The Johnstown Flood (4 page)

Jackson served in the war; then, in 1865, despite all his good life on the mountain, he died at the age of fifty.

By 1881, to accommodate the growing trade, the railroad cleared space in a maple grove and built another hotel, The Mountain House, which, with its endless thick-carpeted halls, its many towers and flowing stairways, was easily the grandest piece of architecture in Cambria County.

Carnegie’s house, only a short distance from the hotel, was his only real home in Pennsylvania by that time. Though no one held more sway in Pittsburgh, he had not lived there for nearly twenty years. He visited often, and was front-page news when he did, but the rest of the time he was either in New York, Scotland, or at Cresson. He loved Cresson and talked up its charms with great vigor, which is perhaps not surprising for a Scot who had been brought up on Burns and had learned to quote him before he had learned to read. (“My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;/ My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.”) He courted his young wife there in the summer of 1886. (“A.C. walked home with me in the starlight…” she wrote in her diary at Cresson. “Such wonderful happiness…the happiest day of my life.”) He also very nearly died there of typhoid later that fall; and his mother, who took sick at the same time and lay in the next room down the hall, did die there on November 10. He entertained his distinguished friends at Cresson (Matthew Arnold had stopped over in 1883), and he managed, as was his pleasure, to keep his mind free and above the petty preoccupations of the steel business.

As one admiring writer of the period explained it: “All other iron and steel magnates, with the exception of Carnegie, lived in Pittsburgh and were swayed constantly by the local gossip, by the labour troubles, and by the rumours of competition and low prices that floated from office to office. To-day they were elated; tomorrow they were depressed. To-day they bought; to-morrow they sold. Carnegie, on the other hand, deliberately placed himself where these little ups and downs were unnoticed…. the news that Coleman had quarrelled with Shinn, or that coke-drawers wanted five cents a day more, was of small consequence. One thing he knew—that civilisation needed steel and was able to pay for it. All else was not worth troubling about.”

The place had its hold on him. He went on bird walks; he read; he talked and talked and talked. And if the views and good company were not enough, there were the “curative powers,” as the guidebook described them, of the iron springs. And who might more readily endorse such a tonic than the bouncy little ironmaster himself?

But Cresson had its drawbacks. It was a public place for one, sitting almost on top of the railroad. For another, there was no water. The story goes that there was (and still is) a house at Cresson where the rain water off of one roof eventually ends up in the Atlantic Ocean, while the rain water off the other finds its way to the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. The resort was at the very crest of the Allegheny divide, and though springs were plentiful, every bit of water there was drained off in both directions.

As a result, except for drives and walks, there was really not much to do at Cresson. Tennis had not yet caught on there. Golf, which was to one day be the great passion of Carnegie and his kind, would not even be attempted in the United States until 1888. But boating was already distinctly fashionable, and fishing had been coming more and more into its own as a gentleman’s sport.

Part of the increasing appeal of fishing seemed to be the multitude of trappings it called for. Where once the well-equipped angler needed only the simplest and most inexpensive sort of gear, now in the late 1880’s a whole line of elaborate and expensive paraphernalia was said to be necessary. Bait boxes, boots, collapsible nets, cookstoves, silk line, creels, reels and casting rods that cost as much as twenty dollars, even costly books on the subject, were the sign of the true sportsman. All of which seemed to make fishing, and particularly trout and bass fishing, which were generally referred to as a “science,” that much more attractive to the man of means. His interest in the sport not only showed his love of the great outdoors, but also that he had both the money and the brains to participate.

Of course, too, few pastimes there were which would take a man so far, in spirit at least, from the rude industrial grind. “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling,” were the words of Izaak Walton in the newly reissued, and quite costly, two-volume edition of his great work on the subject. One Walton disciple of the 1880’s, who as it happens was a Vermonter, wrote about this time, “I take my rod this fair June morning and go forth to be alone with nature. No business cares, no roar of the city, no recitals of others troubles…no doubts, no fears to disturb me as, drinking in the clear, sweet air with blissful anticipation I saunter through the wood path toward the mountain lake.” Had he been a Pittsburgh steel man he need only have added “no competitors, no labor agitators.”

So all that was needed to improve on Cresson was enough water for boating and fishing. A mountain lake, in short; plus some privacy. It would also be well to be back a way from the railroad, though not too far back, as the railroad was the one and only way to make the trip from Pittsburgh. As it was, the ride took about an hour and fifteen minutes to Johnstown, then another twenty minutes to come on up the mountain. That was about long enough. It would be best, therefore, to be somewhere in the same general area.

The old reservoir above South Fork certainly must have seemed a perfect solution. It answered every need: It was well back from the railroad; it was only a matter of miles from Cresson; and South Fork Creek was well known as one of the best trout streams in the state. True, the dam needed a great deal of repair work after so many years of neglect, but that could be handled all right, and especially since the property could be had for such a good price. Or so must have run the reasoning of the Pittsburgh men who bought it in 1879. Carnegie was not among them at this particular stage, but no doubt his presence so nearby on the mountain added still another enticing attraction to the scheme.

The prime promoter behind the move was a onetime railroad tunnel contractor and now-and-then coke salesman and real-estate broker by the name of Benjamin F. Ruff.

Ruff bought the dam and the lake from John Reilly, an Altoona Democratic politician and former Pennsylvania Railroad official who was then serving what would be his only term in Congress. Ruff paid $2,000 for the property, which was $500 less than Congressman Reilly had paid for it four years earlier when he had bought it from the Pennsylvania.

Ruff then rounded up fifteen other Pittsburgh gentlemen who each, with one exception, bought a single share in the operation for $200. The exception was one of the most interesting young men in Pittsburgh.

In the spring of 1879, when all this was going on, Henry Clay Frick was only twenty-nine years old, solemn, enigmatic, strikingly handsome, and already worth an even million. The grandson of wealthy, old Abraham Overholt, the Mennonite whiskey maker, Frick had made his own fortune in the coke business, and largely through his dealings with Pittsburgh’s number-one coke consumer, Andrew Carnegie.

Frick bought three shares. Ruff kept four for himself. A charter was drawn up stating that the name of the organization was to be the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club of Pittsburgh, that its “object” was to be “the protection and propagation of game and game fish, and the enforcement of all laws of this state against the unlawful killing or wounding of the same.” It was also stated that the club’s place of business was to be Pittsburgh, in Allegheny County, not in Cambria County where the property was located.

On November 15, 1879, the charter was approved and signed in the Court of Common Pleas in Allegheny County by Judge Edwin H. Stowe, who for some unknown reason ignored the provision in the law which called for the registration of a charter in the “office for recording in and for the county where the chief operations are to be carried on.” Nor did the sportsmen make any effort to conform to the law. Perhaps it seemed a minor point and was overlooked by mistake. In any case, the charter was secured without the knowledge of the authorities in Cambria County, and there would be speculation for years to come as to what might have happened right then and there had they and Judge Stowe gone about their business in strict accordance with the rules.

Ruff was to be the president of the new club. The capital stock was to be $10,000, but that was soon increased to $35,000 when it became known how much work was needed to get the dam in shape. For in 1879 the South Fork dam was getting on in years, and the years had been hard on it.

Forty-three years earlier, in 1836, the legislature of the state of Pennsylvania had approved funds for the building of a reservoir on the western slope of Allegheny Mountain to supply extra water during dry months for the new canal system from Johnstown to Pittsburgh. The first appropriation was for $30,000, but before the project was finished nearly $240,000 would be put into the dam; and two years after it was finished the whole thing would be obsolete and of no use whatsoever.

The canal from Johnstown to Pittsburgh was known as the Western Division of the state’s “Main Line” canal, which had been built to compete with New York’s thriving, new Erie Canal. The Western Division officially opened for business in May 1831, when a Johnstown barge pulled into Pittsburgh after traveling 104 miles in less than forty-eight hours.

The Eastern Division, running from Philadelphia to Hollidaysburg, at the foot of the eastern slope of Allegheny Mountain, was opened the next year. The only thing that then remained to be finished was an ingenious system of railroads and steam-powered hoists designed to get the boats up and over the mountain. But by spring of 1834 that too had been built and was open to traffic. For the first time the wharves of Philadelphia had a direct, nonstop link with the headwaters of the Ohio. It had cost a staggering sum; the state was nearly bankrupt; but that old, formidable barrier to the Pennsylvania route west, Allegheny Mountain, had been bested, and the general course of the country’s epic push to the Mississippi and beyond had been set for years to come.

The system devised for crossing the mountain was widely hailed as one of the engineering wonders of the age. Within a distance of thirty-six miles it overcame an increase in elevation of nearly 1,400 feet, or about twice the elevation the Erie Canal had to overcome along its entire length of 352 miles. Known as the Portage Railroad, it included a series of five inclined planes on each side of the mountain, ten in all, connected with a narrow-gauge railroad. Barges, passengers, freight, everything was hauled up one side and let down the other with hemp ropes thick as a man’s leg. It was a thrilling experience for travelers, a goodly number of whom chose to go by way of the Pennsylvania, rather than the Erie Canal, for that very reason.

Charles Dickens, one such traveler, described the ride in his
American Notes:

The adventurous journey also included, just to the east of Johnstown, a ride through the first railroad tunnel in the country and, in Pittsburgh, a ride across the first suspension bridge, an aqueduct over the Allegheny River designed by German-born John Augustus Roebling, who would later conjure up that wonder of wonders of the 1880’s, the Brooklyn Bridge.

But from Johnstown west the canal was troubled by water shortages nearly every summer. Operations were interrupted. Business suffered at a time when business had to be especially good to make up for winter, when virtually every moving thing stopped in the mountains for weeks on end, and spring, when the floods came. Particularly troublesome was the canal basin in Johnstown. Despite all the water that rushed into the valley in springtime, along toward mid-July the basin came close to running dry.

The solution seemed obvious enough. Put a dam in the mountains where it could hold a sufficient supply of water to keep the basin working and the canals open, even during those summers when creeks vanished and only weeds grew.

Work began on the Western Reservoir above South Fork in 1838, after some 400 acres had been cleared of timber. The site had been selected and surveyed by Sylvester Welsh, head engineer for the canal. He proposed an earth dam of 850 feet in length, with a spillway at one or both ends “of sufficient size to discharge the waste water during freshets, and sluices to regulate the supply for the canal.” It was also important, he said, that the bed of the spillway be solid rock and that no water be permitted to pass over the top of the dam. The design of the dam was worked out by a young state engineer named William E. Morris, who approved the location because, as he stated in a report made in 1839, it was in an area where there was enough drainage to provide a “certain” supply of water. He too proposed an earth dam 850 feet across the top and 62 feet high. He estimated that it would take a year to do the job.

The contractors chosen were James N. Moorhead of Pittsburgh and Hezekiah Packer of Williamsport. According to lengthy studies made by civil engineering experts years later, they did a competent job. Certainly they went about it with considerable care and patience and despite continuing delays. For, as it turned out, fifteen years passed before the dam was finished.

In 1842 work was halted because the state’s finances were in such bad shape that there was simply no more money to continue the job. For the next four years nothing was done. Then when the work did start again, it was only for another two years. A local cholera epidemic caused “a general derangement in the business,” until 1850, when the project again resumed, and for the final time.