Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever
Authors: Geoff Williams
Tags: #General, #History, #United States, #Fiction, #Nature, #Modern, #19th Century, #Natural Disasters, #State & Local, #Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI)
WASHED AWAY
How the Great Flood of l913,
America's Most Widespread Natural
Disaster, Terrorized a Nation
and Changed It Forever
GEOFF WILLIAMS
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
Contents
Chapter One:
Heading for the Cellar
Chapter Two:
The First Flood Deaths
Chapter Three:
Some of the People in the Way
Chapter Six:
Everyone on Their Own
Chapter Seven:
That Old College Try
Chapter Eight:
From Bad to Worse
Chapter Fourteen:
Children in Harm's Way
Chapter Fifteen:
Jittery Nerves
Chapter Sixteen:
Another Long Night
Chapter Seventeen:
Light at the End
Chapter Eighteen:
Water Retreating
EPILOGUE: THE DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD
Chapter Twenty:
Remember the Promises in the Attic
Notes and Research and Acknowledgments
Author's Note
On March 23, 1913, the United States of America was reminded that when it comes to nature, we're not really in charge. It was an Easter Sunday, but the thunderstorm that almost crushed the Midwest into oblivion could have been straight out of the Biblical story of Noah's Arkâonly it didn't rain for forty days, but, depending where you lived, more like four or five. The rain, in any case, was long enough to create the most widespread natural disaster in the history of the United States. Millions upon millions of 1913 dollars of damage. Hundreds of thousands of families and individuals were driven from their homes. There were at least several hundred, and probably more like a thousand, deaths. It was a flood of such epic proportions that it forever changed how the United States manages its waterways.
My first memory of hearing about the flood is about as innocuous and ordinary a memory as you can get, so boring that I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up. I was standing with an uncle of mine, Pat Scorti, in Middletown, Ohio, at a gas station. I think I was eight years old, which would place us in 1978. He was pumping unleaded into a beat-up car that he had probably purchased a decade earlier. What exactly he was talking about as he pumped, I have no idea, but suddenly his monologue landed on the 1913 flood. He mentioned how there was water for miles, and that Dayton, a city just north of
us, really was hammered by it, and that about a dozen people died in Middletown alone. It was very serious, he said, his voice full of awe, as if he had been there, but he hadn't. He was born over thirty years after the flood.
That's about all I remember. It was a brief, inconsequential moment in time, which somehow stuck with me, but I think the conversation explains a lot about why this flood has now been forgotten. This was a disaster that felt local and wasn't necessarily viewed by individual communities as a national calamity. But during and after the time the water receded, the Great Flood of 1913âArthur Ernest Morgan once called it that; he was a famed engineer whose flood control techniques became widely known and disseminated after the disasterâwas often compared to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and the sinking of the
Titanic
just a year before. And for good reason. The Great Flood of 1913 affected far more Americans than both of those previous disasters combined.
Yet the sinking of the
Titanic
and the San Francisco earthquake were disasters that were contained and created an easy-to-grasp story. The rest of the country could read about the thrilling adventures (the papers back then described every near-death escape as “thrilling”) and wonder what they would have done if they had been there; and of course, movies, like
San Francisco
in 1936 with Clark Gable walking around in a daze, and the
Titanic
films, not to mention shelves of books, all helped to fuel our collective imaginations of the heroes, villains, and victims within each story. Conversely, the Great Flood of 1913 affected so many people that, arguably, people didn't want to wonder what they would have done if they had been there. They
were
there. Or they had friends and family who were there. After a while, nobody wanted to talk about it. It was too close for too many. If anything, people wanted to forget about this disaster.
The flood disaster also, as noted, became very localized. Waterlogged cities adopted the flood as part of their local history, and so instead of becoming known as the Great Flood of 1913, folks around Dayton, Ohio, would talk of the Great Dayton Flood. Residents in Columbus, Ohio, would speak of the Great Columbus Flood. People in Indianapolis thought of it as an Indianapolis flood. My uncle seemed to think of it as a flood that affected only Middletown and Dayton. While
it was a national tragedy, or at least a semi-national apocalyptic catastrophe, hitting over a dozen states and terrifying friends and family across the nation, the flood tended to be thought of as a neighborhood event instead of as part of a national narrative.
It may also have been forgotten because the exact death toll of the flood isn't known and may never be known, so it's easy to forget how deadly and damaging it was. Historian Trudy E. Bell, who wrote
The Great Dayton Flood of 1913
(Arcadia Publishing) and has written extensively on the topic, has placed the death toll at over 1,000, which sounds right to this author, but the numbers bandied about throughout the 20th century often focused on only the deaths in Ohio and Indiana, when a considerable number of people in other states lost their lives.
Four hundred and sixty-seven deaths is the most quoted number for Ohio, devised by J. Warren Smith, who in 1913 was a professor of agricultural meteorology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the number of deaths for Indiana quoted is usually 200. A June 5, 1921
New York Times
article placed the figure of the deaths in Ohio and Indiana as 730, which may or may not have included victims from other states like Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the hundreds of others who died in the tornadoes that came with the storm that initially brought the flood. In other words, this wasn't a tidy disaster like the RMS
Titanic
had been with her loss of over 1,500 souls.
*
The flood has also been somewhat forgotten because there have always been floods, and there always will be. It's hard for the history books to remember the flood of 1913 when it's also competing with the Mississippi Flood of 1912, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the Great Flood of 1937, andâwell, you get the idea.
After my uncle brought up the flood, I didn't think about it for most of my life. Sure, I would occasionally hear about it in the local news when a flood anniversary came up and think, “Wow, sounds pretty bad,” but it never captured my imagination; although in recent years, I started to develop a healthy fear and respect for rivers. My young daughters enjoy wading in a creek that feeds into the Little Miami
River, searching for tadpoles, minnows, and the occasional toad or turtle. It's a few feet deep at the most and home to a lot of tadpoles, guppies, and the occasional turtle and water snake, but in 1913, this meandering waterway was around 50 feet deep for several days. But looking at the docile, picturesque creek now, you'd never believe it. In fact, the creek and the Little Miami River swamped downtown Loveland, Ohio (population in 1913: 1,476), a community I live near and visit often, putting its downtown five to ten feet under water and submerging twenty-five percent of the homes in the area. But what really got me was a death near Loveland, a little over ten years ago. A sixteen-year-old girl was in a SUV with three teenage friends, and the vehicle suddenly found itself floating on a road after a flash flood. Three of the teenagers were able to get themselves to safety, simply by choosing to climb out of the left side of the car; the sixteen-year-old escaped out of the right passenger window and made her way toward a retaining wall that she didn't see, and she fell over it and into Sycamore Creek. A day or two later, her body was found floating in a lake that my kids and I occasionally visit. It horrified me as a human being and parent, in part because I travel on this road frequently; and I think, for the first time, I started to understand the terrifying, ugly power of a flood.
Still, I only considered writing about the flood a couple of years ago when I was trying to come up with an idea for a book. My agent, Laurie Abkemeier, asked if there were any local events that would have national interest. For a long time, I couldn't come up with anything; and even when the 1913 flood popped into my head, I quickly pushed it right out.
A flood doesn't sound all that exciting. Water comes into a town, it gets high, it leaves. I had no clue.
Now I wish I had started researching the 1913 flood immediately after my uncle first told me about it. In communities throughout the Midwest and parts of the South and Northeast, there are so many stories worth telling that one could make researching this flood their life's work and still feel that they hadn't learned everything there is to know about it. This is my way of saying that if you lived in a community that was walloped by the flood, and it's not mentioned in this book, my apologies. There were just so many towns hit by the flood
that I couldn't possibly dig into all of them and still tell the wider story of this flood and what it meant to history.
This was a gravely serious flood, the United States' second-deadliest in history, following the infamous one in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889, in which 2,209 people died after a dam failure. In the spring of 1913, men, women, and children perished in communities across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana. Even states as far away as Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey were affected by the flooding.
What follows are some of the many stories of the thousands of people who lived through this flooding. These are tales of bravery, selflessness, tragedy, and even cowardice and greed, although this is mostly a story about Americans at their best when Mother Nature was at her worst.
*
 Depending on the source, it was either 1, 514 deaths or 1, 517.
SUNDAY,
MARCH 23, 1913
Chapter One
Heading for the Cellar
March 23, Rock, Wisconsin, 5
P
.
M
.â5:12
P
.
M
.
Edward Suchomil deserved a lot more in life than to be struck down by lightning.
At least, the faint remaining paper trail that represents his life suggests that he didn't have this coming. The 24-year-old had made many good friends ever since moving two years earlier to the tiny town of Rock from his home base of Jefferson, just twenty-seven miles north. Suchomil remained close to his parents, visiting them often.