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

by Geoff Williams

  It was a fate worse than death for such an active and curious man, and on July 26, 1927, he sent a last telegram to his brother, went to his hotel room, picked up a gun, aimed it near his heart, and became the depressing subject of at least one short article in the newspaper.

  1928

  Hagerty’s one-time nemesis and friend Ben Hecht fared much better. This was the year his stage play The Front Page, a comedy, which he wrote with Charles MacArthur, another former Chicago journalist, made its Broadway debut.

  Hecht left journalism to become one of America’s most successful screenwriters as well as a director, producer, playwright, and novelist. He was the first writer to get an Oscar for a screenplay, for the 1927 silent crime film Underworld, and he either wrote or worked on numerous movies including Scarface, Nothing Sacred, Gone with the Wind, Some Like It Hot, and the original comedy spy film Casino Royale, which was released in 1967, three years after his death at the age of seventy.

  But Hecht never quite forgot what it meant to be a newspaperman. His well-received stage play, about newspaper men covering the crime beat, was adapted by another screenwriter and became the 1934 film of the same name starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien, and then later, Hecht rewrote the film The Front Page into a new adaptation, which became a much more famous and beloved film classic, His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

  After being presented with a gold medal by the Ohio governor, life went on for telephone operator and Dayton flood hero Arthur John Bell. He remained at his post in Dayton into World War I, briefly working at his company’s branch in nearby Middletown, and then being sent to the center of the state in Chillicothe, where he was in charge of the electrical installation at Camp Sherman. From there, he was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, where he oversaw a crew of a thousand men loading munitions for the war effort overseas.

  After the war, Bell decided to leave the telephone industry and with his wife moved to Detroit, and he got involved with construction work. He was given the position of overseeing a crew working on the Cadillac Building, which was completed in 1920 and is now part of Wayne State University. A few years later, he started working for a sewer contractor. It was at that job that he came to a noble and yet such an ignoble end.

  On August 6, 1928, Bell, now forty-six, was leading his men in installing a new road sewer in Detroit. Bell noticed that one of the workers was missing and, according to conflicting accounts, saw him fall down in the sewer and went down after him or couldn’t find him and then descended the ladder into the sewer.

  Once again, Bell was heralded as a hero, but there would be no happy ending followed by a medal and a meeting with the governor. Like his coworker, Bell was overcome by fumes and passed out. After spending nights and days doing everything he could to help his fellow citizens avoid drowning, Bell once again tried to save another fellow human being but would meet his end drowning in a sewer.

  1933

  Twenty years after the Great Flood of 1913, three flood survivors made their annual trek up to the attic where they had spent three days with six other people, with nothing but crackers to eat. Edward Wagner, a manufacturer, and Clark and Edwin Stoner, grocers and brothers, gathered in the attic of the Stoner home and dined on cheese and crackers. It was the last such reunion, however. Edwin, fifty-eight, was in poor health and low spirits. He would commit suicide in his store before the year was up.

  That same year, Arthur E. Morgan was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who selected him from 150 suggested names—to be the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which involved construction that was twelve times the size of the Egyptian pyramids. Morgan, who, in the midst of overseeing the dam work in Dayton, became the president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, a charming village in Greater Dayton, in 1920. When Roosevelt offered him the job to create a flood control system in the same vein as the successful work in the Ohio Valley for the neighboring Tennessee Valley, which includes parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia as well as the state it’s named for, Morgan, forty-eight, jumped at the chance.

  Roosevelt received some criticism as the cost of the construction mounted, but he defended his selection of Morgan, saying simply, “He builds good dams.”

  Roosevelt was correct; and that same year, Dayton was reminded of what Morgan had done for them. After a tornado invaded the nearby city of Xenia and crushed a house, killing its sixty-year-old dweller, George Gibbs, rivers and creeks left their banks, sweeping poor William Voelpel, forty-five, to his death in a drainage tunnel, and an emergency dam north of Dayton broke, sending waters through the villages of Miami Villa and Eldorado.

  But the main dams of the Miami Conservancy District? Those held fast. In fact, the Miami Conservancy District would be a model that was imitated across the country, including in Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, and Florida. American engineers and international delegations still make pilgrimages to Dayton to probe for lessons on how they have resolved their own flooding problems.

  1937

  This was the year when Morgan’s magic truly came to light, and Roosevelt’s wisdom in hiring the man was borne out. A flood swamped the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, affecting cities from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, and killing, most accounts say, 250 people. In Ohio, which got off relatively lucky with ten deaths, Kentucky, and Indiana, it was estimated that one of every eight people were left homeless. Almost one-fifth of Cincinnati, Ohio, which had managed to mitigate much of the damage in 1913, was now only accessible by boat. The city had no power, although fortunately they were able to bring in some emergency power—from Dayton.

  The streets of downtown Dayton didn’t have a drop of water on them.

  1961

  On January 11, the little baby that miraculously survived the ravaging current, Lois Adams, died suddenly at the age of forty-eight. She was, in a sense, the last victim of the 1913 flood.

  It sounds far-fetched, but it was always the theory of her twin brother, and there may be some rationale behind it. Two days after Charles Adams and Grandpa Adams began cleaning their house, both Lois and Charles Jr. developed pneumonia. It wasn’t due to being in their flood-ravaged house. Viola’s brother, Nelson Hicks, had come down, posing as a doctor since the National Guard wasn’t yet allowing visitors to Dayton. Hicks—who at least was a pharmacist, if not a physician—convinced Viola and Charles to bring the babies up to his house in Fostoria, Ohio. A few hours before boarding the train, Charles, Jr. became very sick, and they called in an actual physician.

  The doctor did what he could and apparently cleared them for travel. In any case, the Adams family traveled north, but before they reached Fostoria, Lois was ill, too. Both babies had the aforementioned pneumonia, and once again, Charles and Viola feared for their children’s lives. For several weeks, in Charles’s words, the two parents “nursed them back to life,” and during the moments that the babies seemed like they might live, Charles would think about their house back home and wonder how moldy and dilapidated it was becoming. But after three weeks, Charles finally felt comfortable enough to leave Fostoria and return to the task of rehabilitating their house. Not that there was all that much to do. Grandpa Adams, who always seems to have put his family first, had been cleaning it for the last three weeks, largely ignoring his own home in the process.

  So the kids grew up, and became quite famous in Dayton, being known locally as “the flood twins.” They married and had kids, and the flood twins’ parents lived good long lives as well. Charles Adams died in 1950 at the age of sixty-three. Viola passed away in 1973. She was eighty-seven. Then in 1961, Lois, who evidently had been healthy throughout her life, simply passed away. Her heart just stopped. Charles, Jr. would always feel her heart and lungs were permanently weakened as a result of the exposure and pneumonia from their near-drowning experience and suffering through weeks of pneumonia. It’s hard to argue that.

  1963

  Sam Bundy, the A
merican Indian, who it’s believed saved as many as 160 lives and possibly more, lived a long life, and deservedly so, although his later years weren’t his finest. When he was in his middle-aged years, he was hit by a car crossing the street in Fort Wayne, and his injuries were severe. In his later years, he was walking with two canes. He needed a walker, but he wasn’t able to afford one, nor, apparently, could his family, and he became house-bound. In 1963, when the Plain Dealer, the paper for Wabash, Indiana, did a story on the octogenarian, Bundy’s granddaughter’s husband told the reporter: “He would appreciate hearing from any old friends. He’s dying from loneliness.”

  Bundy passed away the following year.

  1975

  Arthur Ernest Morgan, the architect of the Miami Valley Conservancy, the man who built dams that protect much of Ohio as well as Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, preventing an incalculable number of flood deaths in later years, appears to have been rewarded with his own life. He was around for a long time, writing books, consulting in Finland on postwar reconstruction and in India as a member of a national universities commission and on a hydroelectric concept in West Africa.

  Morgan was active up until the end when he finally breathed his last. He was ninety-seven years old.

  1983

  In April of this year, Charles Adams, Jr., Dayton’s iconic living symbol of the 1913 flood, asked Jim Rozelle, then the Chief Engineer of the Miami Conservancy District, “How many times would water have been at Third and Main Streets in Dayton, if the five dams had not been built?”

  Rozelle checked his records and concluded that without Morgan’s dams, there would have been seven more floods, on some sort of par with the flood of 1913: 1924, 1929, 1933, 1937, 1952, 1959, and 1963. He added that if the dams hadn’t existed, there would have been minor flood damage 1,200 times.

  2005

  On August 23, 2005, Hurricane Katrina lumbered ashore and made landfall in southeast Louisiana, becoming one of the deadliest storms in history, and the deadliest hurricane since 1928 when 4,078 people were killed. That hurricane had devastated the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas, but it really put a stiletto into the heart of Florida, after a storm surge from Lake Okeechobee flooded the dike surrounding the lake. Just as a lake was created on April 28, 1913, in the Tensas and Concord parishes of Louisiana, Lake Okeechobee flooded an area covering hundreds of square miles. That incident alone was responsible for 2,500 of the 4,078 deaths.

  Hurricane Katrina’s death toll was fewer, but still brutal (at least 1,833), and at first glance it seemed as if Louisiana and Mississippi had come out of the destruction without too much difficulty. But 238 people in Mississippi were soon known to be dead, and 67 more people were never found and thus officially listed as missing, and vast amounts of property from buildings to bridges were destroyed. Louisiana was in similar straits, but it was the state’s largest city, New Orleans, that memorably played out like a disaster movie turned real-life. The surge from the storm caused water to spill over the levees in fifty-three different places, ultimately putting eighty percent of the city underwater.

  Just as in 1913, and countless other floods throughout time, families and individuals were fleeing for their second floors and roofs. Thousands of people who had taken refuge from Hurricane Katrina at the Louisiana Superdome, a sports and exhibition arena, found themselves stuck on what had become an island.

  But what was particularly galling and surprising for the victims, the nation, and the world that watched the catastrophe unfold on cable news networks was how powerless city, state, and federal officials appeared during the rescue efforts. For instance, at the Superdome, which had been designated as a shelter, there were enough MREs (meals, ready to eat) to feed 15,000 people for three days—but 26,000 people had shown up. Nobody had thought to have any water purification equipment on hand, or antibiotics or doctors to prescribe them. The toilet situation was less than ideal. All of that said, the mayor of New Orleans had warned people that they should consider the Superdome as a shelter of last resort and that they should bring their own supplies.

  Still, people expected better. Fair or not, it seemed unreal that in 2005, with all of modern technology at one’s disposal and after everything everyone should have learned about dealing with disasters, that a hurricane and its resulting flooding could make the government appear so spavined, to borrow newsman Ben Hecht’s phrasing.

  Entire books have been written about Hurricane Katrina and the federal, state, and local mismanagement of the disaster, and so it’s probably not worth rehashing at length here, but in a nutshell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was verbally eviscerated for moving far too slowly in getting supplies to the flood victims. President George W. Bush was roundly criticized for his role in Hurricane Katrina, from remaining on his vacation after it was clear New Orleans was facing a dire and unusual threat to its existence to him standing in front of news cameras and telling FEMA’s director, Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

  Brown wasn’t considered by many to be doing a heck of a job, and when it came out that he had almost no experience in emergency management, Bush, who had appointed him, received even more criticism.

  In many ways, what the hurricane victims went through was similar to what happened in so many disasters before it, particularly with the Great Flood of 1913. For a long stretch of time, everyone was on his or her own. Three million people in New Orleans were without electricity, and like thousands and possibly millions of Americans in 1913, many of those people were without food or clean drinking water. Scores of people who had remained in New Orleans began looting, some of them because they wanted to steal TVs, jewelry, and whatnot, but many people simply wanted to avoid starving to death. As with the floods in 1913 and the floods of 2005, if you were poor and black, odds were, you were at a disadvantage. In 1913, you may have lived on some cheap property in a flood plain; in New Orleans, many of the flood victims were impoverished African-Americans, too. They ignored warnings to flee the city not because they wanted to stay but because they couldn’t afford to go. It takes money to gas up the car or pay for bus fare and find a hotel. That help was slow to arrive brought charges of racism or at least a slam on a social class—people were quick to suggest that if it had been a city full of white rich people, aid would have been much faster to arrive. The flood victims in New Orleans suffered many indignities, although at least nobody was asked to spend some time being a human sandbag.

  Then and now, misinformation abounded. While there were many instances of violence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many of the reports of carjackings, murder, thievery and rape turned out to be wild, completely untrue stories undoubtedly born of panic.

  In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson considered traveling to Ohio to see the damage and destruction firsthand, but he ultimately didn’t, and it’s unlikely anyone thought less of him for not traveling from Washington, D.C. to Ohio. Air travel for the president was out of the question—Franklin Roosevelt would be the first president in office to fly, although Theodore Roosevelt had, after his term, flown in 1910—and train travel, even for a president, took some serious time. But by the time 2005 had rolled around, it would have been unthinkable for President Bush, or any president, not to visit the flood-besieged region. As technology, travel, and life have modernized, so have the public’s expectations of what kind of help they should receive. That may be a reasonable assessment, but human nature, no matter what the year, doesn’t change.

  Looking at a flood through that prism, it doesn’t really matter what age or era you live in. Unless mankind ever learns to harness and control nature, if you’re stranded on your rooftop, staring down at water that truly looks as if it wants to come up and get you, you will never be in a good place.

  2011

  As the centennial of the 1913 flood approached, Charles Otterbein Adams, Jr., who was ultimately saved by someone shouting out a window that there wa
s a baby in the river, almost lived to see it.

  He was ninety-nine years old when he passed on. The retired electrical engineer died of what he believed killed his sister and almost killed him shortly after the flood: pneumonia. If at some point in his last remaining hours, he realized pneumonia was going to bring him down, he wasn’t surprised. He had had trouble with his bronchial tubes his entire life.

  Adams obviously remembered none of his adventures in 1913, but always had a keen interest in history and must have felt supreme gratitude toward his parents, neighbors, and strangers for keeping him and his sister alive. Throughout his years, especially after he retired, he frequently gave lectures about the flood, sharing his and his family’s stories not because, he said, that it was all that important people knew about him, but because he felt it was important people remembered the flood and its place in history.

  It is worth remembering. The Great Flood of 1913 was a devastating correction, a rap on society’s collective knuckles that we underestimate and ignore mother nature at our own peril, possibly a useful lesson going forward for civilizations concerned about melting ice caps and global warming stirring up extreme storms such as those that have hit the East Coast in recent years, including Hurricane Irene in 2011 and what became known as Superstorm Sandy in 2012. But if the Great Flood of 1913 caused a lot of hopelessness, it also offers much hope, too. That tens of thousands of people didn’t die in the floods is because families stuck together, neighbors helped neighbors, and strangers instinctively risked their own lives to help strangers. People looked out for each other when it mattered most. Human nature tends not to change over the years, which is why it’s nice to think that if another flood comparable to 1913’s occurred again, people would rally and rise to the occasion, even if it might be hard to imagine such camaraderie with our community when so many of us now hang out with friends and neighbors on Facebook instead of drinking lemonade with them on our front porches.