Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (25 page)

At first, for a few years, Delight (nobody called her Georgia) appears to have been living with her father, Emery, an insurance salesman—but
shortly before the flood, she took a job as a stenographer with Antrim & McClintic, a law firm and moved into the Lovatt house, which by now wasn't just a home to Lovatt and his son George but Mattie and her 66-year-old mother Frances. Mattie's niece, Icea Hesser, who had lost her mother two years earlier, also lived with them.

The community seems to have accepted Lovatt and Mattie's unusual relationship. In the census records, they were never listed as husband and wife. In the 1910 census records, Mattie calls herself Lovatt's daughter, despite her being very much the daughter of William Lovatt, an Ohio farmer, and by 1920, Mattie was referring to herself as Lovatt's “partner” in the household. Whatever their relationship, and it may well have been platonic, in 1913, everyone was referring to Delight as Lovatt's step-daughter. Peru was a small town in an age when gossip spread freely, but that the 68-year-old Lovatt was the richest man in town may have made him impervious to anyone criticizing him for having left his wife and being in a relationship with a woman thirty years his junior.

When McNally came to the house, it was decided that his first two passengers would be Delight and Icea. If the teenage girls were worried about their chances in the boat, McNally wasn't. He had rescued seventy-five people over the last two days.

McNally steered them over Franklin Street, some twenty feet below them, and toward dry land, just as he had dozens of times.

Only this time, something went wrong.

The boat crashed into a house's front porch, shattering into pieces. McNally, Hesser, and Shields were instantly in the river and separated. McNally immediately shouted to the girls to grab something substantial, like a tree or the porch. Then McNally, a strong swimmer, swam toward a tree that Icea had been swept directly into. She grabbed the branches. Delight wasn't so fortunate. The current carried her away from the house and into the street.

Screaming for her didn't help bring her back. She was nowhere to be seen. McNally and Hesser, both distraught, clung to the rain-soaked tree.

Late afternoon, Dayton, Ohio

Grandpa Adams walked along the shoreline of Warder Street, asking everyone he found, who seemed as if they might know, if they had
seen a mother and a baby boy sailing by, and if anyone knew what had come of them.

Late afternoon, Columbus, Ohio

Many mothers gave birth during the flood in less than ideal conditions. One woman, who the papers referred to as a Mrs. J. E. Gonschrlitz, gave birth to twins on the second floor of her home, with the first floor flooded, but she had a doctor who was able to get to her and help her and, compared to some of her fellow mothers, she had a pregnancy picnic. On the west end of the Rich Street bridge, improbable as it sounds, a maternity camp was set up and run by a Dr. S. J. Goodman. During the flood, at least ten mothers gave birth here.

But every mother who has gone through natural childbirth should stop what they're doing right now and pay homage to a Mrs. Olmstead. Sadly, her first name, and thus her age and everything else about her, seems to have been lost to history, although the
Columbus Evening Dispatch
reporter apparently did his best, printing the first name of her family physician, Dr. Robert Drury, and the patrolman, Edward E. Shaw, and Fred Masters, the detective, who took Mrs. Olmstead to the hospital. But Mrs. Olmstead is just Mrs. Olmstead, a woman who lived about a mile west of the Rich Street bridge.

Given all the indignities a mother goes through in the delivery room, perhaps it is somehow oddly fitting that the woman who had one of the worst deliveries in all of history doesn't actually get to be fully remembered by history. So as for Mrs. Olmstead—she was pregnant when two male rescuers picked her up in a boat, but not pregnant when she landed at the Rich Street Bridge. That's right. She gave birth in the boat—in a drenching rain, in a frail rowboat knocked about by the waves, which was then caught in a whirlpool until the men fought and kept them all out of it. It was as “natural childbirth” as it gets.

Mrs. Olmstead was met at the bridge by Shaw and Masters, who both must have heard from other boaters that a mother was delivering. Drury ordered the rescuers to take her to either the Protestant or Grant hospitals. She arrived at neither, leaving everyone to believe the mother and baby had gone to a private home, which wouldn't have been unusual under the circumstances.

But as wretched as the circumstances were when Mrs. Olmstead delivered her baby, at least she had a happy ending and something she could hold over her child for the rest of his or her life (“You can't find a few minutes every once in a while to call your own mother and say hello? Well, let me tell you about the time I gave birth to you …”). Mrs. Olmstead's experience makes the labor of a woman known only as Mrs. McSweeney seem charming in comparison. Mrs. McSweeney is said to have delivered her baby alone in a tree, with rain or snow pelting her and the psychotic waters below her.

Not long afterward, rescuers reached Mrs. McSweeney, but it was too late to help her baby. Several days later, a doctor in Columbus would estimate that the city had seventy pregnant women who lost their unborn babies due to the hardships that they were put through during the flood.

The party of thirteen was still on their floating house, but as light started to give way to darkness, the house was splintering, and their roof was growing smaller. Everyone began saying what you say when you think you're never going to see each other again. Mrs. Guy gave her stepson instructions on what to do if she died and he survived. Frank Williams was struck with how calm his stepmother seemed.

“I kissed her and we said good-bye,” said Williams later, between wrenching sobs, referring to his stepmother. “Then the timbers groaned and cracked, and the entire structure went to pieces.”

Williams told reporters that he ended up on a portion of the side of the house, clinging to it with Mrs. Vine, Mrs. Hunt, and her daughter, as the waves tossed them. At some point, the three Hungarian boys clambered aboard. On a separate chunk of the drifting house was Williams's stepfather, William Guy, and his step-sister, Nora, three-year-old Luther, and Nina Shipley.

As for Mrs. Guy? “I saw my stepmother floating away on a frail piece of timber,” Williams said. “I never saw her after that.”

Williams and his fellow survivors realized that the river was taking them toward Green Lawn Cemetery, which must have been disconcerting. But it was nothing personal; the cemetery was in close proximity to the Scioto River. Their part of the house became stuck in trees and bushes, and they would be rescued later in the night. The remaining guests of the doomed party of thirteen weren't so fortunate.

4:30
P
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

The Beckel House served a hot dinner. Word got back to the guests who were camped out at the National City Bank, and they used their ladder to make the trip across the alleys until they reached the Beckel House. The guests had eaten food at noon, just four and a half hours earlier, and now everyone was having dinner, so everyone was eating well. But, really, what else was there to do? Stare out the window and watch the fires or terrified-looking people on the roofs of their two-story homes?

It was still an apocalyptic mess out there. In C. C. McDowell's journal, he described the scenes outside.

“The scenes on the streets are something terrible,” McDowell wrote. “Horses are screaming and fighting against the flood and finally having to give up and drown. On Main Street, a large building used as a cafe collapsed, and we have every reason to believe that many people went down to their deaths in the wreckage of this building. Up Third Street, another large building collapsed, but we have no way of knowing how many were killed. While we are waiting for rescue, we sit about and wonder what the outside world knows about our plight. How many anxious hearts walked the floors in all parts of this country all of last night wondering as to the safety of their loved ones who were known to be in Dayton at this time?”

Everyone's nerves were on edge, and consuming food was something positive to do.

After dinner, most of the hotel guests, including the ones who had been at the Beckel House all day, took their blankets and either walked across the ladders leading to the more secure Callahan Building or stayed at one of the buildings in between. Judge Walter Jones hunkered down in a building owned by an insurance company, where five employees were trapped. “They were very kind to me, as I shall never forget,” wrote Jones later.

Jones took a chair and slept in it. Not that Jones or anyone in his vicinity would really manage to sleep that night, listening to the roar of the river outside and able to see at least one fire from their windows.

As C. C. McDowell, a traveling salesman, later wrote in a journal that he kept during his hotel stay, “Very few people had any sleep, except one man from New York who snored all night like a buzz saw in a planing mill.”

Chapter Ten

Heartbreak

Late afternoon, Fort Wayne

It was melee. People were shouting to other people in their homes to evacuate as quickly as possible, by any means necessary. It was getting dark, but the police tried—mostly by shouting—to make it clear that they would take anyone away on a boat if residents would just shine a light in their window, alerting them that someone was still there.

Herbert Snow, a stranger in town, volunteered himself as an expert oarsman and said he'd be glad to help out. Someone mentioned Snow to city attorney Harry Hogan, who had also volunteered his services, and suggested that they go out on a boat together. That sounded good to Hogan, who climbed into the boat with Snow, a 28-year-old who looked strong and capable; but it wasn't until they were in the water that the attorney could smell trouble, not to mention his fellow passenger's breath. Snow was drunk.

Snow was also not an expert oarsman, at least not in his current state. Snow first started paddling down Main Street, decided that was no good, and turned to try another road.

And then some water splashed into the boat.

Snow panicked, which must have panicked Hogan. Even more so when Snow jumped out of the boat and into the freezing, muddy, fast-moving, and very deep water.

Hogan shouted for him to get back in the boat.

Snow climbed back in, or attempted to, anyway, pulling the side of the vessel downward, allowing water to rush in.

Physics quickly did its thing.

The boat sank.

Hogan shared a frantic look with Snow. Then Hogan, weighed down by heavy boots and an overcoat, decided it was time to swim for shore. Snow must have had the same thought, but he apparently wasn't an accomplished swimmer. Hogan was, or enough that he was able to reach a tree.

Snow wasn't so lucky. Hogan never saw him alive again, although some bystanders saw Snow go underwater and struggle back up, go under and then raise his head over the water once again, before disappearing completely. Other bystanders said that moments after the boat sank, he simply did too.

Meanwhile, as Hogan reached the tree, he grabbed a branch, which immediately snapped off.

Then he struggled in the water until he was able to find a limb he could climb onto. Fairly certain he wouldn't die now, Hogan shouted for help, catching the attention of Albert Abbott, the brother of Fort Wayne's chief of police, and another resident, Austin W. Stults, who were both in a boat. Hogan yelled out to look for Snow. They found nobody, although much later Snow's body was found with grappling hooks, just a few feet from where the boat had overturned. Inside his pockets were letters from a presumed girlfriend in Elkhart, Indiana, and it was observed that perhaps under the water, in his final seconds of life when he was desperate to somehow save his life, he made a futile attempt to grab something that might save him—a bush or the ground—for there was grass and straw clutched in his dead hands.

But all Abbott, Stults, and Hogan could see was river water, moving very fast. After it was clear that Snow had drowned, Hogan asked if they wouldn't mind picking him up. They obliged, and Hogan, after making it to dry land, hurried home to change into dry clothes and
then rushed off to a city council meeting where he and several others strategized about the best way to save their city.

As for Snow, Fort Wayne officials later learned his name was actually Ralph Templin, thanks to a small personal identification card found with the body. Templin had left his home in Sturgis, Michigan after an argument with his parents and five brothers, who all felt Ralph had a serious money problem. He wasn't a saver but a spender, and evidently one of his last purchases was some alcohol. He actually was a good oarsman, his family informed everyone. Templin had often rowed and trapped in a creek near their house. But, they said, he never did learn to swim.

It was now clear that the children at the Allen County Orphan's Home should be moved somewhere safer. The kids were all in the second story of the building, and the water was still less than a foot high in the first floor of the house. Nobody was too concerned that the river would swallow up the house, but they were now worried that the house might not remain standing indefinitely if the currents continued to gain strength. Two men arrived in a very small boat and concluded that it would take thirteen trips to get all of the children out, and, as people were becoming aware with this flood, being in a boat didn't guarantee safety; capsizing was always a risk. For now, everyone who had a hand in the matter decided, the orphans would stay put.

5–6:30
P
.
M
., Indianapolis

Some people couldn't be persuaded to leave their homes despite it being more than obvious that the levees were going to fail.

Not going wasn't always due to a fear of drowning somewhere, but more or less a fear of what would happen if they survived. There was the sad case of Mary E. Smith, a 76-year-old widow for the last year, ever since her husband fell out of a wagon and into the street and was killed. Mrs. Smith had two daughters, one living in St. Louis and the other in Los Angeles, but apparently she felt that moving in with one of them, if she needed to, wasn't an option.