The Johnstown Flood (19 page)

Gertrude never found out who it was who carried her up the hill, but he eventually deposited her with a family named Metz, who lived in a frame tenement also occupied by five other families. The place looked like paradise to her, but she was still so terrified that she was unable to say a word as the Metz children, neighbors, and people in off the street jammed into the kitchen to look at her as she lay wrapped now in a pair of red-flannel underwear with Mason jars full of hot water packed all around her.

Later, she was put to bed upstairs, but exhausted as she was she was unable to sleep. In the room with her were three other refugees from the disaster, grown women by the name of Bowser, who kept getting up and going to the window, where she could hear them gasping and whispering among themselves. After a while Gertrude slipped quietly out of bed and across the dark room. Outside the window, down below where the city had been, she could now see only firelight reflecting on water. It looked, as she said later, for all the world like ships burning at sea.

The Reverend Dr. David Beale, pastor of the Presbyterian Church on Main Street, was one of the several hundred people crowded into the cavernous, pitch-dark rooms of the second, third, and fourth floors of Alma Hall. The building was on Main, five doors up from Dr. Beale’s church and directly across the street from the park. It was the tallest, largest structure in Johnstown.

Dr. Beale had been at home that afternoon, in the Lincoln Street parsonage, which stood directly behind his church, and like his good friend and neighbor the Reverend Chapman, he had been working on his sermon for Sunday. About four he had gone into the parlor to help take up the carpet. Then all at once the house was struck, and in the next few seconds he snatched up the family Bible, his wife turned off the gas, his daughter grabbed the canary cage, and they and several neighbors who had dropped by earlier all dashed up the front stairs. By the time they reached the second floor the water was up to their waists, and a hat rack was driven against Beale’s back with such force that it nearly knocked him under. As they reached the third floor a man washed in through the window.

“Who are you? Where are you from?” Beale shouted.

“Woodvale,” the man gasped. He had been carried on a roof a mile and a quarter.

Expecting at any moment “to be present with the Lord,” Beale led the group in a prayer and read aloud from the Bible, his voice straining against the noise of the flood:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

“Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea…”

Outside twisted wreckage, tank cars, freight cars, and what appeared to be every house in sight went tumbling past the window. The Reverend Beale saw J. Q. Benshoff, Johnstown’s leading bookseller go by, Mrs. John Fulton and her daughter, and two small children clinging to a roof, both of them nearly naked. For blocks around every building appeared to have been obliterated.

There were ten people in the Beale attic, counting the newcomer from Woodvale. Soon after, Beale helped save Captain A. N. Hart, his wife, sister, and two small sons by pulling them in through the window. But there was considerable doubt as to how long the frame parsonage could last, and especially when, after a shifting and quieting of the current, the wreckage which had been shoved against the west side of the house began slowly drifting off and the whole building started to jerk and tremble.

A decision was made to try, before nightfall, to walk across the flood—over the debris—to Alma Hall, which was the equivalent of about one block away. Captain Hart went out the window first on the end of a rope, tested a roof that was floating below, found it stable enough, and the other fourteen, plus the Beales’ dog, a terrier called “Guess,” followed after. The Reverend Beale was the last one out. Then they started off, picking their way over tree trunks, timbers, stepping from one moving house to another, climbing up the sides of roofs sometimes so steep that part of the group on one side would be out of sight from those on the other side, then jumping across sudden spaces of dark water or bridging them with stray planks. At one point one of the girls lost her balance and fell in, vanishing from sight except for her hair which floated on the surface. She was rescued by pulling her back on some long boards, and everyone continued on.

By now, very near dark, the city was one huge, vile-looking lake anywhere from ten to thirty feet deep, much of it crusted over with a grinding pack of wreckage, across which now other groups of tiny figures, barely visible in the fading light, could be seen groping their way toward the hills or the few buildings still left standing.

About the time the Reverend Beale and his party had climbed out of the parsonage, a break had occurred in the railroad embankment to the right of the stone bridge, between the bridge and the depot, and the water began raging through just as though it were a spillway. House after house had plunged through the break like boats running the rapids, many of them loaded with people, dozens to be dashed to pieces when they hit Cambria City below.

But there were some people who, one way or another, survived the trip to be fished out by rescue teams farther along the river. One of them was Maxwell McAchren, who, after throwing little Gertrude to safety, sailed on toward the bridge in time to be sucked through the break. He wound up riding the mattress straight through Cambria City at the time when a good part of it was being destroyed, past the Cambria works as they were being pounded by the water, and on down the Conemaugh four miles before he was finally pulled to shore by a crowd of men with ropes.

With the break in the embankment the level of the water over the city began to go down, but only slowly, since the Little Conemaugh and the Stony Creek were still pouring in immense quantities of water, mud, and debris. So as night began, those buildings which had somehow held up against everything so far were still withstanding as much as twenty feet of water, and very often they had had several hundred tons of wreckage dumped against them. For those who would manage to get inside them, the long night ahead would be by far the most agonizing part of the whole ordeal.

When the Reverend Beale’s group finally reached Alma Hall, there were already close to 200 people inside. At the Dean Canan house there were 60 people in the attic. At least 51 people were in the attic of Dr. Walters’ house on Vine Street. The Fred Krebs house had 125 people inside before the night ended. Nearly 200 people were in the upper floors of the Union Street School, more than 100 on top of the Wolfe Building, and at the Morrell house (by then it had been converted into the Morrell Institute, a vocational training school for the Iron Company) there were 175 people. And over at Dr. Swan’s tall brick house at the corner of Vine and Stony Creek streets there were close to 90 people, including Horace Rose, who lay stretched out on the floor with a dislocated shoulder, a broken collarbone, several crushed ribs, and half of his face ripped open.

There had been a few minutes after the flood had fallen on his part of Main Street during which Rose had been at his window, almost hypnotized by the scene outside. He had seen John Dibert’s house squashed like a paper bag. Another brick house fell with a crash. A large frame building directly across the street had lifted up and charged right for him. Then there had been a horrible noise, he had felt himself falling, and all was dark.

“A moment later I felt the press of a heavy shock, a sense of excruciating pain came upon me that I was being crushed to death…”

His whole right side had been caved in by falling timbers, and he was powerless to free himself. He had heard his youngest son calling for help but had been unable to do anything for him. He had seen his daughter, June, rise up out of the water, then, almost immediately, sink back out of sight. From out of nowhere a small boy had appeared among the chaos and told him his wife had drowned. Then another stranger, this one a young man, seemed, Rose said later, to shoot out of the debris. Rose told him to go help his wife and daughter. The man, Rose learned afterward, was a Pittsburgh dentist named Phillips, and in a few frantic minutes he managed to free Mrs. Rose from the timbers that had fallen on her. Then the majority of the Rose household—Rose, his wife and daughter (she too had been rescued somehow), two of his sons, one maid, “the strange boy,” as Rose called him, and an elderly lady who had been pulled off a floating shutter by one of his sons—were all together on a single stout roof which chanced by at the very moment when the last of their house was disappearing in the tide. The roof had been heading toward the stone bridge. But, Rose wrote later, “Scarcely was the complement of passengers complete, when the current turned, and our ship was driven with terrific velocity directly up the channel of the Stony Creek…”

Then for several more hours they had floated about, sometimes wallowing in dead water, other times rushing rapidly back over a course they had just completed. And through it all Rose lay helpless, in terrible pain, and shaking with severe chills as the cold rain beat down.

They had seen the spire of St. John’s Catholic Church catch fire, which according to most accounts had happened about eight o’clock, and had watched the flames leap clear to the cross on top before the whole thing toppled and fell into the water. At another point they had been becalmed within perhaps a hundred feet of where Rose’s office had been on Franklin Street, and listened to the ringing of the ponderous bell in the town clock. The clock was in the steeple of the Lutheran Church, and somehow or other its mechanism was still functioning the same as ever. Through the rest of the night, despite everything, every hour on the hour, it bonged away. The sound had a powerful effect on everyone who heard it.

Then by another sudden change in the surface currents, the roof had been driven off over the main channel of the Stony Creek, where by now the current was again heading downstream. They were carried a hundred yards or more before the roof lodged against the side of the Swan house.

Rose was lifted from the roof and through a window. From then until morning he lay listening to buildings breaking up somewhere out in the night and watching the light from the fire at the bridge play across the walls and ceiling.

For the Reverend Beale and the others inside Alma Hall there had been an immediate fear of fire and what might happen if panic should break out among so many people waiting in the dark. An Alma Hall government had been set up, with Beale and Captain Hart each put in charge of one of the floors. Some whiskey was confiscated, and the use of matches was strictly forbidden because of the likelihood of a natural-gas leak in the basement. A count was made to see how many there were (it came to 264), and the Reverend once again led a prayer.

James Walters, a lawyer, was named director of the building. Walters had made one of the day’s most extraordinary voyages, having been swept from his home on Walnut Street on top of a roof which took him spinning across town until he smashed into the side of Alma Hall, flew headlong through a window, and landed square in the middle of his own office.

The fourth member of the governing body was the only physician in the building, Dr. William Matthews, who spent the entire night tending to the wounded, without sleep or rest, despite the fact that he had two broken ribs.

In the Reverend Beale’s words, it was a “night of indescribable horrors.” The only light was the faint, eerie glow from the fires outside. Up near the long front windows that earlier in the day had looked down into the green treetops of the park, the light was bright enough to recognize a nearby face; but farther back in the deep, high-ceilinged rooms it was nearly pitch-black, and on the stairways between floors there was no light at all.

Nearly everyone was wringing wet, filthy, and suffering from the cold. A number of people had most of their clothes torn off. There was no food and no water. There were no blankets, no dry clothes, and no medical supplies. The injured lay shivering in the dark. The rooms were filled with their moaning, with the crying of scared, hungry children, and with a lot of fervent praying.

Outside they could hear the rush of the rain and faint calls for help, a sudden scream, and every now and then the unearthly howling of dogs and other animals, which to many people was the most frightful sound of all.

Nor was there any assurance whatsoever that the whole enormous building would not go the way of so many others and crack apart and bury them all under tons of brick and plaster and falling timbers. Everyone was asked to move about as little as possible. According to Beale, “the expressed opinion of the contractors present” was that the building would not last the night.

People began thinking about whether their own corpses would be recognizable or where they might be buried, if ever their bodies were found. The suspense was unbearable, and it kept on, hour after hour. It seemed morning would never come.

But Alma Hall stood through the night, as did the Presbyterian Church and its parsonage, Dr. Lowman’s house, where a small crowd had gathered in the top floor, and the Methodist parsonage, where the Chapmans and their assorted guests huddled together in the numbing cold praying for morning. The buildings survived because they were on the lee side of the big, stone Methodist Church. Standing as it did, at the corner of Franklin and Locust, on the northeastern corner of the park, the church was one of the first sizable buildings in town to be struck by the wave. Not only had it held, but it had split the wave and so served as a shield for buildings directly in line behind it. (One tale to come out of Alma Hall later on told of a voice in the dark saying, “We’ve been saved by the Methodist Church,” whereupon another voice answered back, “Only the Catholic Church can save!”)

Elsewhere in the night the story was quite different. Buildings caved in or caught fire and burned to the water line. The St. John’s fire was the biggest and most spectacular, but there were fires among several houses close by; the Keystone Hotel caught fire and there were one or two small fires over in Kernville.