The Johnstown Flood (9 page)

On Sunday thousands of mourners queued up along the south side of Main Street to go through the iron gates, up the long front walk, and into the big house to view the remains. For three hours the doors were open and a steady procession filed through.

The next day, from noon until five, the whole town was shut down. The procession that marched out to the cemetery was as fine a display of the town’s manhood as anyone had ever seen. Ahead of the hearse tramped men from the Cambria mines and railroads, the rolling mills and blast furnaces, row on row, like an army, followed by the merchants and professional men, the police, the city fathers, men of every sort who worked for or did business with or depended on the Cambria Iron Company, which meant just about everybody. The only sound was the steady beat of their heavy boots and shoes on the cobblestones.

After the hearse came the special carriages for the mourners. Bill Kelly and his wife were there; so was Captain Bill Jones, and a Cleveland steel man and family friend named Marcus Alonzo Hanna.

There never was a bigger or better funeral in Johnstown.

Two years later, on March 29, 1887, the day a wagonload of fruit trees arrived at his cottage on Lake Conemaugh, Benjamin F. Ruff died suddenly in a hotel in Pittsburgh. The cause of death according to the papers was a carbuncle on the neck.

1

The hard, cold rain that had started coming down the night before had eased off considerably by the morning of Friday, May 31. But a thick mist hung in the valley like brushwood smoke and overhead the sky was very dark.

Even before night had ended there had been signs of trouble. At five o’clock a landslide had caved in the stable at Kress’s brewery, and anyone who was awake then could hear the rivers. By six everyone who was up and about knew that Johnstown was in for a bad time. The rivers were rising at better than a foot an hour. They were a threatening yellow-brown color and already full of logs and big pieces of lumber that went bounding along as though competing in some sort of frantic race.

When the seven o’clock shift arrived at the Cambria mills, the men were soon told to go home and look after their families. By ten there was water in most cellars in the lower part of town. School had been let out, and children were splashing about in the streets with wooden boxes, boards, anything that would make a boat.

One of the most distinguished residents of the lower part of town was the Honorable W. Horace Rose, Esquire, former cavalry officer, former state legislator, former district attorney of Cambria County, a founder of Johnstown’s Literary Society, father of five, respected and successful attorney at law. Rose was a Democrat with a large following among Republicans as well as his own party, and including those Republicans who ran the town and Cambria Iron. He was an expert horseman, slender, erect, and full-bearded, with strong blue eyes and a soft voice which he seldom ever raised.

He had been born in a log house that had stood at the corner of Vine and Market. At thirteen he had been orphaned when both parents died of cholera within the same hour and had been on his own ever since, first as a bound boy in a tannery, later as a carpenter. When he was nineteen, John Linton, Johnstown’s leading lawyer, took him into his office to “read law.” Not long after he opened his own office, which he built himself, and got married to Maggie Ramsey of Johnstown. Then came the war, during which he was wounded, captured, and released in time to take part in General Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign.

The house Horace Rose and his family lived in was downtown, on lower Main Street. He had witnessed nearly every one of Johnstown’s floods over the years, and when he heard that the rivers this particular morning were both coming up rapidly at the same time, something they had not done before, he decided to go out after breakfast and see how things were going.

By the time he and his two youngest sons, Forest and Percy, had finished hitching the team, there was water on the stable floor. Rose took care to use his second-best harness and had one of the boys drive their cow to the hillside, expecting to bring her back down again in a few hours, when the water subsided. Then they climbed into an open wagon and headed down Main, with Rose driving.

His intention was to pick up anyone toward the river who wished to be evacuated. But by now, which was somewhere near nine, the water that far downtown was too deep to get through safely. So he wheeled around and headed back up Main, going as far as Bedford, where he paused to pass the time with his old friend Charles Zimmerman, the livery-stable owner. For a few moments they watched another cow being led to higher ground.

“Charlie,” Rose said, “you and I have scored fifty years, and this is the first time we ever saw a cow drink Stony Creek river water on Main Street.”

“That’s so,” Zimmerman agreed. “But the water two years ago was higher.”

About then the rain started coming down again as hard as it had during the night, heavy and wind-driven. Rose stopped off long enough to buy his sons rubber raincoats, then proceeded over to the end of Franklin to his office, which was less than a hundred feet from the roaring Stony Creek. For another half-hour he and the boys set about placing his papers and other things well above the flood line of 1887, which was about a foot from the floor. Then they started for home, stopping once more on the way to talk to another old friend, John Dibert, the banker, who was also their next-door neighbor.

The situation for property holders in the lower part of town was growing serious, Rose and Dibert agreed. This business of flooded cellars every spring had to be corrected. The solution, as they saw it, was to call a meeting to protest the way the Cambria Iron Company had been filling in the riverbanks next to the mills below town. They recalled that town ordinances had fixed the width of the Stony Creek at 175 feet and the Little Conemaugh at 110 feet. This meant that the combined width of the two was 285 feet; but the Conemaugh, which had to carry all the water from both of them, was now less than 200 feet wide near the mills. Obviously, the rivers were bound to back up when flash floods hit, and obviously the Cambria Iron Company would have to restore the riverbed to its original width. With that settled, the two friends parted.

Rose went directly home, where he found the water now so deep that he was unable to get near his front door. He sent young Forest with the team to a nearby hillside while he and Percy assembled a makeshift raft and floated over to the back porch. Once inside, like nearly everyone else in town, they busied themselves taking up carpets and furniture. Rose also “marked with sadness” that the slowly rising water “with its muddy freight” had already ruined his new wallpaper.

Then everyone moved upstairs where the morning took on the air of a family picnic. Forest had been unable to get back to the house after leaving the horses but had signaled from a window across the street that he was high and dry with the Fishers.

Horace Rose called back and forth to Squire Fisher and joked about their troubles while his wife and the others got a fire going in the grate and made some coffee. After a bit Rose got his rifle, went up to the attic, propped himself in a window, and whiled away the time shooting at rats struggling along the wall of a stable in the adjoining lot.

And so the morning passed on into afternoon; there was nothing much to do but wait it out and make the best of what, after all, was not such an unpleasant situation.

There were hundreds of other families, however, who had seen enough. They began moving out, wading through the streets with bundles of clothing and food precariously balanced on rude rafts, or jammed into half-submerged spring wagons. Here and there a lone rowboat pushed up to a front porch or window ledge to make a clumsy, noisy rescue of women and grandfathers, dogs, cats, and children.

Some people were simply heading for higher ground, without any particular place in mind; others were going to the homes of friends or relatives where they hoped there might not be quite so much water, and where, come nightfall, there might be electricity and a dry kitchen.

A few families went over to the big hotels in the center of town, thinking they would be the safest places of all to ride out the storm. Quite a good many, wherever their destination, went a little sheepishly, dreading the looks and the kidding they would get when they came back home again.

The water by now, from one end of town to the other, was anywhere from two to ten feet deep. It was already higher than the ‘87 flood, making it, by noon at least, Johnstown’s worst flood on record. The Gautier works had closed down at ten, when Fred Krebs, the manager, was reminded by one of the men that the huge barbed-wire plant stood on fill that had been dumped into the old canal basin, and that once upon a time there had been four feet of water right where they were standing. At eleven, or soon after, a log boom burst up the Stony Creek and sent a wild rush of logs stampeding through the valley until they crashed into the stone bridge below town and jammed in among the massive arches.

Not very long after that the Stony Creek ripped out the Poplar Street Bridge; then, within the hour, the Cambria City Bridge went. At St. John’s Catholic Church, which stood far uptown at Jackson and Locust, and so, presumably, well beyond reach of spring floods, the water was so deep that the funeral of Mrs. Mary McNally had to be postponed midway through the service and the casket left in the church.

Worst of all, and unlike any other flood in Johnstown’s history, there had been a tragic death. A teamster named Joseph Ross, a father of four children, had been drowned when he fell into a flooded excavation while helping evacuate a stranded family.

Along Main Street, shopkeepers were working feverishly to move their goods out of reach of the water. In his second-floor office overlooking Franklin and Main, George T. Swank, the cantankerous editor and proprietor of the
Tribune,
began working on what he planned to be a running log of the day’s events, with the intention of publishing it in the next edition, whenever that might be.

“As we write at noon,” he put down, “Johnstown is again under water, and all about us the tide is rising. Wagons for hours have been passing along the streets carrying people from submerged points to places of safety…From seven o’clock on the water rose. People who were glad they ‘didn’t live downtown’ began to wish they didn’t live in town at all. On the water crept, and on, up one street and out the other…Eighteen inches an hour the Stony Creek rose for a time, and the Conemaugh about as rapidly.”

On the street below his window the current, coming across from the Stony Creek, was rushing by at an estimated six miles an hour.

Across Main, and three doors down Franklin, the Reverend H. L. Chapman was having a slightly unnerving day.

After an early breakfast he had retired to his study to work on his sermon for Sunday. The text he had selected was “But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?” He had barely begun when he was interrupted by the door-bell. Opening the front door, he found his wife’s cousin, Mrs. A. D. Brinker, standing on the porch looking terribly frightened.

She had crossed the park from her home on the other side. She asked Chapman if he had heard about the high water downtown. He said he had not and that he did not think there would be much of a flood.

“Johnstown is going to be destroyed today,” she said, and then told him that the reservoir would break and all would be swept away.

Chapman was so incredulous he almost laughed in her face, and would have had she not looked so pitifully terror-stricken. It was also not the first time Mrs. Brinker had made just such a forecast.

“Well, Sister Brinker, you have been fearing this for years,” Chapman said with patience, “and it has never yet happened, and I don’t think there is much danger.”

He invited her to step in and stay with them until after the flood had passed, an invitation she gladly accepted, saying that her husband had insisted on staying home, to “hold the fort” as he had put it.

Later, a young student friend named Parker dropped by to see if the Chapmans needed help moving their furniture, but the Reverend told him he expected no trouble, as the new parsonage had a higher foundation than other houses. But the young man stayed on nonetheless.

About noon Chapman happened to look out the window long enough to see one of the town’s most dignified figures standing in the street in water up to his waist. It was Cyrus Elder, who along with being chief counsel for the Iron Company was now Johnstown’s one and only member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, having acquired the Morrell memberships at the time of the old Quaker’s death.

Chapman was puzzled by the whole thing and hurried onto the porch to see what he could do. Elder, though a most solid citizen, seems also to have had a sense of humor.

“Doctor,” he called, “have you any fishing tackle?”

Chapman answered that he thought he had.

“Well,” said Elder, “I was in a skiff and it upset and left me here, and I am waiting for a man who has gone after a horse, to take me out, and I might put in my time fishing.”

When the man and horse returned, the hefty Elder, try as he would, was unable to get up on the animal’s slippery back. So the rider went off again and returned next with a wagon. This time they had better luck and started off down Main toward Elder’s home on Walnut Street but had to turn back and head uptown for Elder’s brother’s house; all of which was duly noted with amusement from the window of the
Tribune
by George Swank, who was also Elder’s brother-in-law.

Elder had arrived back in Johnstown from Chicago just that morning and had been trying for hours to get home to his wife and daughter. From the station platform he had been able to look right across at his house, where, on the front porch, the two women were waving their handkerchiefs at him. They had gestured back and forth about the water and how he might get home, but from then on he had made little progress.

At midday the Chapmans and their guests sat down to dinner, but Mrs. Brinker was still too unstrung to eat anything. Dinner over, they moved to the study, where they sat quietly chatting beside the gas fire. But the Reverend soon grew impatient with the comings and goings of Lizzie Swing, the Chapmans German servant girl, who kept tramping past the study door on her way from the cellar to the attic with armloads of food.

“Why does she do that?” Chapman asked. He was genuinely puzzled by the girl’s obvious state of nerves, since she understood almost no English. The Reverend was having trouble maintaining an intelligent sense of domestic calm.

The train which returned Cyrus Elder to Johnstown had left Chicago the day before at three in the afternoon. It was one of two sections of the
Day Express,
which had pulled out of Pittsburgh that morning, on time, at 8:10. The two trains arrived at Johnstown about 10:15, and again on time, but were held there for a half-hour or so. The eastbound track on up the valley had washed out. Not until a local mail train came through were the two sections given orders to follow it to East Conemaugh, running east on the westbound track.

During the wait at Johnstown, passengers on board watched in fascination the struggles of the flooded city. They waved back and forth to families hanging out of upstairs windows. Some got out for a few minutes and joined the crowds on the station platform and along the near enbankment to watch the railroad crew that was trying to dislodge the logs and drift from the stone bridge. When the trains began moving again, very slowly, around the blind corner of Prospect Hill and on to the East Conemaugh yards two miles ahead, the passengers could see the ugly yellow-brown surge of the Little Conemaugh to their right, now very near their rain-streaked windows. More and more debris swept by and telegraph poles swayed precariously in the strong wind.