Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (43 page)

Still, as odd as the Elsie Smith story was, it has nothing on the story reported in Xenia's
Daily Gazette
on May 9, a tale that if it wasn't so sad, might make a good campfire story. According to the
Daily Gazette,
a Mrs. Stella Mercer told her brother, Omar Toy, that he should look for his wife's body at a farm owned by a family named Dresbach. If the report is true—a big if—Mr. Toy, who lost his baby son to the flood and then his wife after spending a harrowing night in a tree, went to the farm a mile south of Columbus and located a spot that seemed like the one his sister had described to him. It was a pile of mud, about four feet high.

Then he began to dig.

Just a foot into the mud pile, Toy discovered a human hand, only it didn't belong to his wife but to a six-year-old girl, Dorothy Busick.

Columbus, March 29

Many rescuers were now being turned away by trapped homeowners, unbelievable as that might sound at first. Some people rightfully felt that the worst of the flooding was over at this point, and they wanted to stay and protect their property.

There was some reason for the homeowners to be concerned and want to stick around. Authorities and the business community were always worried about looters, although many poor and ethnic residents were arguably just as concerned that they would be seen as looters. One African-American was shot in Columbus because he had seven gold rings on a hand, and while, yes, he may have been looting, he could have just as easily rescued his family's jewelry and stuck them on his hand, or maybe he simply liked to wear rings. You didn't want to be black and searching for food in an abandoned home or business and then have anyone white and carrying a gun discover you.

While surely many people throughout history who were shot for looting were actually, indeed, looting, they at least deserved a trial; but in 1913, you could generally forget about seeing a judge and a jury of your peers. Orders to the militia and police were usually of the “shoot to kill” variety, and indeed, this happened on this day in Columbus. Edward McKinley, a white man, one paper noted, as if so people could express surprise that it wasn't a “colored” person robbing homes, was apparently ransacking a house, or just had, and had a sack of valuables with him when a squad of soldiers, designated to hunt down looters, fired upon him.

Rumors were still flying around in regard to the flood, deaths, and now looters. In the
Cincinnati Enquirer,
on April 3, 1913, there would be an article about how seventeen men had been shot the night before on the steps of the Callahan Bank Building in Dayton. According to the Brigadier-General George H. Wood, the man in charge of the Ohio National Guard, it wasn't true, none of it, and that day he wired the
Enquirer's
managing editor, who printed a retraction the next day. Wood was always emphatic that no looters in Dayton were shot. The city had seen enough death.

The homeowners in Columbus who refused a boat ride to dry land were correct. The worst of the water was over, and yet, emotionally, the worst was also to come: locating and identifying bodies.

Corpses were laid out at a firehouse, and in some cases entire families were set out, waiting to be identified, and rescuers were morphing from rescuers into search-and-recovery mode. A temporary morgue was also set up at Green Lawn Cemetery, where so many people, dead and alive, soon found themselves. Mrs. Edna Keller Burkhart's body was found near Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus, almost buried in a pile of mud about ten, maybe twelve, feet high. She would have been completely missed, except for some of her hair sticking out, which someone spotted. Three days later, the corpse belonging to a Mrs. Lloyd Lynch would also be found at Green Lawn Cemetery, underneath a mud-covered wagon.

The body of 28-year-old Cleveland A. Turney was found in a tree, taken down, and laid out at the temporary morgue at Green Lawn Cemetery, awaiting identification, where he would then receive either a funeral or a hasty burial in a potter's field, depending on his family's resources. It was then that a young boy noticed some slight movement in Turney's body. He shouted for the doctor, who quickly administered restoratives, which were probably smelling salts. Turney was revived, taken to a friend's home, and shared his story.

Turney had been with his wife, Junia, when he was separated from her in the flood. Turney hung to some driftwood until he slammed into a tree on Green Lawn Avenue. He managed to climb up to branches where he found a harness, and, necessity being the mother of invention, he tied himself to the tree. Then he allowed himself to pass out until he woke up at the temporary morgue. Turney no doubt regaled friends and family with his tale of the flood until his actual death in 1963, when he was seventy-eight. His wife, who survived the flood, passed away in the same year, several months earlier.

March 29, Dayton

Mildred Grothjan recalled in a letter to the
Dayton Journal Herald,
“To walk down Main Street was a sad experience. Most of the big plate glass windows had been broken, and they were boarded up. Newsaldt's at Fourth and Main offered rewards for the recovery of jewelry and silver that had washed out of their store through broken windows. The owner of a shoe store on Main near Fifth had the remains of his stock on tables outside his store, with a sign that read: ‘Big sale of
muddy tans'—a bit of humor in an otherwise grim scene. Rike's had moved from Fourth Street up to Second and had just had a big spring opening a few days before.

“What a different sight their beautiful store was now. The streets were piled high with merchandise that had been shoveled out of the stores, and everywhere was the sickening smell of disinfectant that had been sprayed over everything. The mud—and later the dust—was ankle-deep. That, and the odor of disinfectant lasted all summer.”

Carlos F. Hurd, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reporter of
Titanic
fame, wrote that the property damage could easily be compared with the destruction in Galveston and San Francisco and then added: “The very streets have literally been torn away and big slabs of asphalt from other streets are lying all over the brick pavement of Main Street, which is a line of deserted business houses, with windows gone and interiors wide open. Walking on the mud-piled sidewalks is forbidden and in many places would be hardly possible.”

After the flood, the advantage of having those holes that had been cut in the floor proved two-fold, at least those with underground rooms. People would scrub the floors and push everything, the water and some of the mud through the hole so that it would fall into the dirt cellar.

The city was already quickly putting itself back together. Western Union set up a telegraph office in, of all places, the Beckel House. Its first floor was full of mud, but the stories above it were fine. The fire hadn't touched the place after all. It wasn't long before telegrams were pouring in from people inquiring about friends and family.

Ben Hecht was still in Dayton, collecting anecdotes and quotes and then telegraphing his stories to his editors at the
Chicago Journal.

“Three-fourths of the city is high and dry,” he wrote after stating that he didn't think the death toll would be too high. “The streets are streaming with people. The weather is bright and warm. The skies seem to be smiling, and the people are taking heart. The apparently impossible tasks of rebuilding the city, of finding homes for the sorrowing refugees, starting again to live as they did before the flood, occupied Dayton today.

“The martial law declared two days ago has been raised for this afternoon to permit refugees to seek their homes. Creeping and
splashing through the mud are countless people on their way home. Home often means a half house, torn and scattered across the entire street. But it is home, anyway, and the men grabbed spades to shovel out the mud while women try to cook their meal. Sometimes it isn't a half house; only a mud hole greets the refugees.”

Then Hecht described how a man named Howard Lowrey found a mud hole on lower River Street. “He stood knee deep in the water watching people pass. A woman carrying a child came trudging along. She was his wife, and it didn't matter that the home was swept away. The family reunited, laughed and cried and started off arm in arm for a refugee home. There are thousands of similar scenes. They would fill a volume that would bring tears and smiles and tell a story such as the world has never heard.”

Hecht described other surreal scenes: “Some of the steel structures have been twisted out of shape, others are overthrown and scattered along the squares. Mud lies two feet thick on the floors. In the teller's cage of the First National Bank building, a horse was found. Another animal was discovered on the second floor of a department store.”

Hecht doesn't mention whether the two horses were alive. It seems likely that the first wasn't, assuming the teller's cage was on the second floor, but that the horse in the department store came out all right. In any event, there were dead animals alongside the dead people throughout the city and all were being removed as fast as possible to prevent the spread of disease. Two wagonloads of dead dogs were removed from Main Street on this day, and forty-five horses that had drowned in a bunch were taken out at one time.

“It is not true that cats have nine lives,” declared a story in the
Oelwein Daily Register,
the paper read by the people of Fayette County, Iowa. “There are thousands of dead cats in Dayton.”

Everyone knew they were losing their city, their neighborhoods, their homes during the flood, but now that the water had receded, people were starting to realize just what had been lost purely on an economic scale. Daniel Rheim, a Fort Wayne saloon owner and resident of Bloomingdale, Indiana, was illustrative of what the flood had done to people's net worth. The previous fall he had purchased a piano for $550. About a week after the flood, he paid a junk dealer $10 to haul it away.

Orville Wright returned to his house, where he and his brother had lived since 1871, the year of Orville's birth. The house at 7 Hawthorn Street was still standing, but it was in wretched shape. Orville was stunned to find, though, amidst the wreckage, on a table, a bowl of moldy oranges. The bowl of oranges—a favorite snack of his—had been on the table when he and Katharine left. Similar to what had happened at the Adams residence, the table rose in the water, and the bowl of oranges remained on it, and then when the water levels dropped, so did the table and the oranges.

Mr. Wright and American history was, overall, pretty lucky. A fire broke out in a building near the old bicycle shop where he and Wilbur had worked for many years, drafting blueprints and constructing parts for their flying machine. In the shop were those blueprints as well as diaries and photographic negatives of the brothers' early experiments. Fortunately, the fire missed the shop.

But the shop had certainly been through the wringer. The Wright brothers' famous 1903 Flyer, the airplane that started it all, had been dismantled shortly after its first flights and then put in crates in a shed behind the store. The crates storing the Flyer were completely submerged—for eleven days. You might think that would have completely done in the famous biplane, but when Orville eventually opened the mud-covered crates, he discovered that the mud had actually preserved the contents. The 1903 Flyer wasn't destroyed and it—or parts of it, anyway—since 1948 has been proudly exhibited in the Smithsonian.

There were other casualties of history as well. Lyles Station, Indiana, was a tiny community that began in the 1840s as a settlement for freed slaves, getting its name from Joshua Lyles, a freed Tennessee slave who donated six acres of ground to the community to start a railroad station. It was named Lyles Station in 1886 and by the time 1913 rolled around, it was a community of eight hundred residents with fifty-five homes, a post office, the railroad station, an elementary school, two churches, two general stores, and a lumber mill. The Patoka and Wabash Rivers pretty much ended progress at Lyles Station, however, and today, other than a few scattered homes, a church, a grain elevator, and the school, there's very little left of Lyles Station.

Libraries throughout the region were decimated. The city of Zanesville, Ohio, lost 5,000 books. In Piqua, the library lost 8,500 books
when the water filled the entire first floor. In Hamilton, 13,000 books were destroyed. But the damage was worst in Dayton's library, which lost 45,000 books, not to mention desks, chairs, bookcases, and filing cabinets. The November 1913 issue of
The Library Journal
described the destruction at the Dayton library this way:

“Floors were covered several inches deep with black, slimy, sticky mud into which books were imbedded as a thick carpet. Furniture was overturned, wooden book shelves warped and fallen and heavy card catalog cabinets lifted and carried far out of place or overturned face down in the slime, a typewriter on its face in the mud, the office and catalog room closed by the swollen walnut doors. The mud was too wet and heavy for immediate removal, so the building was opened for drying and the following hours spent in seeking workmen, shovels, wheelbarrows, and rubber boots.”

Since the library staff was mostly women, and they felt they could use some male testosterone to help with lifting, “three or four sturdy Germans” were found at a nearby automobile factory, according to
The Library Journal,
and added to the staff.

But then occasionally, people would shake their heads in wonder and amusement at what wasn't destroyed. In Dayton, the Newcom Tavern and Log Cabin somehow escaped ruin. It was the city's oldest standing structure.

It had been built in 1796 and moved and turned into a museum one hundred years later—the move paid for by long-time Dayton benefactor John H. Patterson—and while it had been swamped by the flood, along with just about every other house in the city, unlike so many of its modern counterparts, it stood. It's still standing today.