Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (28 page)

He was something of a colorful character.

According to Hecht, Hagerty was fat,
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“his waist line gone, his voice hoarsened by the river of whisky that had flowed down his gullet. His eyes were bloodshot.” But there he was, a clear threat to Hecht's plan to scoop the other reporters.

“I'm going to cross the bridge,” Hecht told him. “I don't think you'd better come along. It's risky. You can see it's shaking already.”

“I've been following you for an hour,” Hagerty informed him. “I yelled at you a few times, but you're evidently deaf.”

“I'm not deaf,” said Hecht, who likely hadn't heard him over the incessant rumbling of the water.

“Glad to hear it,” said Hagerty. “I knew a deaf newspaperman in Africa once. Wore my fingers out talking to him. Get going,” Hagerty then said, “and keep the lantern raised.”

Hecht obeyed, miserable and suddenly frightened. The river was definitely rising, and just a few feet away was instant death if he slipped. He walked quickly on the trestle with no railing whatsoever, but carefully, holding the lantern so he wouldn't make a misstep, and listened to Hagerty wheezing behind him.

When they reached the other side, Hagerty pointed and said, “Dayton is that way. Get going.”

They walked, following railroad tracks, and Hecht listened to Hagerty panting, coughing, and spitting out phlegm. Hecht was hoping
Hagerty might give up the idea of going to Dayton, which was, after all, over a hundred miles away. Neither man wore an overcoat. They could have used one.

“Want me to carry the lantern?” Hagerty asked.

“No, it's my lantern,” said Hecht.

Hagerty laughed. “I saw you steal it.”

The two kept walking.

Indianapolis, 3
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.
M
.

As the night wore on, the crying and shouting had become less frequent, and by now, people who had been listening noticed that it was eerie quiet, as if many people had been silenced by the flood. And perhaps some had.

Middletown, Ohio, 3
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.
M
.

Not that anyone noticed except the weather watchers, but the Great Miami River started to fall, ever so slightly.

The middle of the night, somewhere in Indiana

Chris Hagerty was in the middle of a long anecdote when, as Hecht would recall in his biography, “two Italians were on the roadbed ahead of us trying to lift a handcar onto the tracks.”

They were going to Dayton, and they agreed that Hecht and Hagerty could come along if they helped pump the handcar. “I looked at Hagerty in the lantern light,” wrote Hecht half a century later. “His face was purple. He looked frozen, spavined
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and on his last legs.”

Hagerty told them, “Go ahead. You start, and we'll relieve you in fifteen minutes.”

Sometime in the middle of the night, Brookville, Ohio

While Hagerty was doing his best to get the Associated Press to Dayton, a nameless Associated Press reporter in another city had
established contact with a telegraph operator in a tiny town, twenty miles northwest of Dayton. The telegraph operator, whose name didn't appear in the report, spelled out what the city was facing:

“Practically half of Dayton is under water from thirty to forty feet. At the lowest estimate 200 lives have been lost. The city is without electric lights, street car service or water service. It is impossible to estimate the damage. There is much suffering and the people are in need of food and clothing. All bridges have been swept away. There is no communication with the outside world. Many persons were caught in their homes with all avenues of escape cut off.”

As if that news wasn't bad enough for readers of the next day's morning papers, the telegraph operator concluded with a final, not-so-cheery thought for everyone living in the Dayton area: “The water is still rising and a heavy rain falling.”

Rain wasn't the only thing falling. Temperatures were, too. It was challenging enough to be trapped on a roof, without food, without worrying about freezing to death. But for thousands of families and individuals, that's exactly what people were facing.

Middle of the night, Dayton, Ohio

Charles Adams couldn't sleep. In the early evening, after he had rested a bit and warmed up, he wanted to go find his wife and son, but his family begged him to wait until the morning, when it would be daylight and perhaps the flood waters wouldn't be so rough. Charles reluctantly agreed. But he couldn't sleep. Whenever he shut his eyes, he saw little Lois, floating away.

His sister-in-law, meanwhile, was frantic because her husband, Emerson, hadn't returned from checking on her parents. She imagined he might also easily be floating face-down somewhere.

It was a long, miserable night for the Adams and Fries families. Even if Charles and his sister-in-law Mary were able to occasionally forget for a few minutes or seconds about their loved ones, there were constant reminders of what was happening outside, such as the sounds of debris crashing into their house with a thud and the cries of help from people who weren't in a house as sturdy as the reverend's seemed to be.

4
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., Mayfield, Michigan

John Hawthorne was the engineer of the plant overseeing the dam that provided electricity to several towns in the area, like Mayfield and Kingsley. The dam itself was forty-five years old, just about three years younger than Hawthorne, who possibly chose the night shift to work, since he wasn't married and apparently did not have a large family, other than a sister in Canada and a niece in Elkhart, Indiana.

He was alone when the wooden dam, and the water behind it, came careering two hundred feet downward and into the power house, splitting it into two, and carrying off its occupant.

The sheriff and coroner, after locating Hawthorne's body early the next morning in the daylight, tried to piece everything together, particularly why Hawthorne was completely naked. They surmised that he realized what was about to happen and was afraid his clothing would become caught in the machinery surrounding him. He must have removed some of his wardrobe and then the rest was ripped away in the flood.

Or else the water disrobed him completely. Such was the relentless fury and power of the flood.

March 26, 4
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., Indianapolis

Maybe he was worried about his family. Maybe by experiencing that wave of invincibility that got a few other young people his age in trouble, he underestimated the risks. Maybe he was simply tired and not thinking clearly. Maybe his co-workers begging him not to go wound up making him more determined than ever to give it a try because he decided he was up for the challenge. Whatever was on his mind, nineteen-year-old Chester Arnold should not have attempted to swim home.

Even at the best of times, no one should have ever attempted to swim the White River. It was a cesspool, a waterway filled with butchered entrails and dead hogs, along with human excrement dumped out from outhouses and industrial waste. The Indiana Engineering Society had issued a report seven years earlier, stating, “The odor is distinct for 40 miles down the river. Animals will not drink it. It cannot be used for the laundry or other domestic purposes when the cisterns and wells go dry.”

Arnold lived in a city that serviced eighty passenger trains, and it was on this early morning, at the Indianapolis Belt Railway Company, that he stood on elevated railroad tracks that were for the moment still above the White River. He had been trapped by the water at a shop that he worked at, but he and his fellow workers managed to get free, but not so free that Arnold could make it home. So he decided that he could swim from the Peoria & Eastern Railroad tracks and then reach the Vandalia Tracks. From there, he must have believed he could walk the rest of the way to his house. And when he jumped in, he obviously believed he could swim the currents between the tracks. But he couldn't have been more wrong.

Two men would later tell the local paper that they tried to rescue Chester Arnold, but with no tree branches to try to bend his way, with no life preserver tied to a nylon rope or any other equipment handy that might have been helpful, their rescue attempt was probably mostly screaming and jumping in the air and willing him back to the railroad tracks.

A few minutes after 5
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., Tiffin, Ohio

Chester Arnold's fatal mistake was taking a hugely unnecessary risk, but some people found themselves in trouble because they were afraid of taking
any
risk. They just wanted the flood to go away. Addline Axline, born Adison J. Alexander, was one such person. From the beginning of the deluge, she wanted to remain in her house. Almost twenty-four hours earlier, her husband, William, a few months away from his sixty-third birthday, left for work at the
Tiffin Tribune,
where he was the foreman of the printer's department. It was a demanding job, in which the successful printers needed both a mechanical and business mindset, since, being a low-profit-margin industry, one needed to work fast and efficiently. A foreman often found himself covered in printer's ink, and yet the newspapers needed to be clean and tidy.

William undoubtedly had a busy day on Tuesday, with the paper covering the flood, and while he was gone, neighbors beseeched her to leave. Citing all the familiar excuses—where would she go; she wanted to at least wait for her husband—Mrs. Axline stayed put. But then when her husband came for her, she still didn't want to leave. She refused. So in the end, Mr. Axline, who had been married to his wife
since 1877 and stuck with her through good times and bad, determined that he would stay with her. They had no children, only each other. It must have seemed impossible to imagine leaving her behind.

But now the Axlines' worst fears finally began to come true. There was a series of ear-splitting cracks. The home ripped from its foundation. The Axlines were adrift.

William and Addline must have had, at first, a stab of hope. After all, the house was floating upright, flowing with the current down Washington Street. This was much different than their fellow Tiffin citizens, the Knechts, whose house left its moorings but soon split apart, and the tragic Klingshirns, whose home splintered apart immediately.

If the river parked their house on dry land, they'd be able to walk out of their home without a drop of water on them. And their luck held. The house dodged a mountain of metal that was once the Monroe Street bridge, and it kept going.

But then the Axlines' home floated toward the Baltimore & Ohio railroad bridge. Spectators were on the steel bridge, and according to reports, some of them, as the house made its way toward the bridge, incredibly didn't leave. This bridge was not going anywhere. Some people couldn't watch, and yet others couldn't turn away, for what they saw unnerved and encouraged them.

The Axlines were standing at the window on the second story of their house. Addline's face was buried in William's shoulder, and he was patting his sobbing wife on the head. He kissed her. Some spectators swore that they saw a rope tied around each of their waists, in the hopes of staying together once they were in the water.

The house slammed into the bridge, and then appeared to duck underneath the bridge because the current pulled it directly underneath.

Except for the roof, which was shorn off. The windows exploded, and the siding almost came off but somehow hung on. Several townspeople on the bridge, watching the house, would never forget what they saw next.

The house was still upright and floating down the river.

What's more, inside the bedroom were William and Addline, standing, hugging each other, miserable and terrified. But alive.

The house traveled another fifty feet. The Axlines were still beating the odds.

And another fifty feet.

Then the two-story house without a roof did the unthinkable and ruined this feel-good survival story.

It capsized.

The house tore into fragments. Moments later, William Axline could be seen, being pulled through the current, clutching driftwood and holding on to Addline. Moments later, William let go of Addline, but she, too, clung to some of the debris that may have been one of the floorboards in their bedroom or kitchen. Then a few minutes later, two blocks from Washington and now over Minerva Street, William and Addline were separated.

Addline's body would be found some time later on Abbotts Island, a land mass in the Sandusky River, five miles north of Tiffin. William Axline's body wouldn't be found until early May and was the last of the nineteen Tiffin residents to die in the flood. He also was located at Abbott's Island, which is where most of the victims of Tiffin were dumped by the river. Dutiful husband to the end, around his waist rescuers found a rope.

Addline's hair was so entangled with the branches and garbage that it had to be cut in order to remove her body, observed at least one newspaper. Oddly enough, it's difficult to imagine a detail like that being shared with readers today. While the mass media today reports many intimate details about people's personal lives that someone in 1913 would have found astounding, editors and reporters often resist painting too gruesome a picture of how a victim, whether of a natural disaster or at the hand of a gun, looked when their bodies were located or discovered, among the reasons being that it's unnecessary sensationalism and upsetting to the grieving victim's family. It may be that reporters in earlier times wanted to gin up their articles and make them more exciting to read or satisfy readers' innate curiosities. Probably all of that is true.

But there may be another reason papers easily offered up grim details of how a body appeared when it was found. This was an age when you could easily find your life snuffed out by a flood, when a raft of diseases from measles to typhoid fever to whooping cough could end your life prematurely, in a time when stillbirth deaths were frequent and childhood mortality from a variety of diseases (which
we are vaccinated against nowadays) was rampant. If you were alive into adulthood during the early 1900s, it was almost a miracle. Mellie Meyer, one of the flood refugees who walked the wires after the Saettel grocery store blew up, could have told anyone that. Her husband, William Meyer, a jeweler, had died six years earlier in a freak accident at thirty-eight years old, after stepping on a match.