

  1922

  The year that Arthur E. Morgan wrapped up his work on saving Dayton from any future flooding, it was almost as if fate decided that John H. Patterson would be called for duty in the next world. He died a little over nine years after the flood, passing away on May 7, 1922. He was seventy-seven and busy to the end, dying two days after working on plans with General Billy Mitchell, a U.S. Army general who is considered the father of the Air Force. They intended to build an aviation research center in Dayton, Patterson’s beloved city. He was as generous with his time and his money as he was during the flood until the end of his days.

  1927

  Christian Dane Hagerty, the intrepid Associated Press reporter, died far too young. His life ended in Chicago at the age of fifty-one. It was a sad end, an ill-fitting one considering all of the adventure he appears to have crammed into his life. The hard liquor and hard living caught up with him, and in his last few years in life, he was, as one paper described him, “an invalid.”