Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (44 page)

There were also telephone lines to restore. As a 1913 issue of the trade publication
Telephony
explained, “Gangs of cable men in mud-holes with water waist deep and with pumps working over their heads to keep the water down, labored night and day endeavoring to adjust the indescribable condition in which they found their work.”

Most of the wires,
Telephony
added, were too wet and muddy and had to be replaced.

Outside the Beckel House, fire engines were pumping water from basements of what were considered the most important buildings for the city, like the Bell Telephone Exchange and the Algonquin Hotel.

Of course, what was bad for the flood-battered cities was good for other cities, and all of the work being done in Dayton and throughout the region demanded professional help. A 1913 issue of
Electrical World
reported that as far as Duluth, Minnesota, linemen and electricians were told that “every man who can climb a telegraph pole and twist a wire is wanted at Dayton and other flooded cities in Ohio and Indiana.”

Not that it was a boon for the economy, since millions of dollars were lost in almost every industry imaginable and unimaginable. In fact, it's tempting to call the effect the flood had on the economy a wash. For instance, you wouldn't think of the ice cream industry during a flood, but a 1913 issue of
Ice Cream Trade Journal
reported seventy-five factories making ice cream as being damaged. “There will be little ice cream sold before July, and then the sales will be from 50 to 80 percent under those of last year,” predicted the journal.

Mayor Phillips called an afternoon meeting of the council. His purpose was to issue emergency bonds to provide money to the salvage corps to remove the dead horses and clear away mud, and then to provide food and relieve the National Cash Register Company and other sources from the tremendous expense that they were going through, caring for everyone; money would also go to help people who were rendered helpless by the flood or unemployed thanks to the flood, and finally, to help strengthen the police system.

Over in the mayor's office, Mayor Phillips didn't feel he deserved everyone's wrath and blame and tried defending himself. “Had council granted my request for a bond issue to dredge the Miami River on January 6, 1913, I am firmly convinced that many persons would have escaped,” the mayor told reporters. “I do not mean that I think dredging the canal would have averted the flood, but that if the obstructions had been removed from the bed of the river, I am convinced that the inundation of West Dayton would have been delayed until many people could have been warned of the situation and given time to make their escape.”

So either Mayor Phillips was pressured to do what he did next, or perhaps he came up with the idea on his own, understanding, after being trapped in his house during Dayton's darkest moments, that his career in politics was over. He issued a statement praising John
H. Patterson and then called on all citizens to recognize the head of the National Cash Register Company as “mayor of Dayton during the emergency period.”

It was quite a turnaround for Patterson, a businessman who had broken anti-trust laws and was still technically awaiting a sentencing that was expected to put him in jail for a year, and for Mayor Phillips who, before the flood, seems to have been well regarded and on his way to a promising political career. Now, Phillips was a footnote in his own city, and Patterson was a beloved hero who could do no wrong. In fact, it came out that day—although it probably wasn't exactly kept a secret—that Patterson was paying for the coffins and burials of the victims. Small wonder that people in Dayton were circulating a petition, asking the president to pardon Patterson.

“I don't want a pardon,” Patterson told a reporter around this time. “All I want is a fair trial in a higher court. I am not guilty of anything. If I am, I want to go to jail just the same as any other man.” Two days later, Patterson would wire President Wilson: “I am guilty of no crime. I want no pardon. I want only justice and some federal action that will make Dayton safe from recurrence of such a catastrophe as we have just had.”

Small wonder Dayton loved Patterson, who ultimately was interested in business and not politics. He made it known that he wanted someone to take over and be in charge of the flood relief situation, and he soon found just the man: Edward T. Devine, president of the New York school of philanthropy and a leading social worker in the nation. He volunteered his services to the Red Cross, which sent him to Dayton. Devine had been in charge of the relief work after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

“The situation in Dayton is worse than that which followed the Frisco earthquake,” said Devine, who was referring to not only the vast destruction in the city but lumping it in with the entire state of Ohio and beyond.

Mabel T. Boardman and Ernest Bicknell of the Red Cross seconded that. In a letter written in late March that Ms. Boardman sent to a prominent New Yorker, she noted, “Mr. Bicknell told me he thought it was the biggest and most difficult field the Red Cross had yet had to deal with. At San Francisco the work was concentrated and here it
is spread out, so that we will have not only the jealousy of individuals but that of communities to contend with. Furthermore, I think the responsibility of a really serious disaster over a large territory comes more upon the Red Cross than it ever has before. Of course, this is as it should be, and I hope and believe we can meet it, but it will take time.”

But what really concerned the Red Cross and those involved with relief was the concern of disease breaking out. “The serious feature of this situation is the danger of pestilence arising from unsanitary conditions due to the flooding,” said Devine at the time; and indeed, two children in northern Dayton, according to a Dr. R.A. Dunn, who was interviewed after a trip there, had already died of diphtheria.

The dead bodies, at least the ones that could be recovered, were quickly being buried after being identified.

It was the most depressing of all the tasks. One woman's body was found in the west side of Dayton, her face disfigured, apparently from a fire, and in her arms was a six-month-old baby. Another woman was found lying across a picket fence, with her face so lacerated that authorities weren't very hopeful about her being identified. She was in her night clothing, suggesting that the flood had caught her asleep.

When all was said and done, the official death toll for Dayton was open for discussion. The Ohio Bureau of Statistics listed eighty-two names of people who died in Dayton, while cautioning, “it is impossible to say how many persons lost their lives directly and indirectly as a result of the flood of March, 1913.” Historian Trudy E. Bell puts the figure at ninety-eight. Other sources place Dayton's deaths at closer to three hundred, but they may be considering nearby cities and neighborhoods. Whatever the number was, it was too many.

Away from Dayton

And people on March 29 were still going to their watery graves.

The papers reported a Miss Anna Smith, leaving Cincinnati and trying to cross the Ohio River and reach Newport, Kentucky, in a skiff with three men. For anyone who has seen the Ohio River on a good day, one can imagine that it wouldn't be easy to cross it in a skiff, not the most sturdy of boats to ford wild and unpredictable water. To have done it when the Ohio River was miles wide and at a time when thousands of miles of water was rushing into it seems like madness.
The craft capsized, and while the three men somehow made it to shore, Miss Smith did not.

Ohio River communities were, as everyone expected, still being swallowed up by the second wave of the flood, although Cincinnati was one city unexpectedly not devastated by the flood.

Cincinnati was considered on the verge of flooding when the water reached fifty feet. The highest anyone had ever seen it was 71.1 feet on February 14, 1884, and by April 1, it was 69.8—perilously high but not a record. The Ohio River expanded into downtown, flooding the Palace of the Fans (later Crosley Field), the baseball stadium; streets like Main and Walnut became rivers. Fifteen thousand people were left homeless.

But it caught few people by surprise by the time the flood came to these parts of the state, and for the most part, Cincinnati residents were helping neighboring towns, rather than needing help themselves. It also helped that the city is built on a series of hills—one of its nicknames is the City of Seven Hills—so many homes were far from the flooding, and the hills provided easy access for residents who needed to find somewhere to wait out the flood.

Newport and Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, were also quite submerged, with twelve thousand residents needing to find a place to stay. In nearby Lawrenceburg, only forty houses—out of five thousand—weren't underwater.

The flood ravaged Wheeling, West Virginia, picking off ten people there and making twenty thousand people at least temporarily part of the homeless class. Wheeling's Wheeling Island, the most populous island in the Ohio River, had some houses completely submerged—not even an attic window above the water—and many came off their moorings and went floating down the river. Half of Moundsville, West Virginia, and Bridgeport, and Bellaire, Ohio, were underwater. One of the saddest tales has to be that of William Sullivan in Huntington, West Virginia. He helped his wife and children into a boat, and then rescuers took them from the second story of his house. The waters kept rising and when he became convinced that they would not be able to return for him, he ended his own life by drinking poison.

Farther away, the James River in Virginia was out of its banks. The Delaware River in New Jersey was higher than it had been in years, sending many families to the second floors, and even as far north as
Vermont, the Connecticut River was overflowing. In Massachusetts, the residents were on standby, in case the rising river threatened any mills and factories.

Rochester, New York

The rain had been six to eight inches above normal in northern and central New York throughout all of March, but the rainfall that came on March 27 and March 28 dumped 4.4 inches of rainfall over the entire Genesee River basin and was still making plenty of trouble on March 29. The entire Mohawk and upper Hudson River basins were also flooded. Albany, Troy, and Buffalo were all cities enduring flooding and seeing their bridges smashed and their streets littered with hundreds of dead cattle.

Nobody was predicting doom for Rochester, but the end result of the flooding was that the Genesee River was rushing into the streets like it hadn't since forty-eight years before, in 1865, and merchants were moving their goods upstairs as fast as possible. Front Street caved in, highways were damaged, bridges went down, and there was one fatality. Police officers heard shouts, and when they ran to see what was the matter, they found a boy clinging to an overturned canoe rushing down Clarissa Street.

The boy and the canoe sailed through the city as dozens of people gathered along the riverbanks and threw ropes, hung out tree branches, and did whatever they could to save him. Just before he reached the Court Street dam, the boy stopped screaming. He disappeared under the big waves, and the canoe was swept over the dam.

Hornell, New York

Maybe people were becoming used to the flooding and assuming the worst was over, and so that's how seven-year-old Earl Rosier came to be allowed to play outside with his brother. They wound up on an unfinished abutment of the Erie Railroad Bridge, and after the boy stumbled and plunged into the river, it's safe to assume the parents spent the rest of their days wondering how and why it happened.

Fort Wayne, Indiana

A similar situation happened on the same day to a four-year-old boy, William Singer, who walked off a sidewalk and into some fast-moving
water and was quickly whisked away. His mother waded in after him but was almost drowned herself until a neighbor pulled her back to shore.

A railroad man found the four-year-old floating in the water. He was still alive—barely. Two agonizing hours later, after a doctor and the Fort Wayne police chief labored over young William, using a new resuscitating device called a pulmotor, that pumps oxygen into the lungs, they had to call the boy's time of death.

It may be impossible to ever really know how many people died in the Great Flood of 1913, because there were surely some people who were never found and weren't registered as an official casualty. In his memoir,
Journey Through My Years,
Ohio governor James M. Cox says as much, stating that for Ohio alone, “the number of known dead was 361, but undoubtedly many more bodies were never recovered. Much sickness and many deaths followed the flood. Thirty-two persons were admitted to the Dayton State Hospital, the city's asylum, their commitment papers expressly stating that their insanity was a direct consequence of the flood.”

Meanwhile, as Cox implied, when annual totals were tallied for publications like
Annual Report,
put out by the Ohio Bureau of Vital Statistics, people who died during the flood for reasons other than drowning were not counted in the totals, people like John and Katherine Stotler, seventy and sixty-five respectively. They were victims of the flood as much as anyone but weren't counted in the final death total, presumably because they didn't drown. On March 26, in Columbus, marooned in their cottage with the Scioto and Olentangy rivers overtaking their home, the husband and wife decided to commit suicide instead of letting the river kill them. You pick your poison, of course, but newspaper accounts say that they slit their throats, which all in all, doesn't necessarily seem like a better way to go than drowning, terrifying a death as it is. Their fear, hopelessness, and helplessness must have been beyond overwhelming to take such drastic measures.

Delia McNerny, a 69-year-old widow, also living in Columbus, died in her house on March 27, with the water still surrounding her home and in the first floor of her house. She caught pneumonia and passed away with two of her daughters, Susie and Annie, looking after her as best they could.