Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (21 page)

In the same tree was a Mrs. Nicholson and her son Harry, a Mr. and Mrs. William Prewdley, and Omar Clarence Toy and his wife Pauline. It isn't clear how the Nicholsons and Prewdleys wound up in the tree, but the Toys were on a raft, which they constructed before leaving their soon-to-be ruined house. With them was their 22-month-old son, Clarence Omar Toy. At some point, when the water was even more feral and unpredictable than it had been, Mrs. Toy turned to help her husband steer their craft. In that moment, their son toppled out into the water and disappeared.

The Toys reached the tree, distraught.

For the next twenty-four hours, the Underwood parents and their four children, and the Toys, remained in the tree, the rain dumping on them until it turned into snow. Below them was the barbaric, seething current. They had two choices: fall into the river and undoubtedly meet a quick death, or stay in the tree and try to outlast the storm.

Pauline Toy chose death. She hung on to her perch in the tree for some time, but at 1:20 in the morning, exhausted from the freezing
rain and snow that had started to fall, and sobbing over the loss of her son, she dropped into the water and let the river do its work.

When the rescuers finally arrived, they were horrified by what they found. John Underwood, still holding Edgar, was insane with grief. Albert was only barely alive, mostly frozen, and he would die shortly after reaching some of the dry land at—in a touch of cruel irony—the cemetery. Josephine, who had been tied to the tree with a rope to keep her from falling, had frozen to death. The rescuer, who had already made several unsuccessful attempts in a motorboat over the course of several hours to reach them, and still very concerned about the threatening current, left Josephine where she was.

As if that wasn't enough agony for the Underwoods, they soon learned that their eldest son was missing. John had gone with a police officer, to check on the police officer's home, and hadn't been seen since. While the police officer later turned up alive, the Underwoods' worst fears about their son were confirmed.

Professor F. S. Jacoby, head of the poultry department at the waterlogged Ohio State University, with 192 acres underneath the spreading Olentangy River, spent much of his day in the basement of the instruction building, trying to save two thousand eggs that were due to hatch in two days. He had put the students to work outside of the building while Jacoby caulked the basement windows—and apparently the doors leading to the basement—with paper and heavy cloth.

Jacoby couldn't have been thinking too clearly, or he didn't realize just how high the water was rising outside, or he would have realized he was effectively trapping himself in the basement.

Outside, the river was surrounding the poultry building. Jacoby's students, unable to come after their professor, ran for their lives, taking with them a slew of baby chicks. As many as 150 hens were swept away by the flood; another 150 managed to fly to the top of their coop and escape the water. But the ducks inside the duck house probably came to an unfortunate end when it was swept away.

In the basement of the poultry building, Jacoby was oblivious, continuing to caulk the windows. But then he heard a creaking above him, and the professor, an otherwise smart man, understood instantly
what was happening. The water was collecting on the floor above him, and the ceiling was about to cave in. On him.

Racing up the stairs that had become a waterfall, Jacoby left the room seconds before the ceiling collapsed on the basement and its two thousand eggs. Jacoby reached the attic of the building and remained there for the rest of the day until rescuers, alerted by his students who had escaped to a nearby farm, came and found him.

While most of the professors and students at Ohio State University would get through the day without such a harrowing tale, there were other close calls. Two students capsized in a canoe on Town Street, saving their lives by clinging to a telegraph pole. A police officer made his way to them in a rowboat, but then he also was thrown into the drink. The officer reached the pole, climbing up it and joining the two college men sitting on the top.

From a building, two men threw a one-inch-thick rope to the two students and officer stranded on the telegraph pole. They tied it fast and then, hand over hand, the students and officer dangled from the rope and made their way to the building.

Other people didn't face certain death but were just as resourceful. As the floodwaters crept toward their house, George Roller and his family managed to lead their cow through the kitchen door and then upstairs, where, for five days, they and their neighbors drank fresh milk.

But sometimes, no matter what, all the ingenuity, resourcefulness, or patience wasn't enough. Dr. Robert J. Sharp, fifty-nine years old, in his little corner of Columbus, watched horrific scenes from his house with his wife, Lillie, and their adopted nine-year-old daughter, Dorothy. Their house was safe—eighty-four feet above the floodwaters—but according to a letter he would later send his brother, he saw one man in a tree, holding two children, while his twelve-year-old daughter stood on one of the branches beside him. The wife and mother had already drowned, according to Sharp. They were in the tree all day and night, and by his count, after thirty-five hours of being in the branches, the exhausted twelve-year-old fell into the river.

Sharp—who was never clear whether he witnessed this particular event or heard about it—also shared details of a ten-year-old girl who was seen riding a hen coop, with a stick in her hands, screaming as she
was being carried along. A delivery man, or an express man as they were often called, was in his wagon when he saw her, and his horses broke into a gallop. Just as the horses caught up, and the express man had a chance to reach down for the girl and attempt a daring rescue, the undercurrent caught the coop, which disappeared under the water. The delivery man jumped from the wagon, plunging into the waters after her, and they both drowned.

Chapter Eight

From Bad to Worse

March 25, Tuesday

2:12
P
.
M
., Hamilton, Ohio

The Cincinnati, Hamilton & Indianapolis railroad bridge collapsed.

Collapsing bridges during a major flood was as natural and expected as the water itself. On March 22, the day before Omaha's tornado, the fragility of bridges was underscored in Vermont during a train trip from Montreal to Boston. Engineer John Eastman knew the rivers in the area had been overwhelmed and was on the lookout for questionable bridges. When he approached one particular bridge, he noticed that an abutment looked vulnerable, and he slammed on the air brakes.

The passenger cars never touched the bridge, but the train engine stopped on the structure, and as soon as the train came to a halt, it was moving again, downward, careening into the Passumpsic River. Eastman jumped from the engine, landed in the river, and swam to shore. But what really shook up Eastman, his crew, and the 125 passengers was what they learned when they reached the town of Lyndonville, Vermont, to wait for another train to take them on to Boston:
two other bridges behind them had collapsed, shortly after Eastman's train had crossed them.

During the Great Flood of 1913, particularly from March 23 to March 27 but also well into April, thousands of bridges were destroyed, from steel structures to wooden trestles to small footbridges. That even the steel bridges were going down must have been dismaying to many bridge builders, although the concrete industry as a whole couldn't help but feel smug because more often than not, their bridges were withstanding the flood.

In 1913, Daniel B. Luten, an eminent bridge designer and engineer, wrote an article for a booklet published by the Lehigh Portland Cement Company, in which he praised concrete and noted how frequently steel bridges had gone down.

“Concrete is a material which is practically everlasting and when proper and reasonable precautions in construction are taken, will withstand fire, flood and storm,” wrote Luten, whereas the other bridges weren't so fortunate: “Steel and wooden bridges went out by the hundreds and thousands. Along the Wabash river in Indiana, two steel bridges were wrecked at Peru, six at Logansport, and two at Lafayette, practically destroying all communication across the river at some of these cities, except for concrete bridges at Peru and at Georgetown below Logansport, both of which remained standing.”

He noted that three steel bridges on stone piers collapsed in Indianapolis and pointed out that in Zanesville, Ohio, the reinforced concrete bridge over the Muskingum River, “one of the first large concrete bridges erected in the United States, effectively resisted the flood. The only damage was the destruction of the hand rails which apparently had not been reinforced.”

He went on, but his point was clear: the way of the future, at least when it came to building bridges, was concrete. A trade publication in 1913,
Cement and Engineering News,
was quick to pounce on Luten's article once it was published.

Of course, steel-bridge builders were not convinced that steel bridges were inferior to concrete. They still aren't. It's an issue still being debated today. And yet you never knew what bridge might end up holding. In Columbus, Ohio, according to some accounts, the only
bridge that wasn't destroyed was the Rich Street Bridge, which fifteen years earlier had been declared unsafe by engineers.

But there was little question that bridges needed improving. During the days, weeks, and months after the floods, train routes were constantly being changed in order to get people from Point A to Point B; in the aftermath of the deluge, one could never easily get there from here. Possibly because so many deaths were associated with bridges lost in the 1913 flood, at least two of the rebuilt bridges became stuck with a haunted label. To this day, it is said, mysterious lights occasionally appear late at night around Ellis Bridge, near Zanesville, Ohio. Everett Road Covered Bridge near Cleveland was allegedly haunted before the flood of 1913—long before 1913, on the previous bridge, a woman trying to cross it during a flood was killed—but the creepy factor wasn't helped when the bridge was destroyed in 1913 and had to be rebuilt.

The bridges going down—and the miles of railroad track submerged under rivers and creeks—created a lot of trouble for Albert E. Dutoit, a train engineer who found himself in the midst of a challenge Tuesday. When the engineer was in Toledo and unable to travel any further, he received a message that read, “Track out at Columbus because of floods,” and immediately, Dutoit began worrying about his family.

In a move that could now be declared James Bond-esque, Dutoit detached his engine from the rest of the train—no word on what the passengers, if there were any, thought of this change in plans—and sped ahead on the tracks anyway. At top speed, he spent all of Tuesday on railroad tracks, avoiding suspect bridges and searching for the most direct route from Toledo to Columbus.

Mid-afternoon, Dayton

Things had finally gone from bad to worse.

Not every person in Greater Dayton was struggling to stay alive on March 24, 1913, but it sure seemed like it.

Firemen and policemen were out en masse, saving everyone they could and putting themselves in danger the entire time. Edward Doudna was trying to rescue a family on West Third Street. According to Allan W. Eckert's book,
A Time of Terror: The Great Dayton Flood,
Doudna lost his balance in a boat and plunged into the river. His fire
boots filled with water; his heavy clothing soaked up every drop, and the weight of his wardrobe simply pulled him under, and the current and lack of oxygen did the rest.

Some people were seen in the streets, clinging to debris. J. R. Finnell, who worked in publishing, later reported that he saw ropes being dangled from a bridge, in the hopes that the people hanging on to driftwood and floating by would be able to grab the rope. One can't help but think, over a hundred years later, that it sounds like a perverse stunt in a reality show, grab the rope to get out of the rapids and earn some prize money or move on to the next level. Only this was all too real, the prize was life or probable death, and in the half hour that Finnell watched, none of these contestants managed to grab the rope.

But maybe the better analogy for what Finnell and others were enduring is a war zone. A physician, a Dr. G. S. Staub, had just delivered a baby—or as he put it later, in 1913 terms, “I had just delivered a woman in confinement,” when a house nearby exploded. Two elderly ladies, seventy-nine and eighty-three years old, were stuck in their home, and when one of them tried to light their gas stove, it blew up and set fire to their house and the women.

In flames, the women jumped into the water. One quickly drowned, but the other caught hold of some wreckage. Dr. Staub and a man named Frank Yenger came up to her in a boat and brought the elderly lady into the boat. Her face was badly burned, Dr. Staub recounted later, and her hands were so badly damaged that her fingernails dropped off. She died four days later.

From the Miami Valley Hospital, deep in downtown Dayton where rescuers couldn't reach anyone, nurses and patients watched, feeling sheer terror but being able to do nothing, as a woman lay on the top of a pointed roof. She clung to the top, called the ridgepole, and then, as the flood lapped at her feet, she climbed back and sat on top of the roof. But the rain was pounding at her, and it was cold—a little above freezing—and she was rapidly losing her strength. She kept losing her footing and would slide down the roof, managing to stop herself just in time and climb back to the top. She did this for more than an hour until finally she couldn't crawl back to the top of the roof and just rolled into the wild river.

At the Beckel House, the guests who stayed behind—and those who retreated to the sturdy bank building several buildings away but returned to eat—were pleased to realize that there was ample food on the second floor waiting for them. Not much to drink, however, and thus many people resorted to collecting rain water. Walter Jones, the judge, was impressed that the staff of the Beckel House didn't make any distinction between the guests and people off the street who had come in for shelter. Everyone was entitled to whatever food was available.