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HISTORY OF The Johnstown Flood.
HISTORY OF The Johnstown Flood.
INCLUDING ALL THE FEARFUL RECORD; THE BREAKING OF THE SOUTH FORK DAM; THE SWEEPING OUT OF THE CONEMAUGH VALLEY; THE OVER-THROW OF JOHNSTOWN; THE MASSING OF THE WRECK AT THE RAILROAD BRIDGE; ESCAPES, RESCUES, SEARCHES FOR SURVIVORS AND THE DEAD; RELIEF ORGANIZATIONS, STUPENDOUS CHARITIES, ETC., ETC. WITH FULL ACCOUNTS ALSO OF THE DESTRUCTION ON THE SUSQUEHANNA AND JUNIATA RIVERS, AND THE BALD EAGLE CREEK. BY WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON. ILLUSTRATED. EDGEWOOD PUBLISHING CO., 1889. Copyright, 1889, by
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PREFACE.
PREFACE.
The summer of 1889 will ever be memorable for its appalling disasters by flood and flame. In that period fell the heaviest blow of the nineteenth century—a blow scarcely paralleled in the histories of civilized lands. Central Pennsylvania, a centre of industry, thrift and comfort, was desolated by floods unprecedented in the records of the great waters. On both sides of the Alleghenies these ravages were felt in terrific power, but on the western slope their terrors were infinitely multiplied by
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CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER I.
Springtime in the mountains. Graceful slopes and frowning precipices robed in darkest green of hemlock and spruce. Open fields here and there verdant with young grass and springing grain, or moist and brown beneath the plow for the planting time. Hedgerow and underwood fragrant with honeysuckle and wild blackberry bloom; violets and geraniums purpling the forest floor. Conemaugh creek and Stony creek dash and plunge and foam along their rocky channels to where they unite their waters and form th
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CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER II.
Twenty miles up Conemaugh creek, beyond the workingmen’s villages of South Fork and Mineral Point, was Conemaugh lake. It was a part of the old and long disused Pennsylvania Canal system. At the head of Conemaugh creek, back among the hills, three hundred feet or more above the level of Johnstown streets, was a small, natural lake. When the canal was building, the engineers took this lake to supply the western division of the canal which ran from there to Pittsburgh. The Eastern division ended a
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CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER III.
Friday, May 31st, 1889. The day before had been a solemn holiday. In every village veterans of the War for the Union had gathered; in every cemetery flowers had been strewn upon the grave-mounds of the heroic dead. Now the people were resuming the every-day toil. The weather was rainy. It had been wet for some days. Stony Creek and Conemaugh were turbid and noisy. The little South Fork, which ran into the upper end of the lake, was swollen into a raging torrent. The lake was higher than usual; h
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CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER IV.
The course of the torrent from the broken dam at the foot of the lake to Johnstown is almost eighteen miles, and with the exception of one point, the water passed through a narrow V-shaped valley. Four miles below the dam lay the town of South Fork, where the South Fork itself empties into the Conemaugh river. The town contained about 2000 inhabitants. About four-fifths of it has been swept away. Four miles further down on the Conemaugh river, which runs parallel with the main line of the Pennsy
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CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER V.
“Johnstown is annihilated,” telegraphed Superintendent Pitcairn to Pittsburg on Friday night. “He came,” says one who visited the place on Sunday, “very close to the facts of the case. Nothing like it was ever seen in this country. Where long rows of dwelling-houses and business blocks stood forty-eight hours ago, ruin and desolation now reign supreme. Probably 1500 houses have been swept from the face of the earth as completely as if they had never been erected. Main street, from end to end, is
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CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VI.
Mr. William Henry Smith, General Manager of the Associated Press, was a passenger on a railroad train which reached the Conemaugh Valley on the very day of the disaster. He writes as follows of what he saw: “The fast line trains that leave Chicago at quarter past three and Cincinnati at seven P.M. constitute the day-express eastward from Pittsburg, which runs in two sections. This train left Pittsburg on time Friday morning, but was stopped for an hour at Johnstown by reports of a wash-out ahead
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CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VII.
There have been many famous rides in history. Longfellow has celebrated that of Paul Revere. Read has sung of Sheridan’s. John Boyle O’Reilly has commemorated in graceful verse the splendid achievement of Collins Graves, who, when the Williamsburg dam in Massachusetts broke, dashed down the valley on horseback in the van of the flood, warning the people and saving countless lives: There were two such heroes in the Conemaugh Valley. Let their deeds be told and their names held in everlasting hono
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CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER VIII.
Volumes might be written of the sufferings endured and valor exhibited by the survivors of the flood, or of the heart-rending grief with which so many were stricken. At Johnstown an utterly wretched woman named Mrs. Fenn stood by a muddy pool of water trying to find some trace of a once happy home. She was half crazed with grief, and her eyes were red and swollen. As a correspondent stepped to her side she raised her pale, haggard face and remarked: “They are all gone. O God! be merciful to them
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CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER IX.
Many of the most thrilling sights and experiences were those of railroad employees and passengers. Mr. Henry, the engineer of the second section of express train No. 8, which runs between Pittsburg and Altoona, was at Conemaugh when the great flood came sweeping down the valley. He was able to escape to a place of safety. His was the only train that was not injured, even though it was in the midst of the great wave. The story as related by Mr. Henry is most graphic. “It was an awful sight,” he s
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CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER X.
Edward H. Jackson, who worked in the Cambria Iron Works, told the following story: “When we were going to work Friday morning at seven o’clock, May 31st, the water in the river was about six inches below the top of the banks, the rains during the night having swollen it. We were used to floods about this time of the year, the water always washing the streets and running into the cellars, so we did not pay much attention to this fact. It continued rising, and about nine o’clock we left work in or
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CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XI.
The first survivors of the Johnstown wreck who arrived at Pittsburg were Joseph and Henry Lauffer and Lew Dalmeyer. They endured considerable hardship and had several narrow escapes with their lives. Their story of the disaster can best be told in their own language. Joe, the youngest of the Lauffer brothers, said: “My brother and I left on Thursday for Johnstown. The night we arrived there it rained continually, and on Friday morning it began to flood. I started for the Cambria store at a quart
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CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XII.
One of the most thrilling incidents of the disaster was the performance of A. J. Leonard, whose family reside in Morrellville. He was at work, and hearing that his house had been swept away, determined at all hazards to ascertain the fate of his family. The bridges having been carried away, he constructed a temporary raft, and clinging to it as close as a cat to the side of a fence, he pushed his frail craft out in the raging torrent and started on a chase which, to all who were watching, seemed
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CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIII.
It was not “good morning” in Johnstown nor “good night” that passed as a salutation between neighbors who meet for the first time since the deluge but “How many of your folks gone?” It is always “folks,” always “gone.” You heard it everywhere among the crowds that thronged the viaduct and looked down upon the ghastly twenty acres of unburied dead, from which dynamite was making a terrible exhumation of the corpses of two thousand mortals and five hundred houses. You heard it at the rope bridge,
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CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XIV.
The language of pathos is too weak to describe the scenes where the living were searching for their loved and lost ones among the dead. “That’s Emma,” said an old man before one of the bodies. He said it as coolly as though he spoke of his daughter in life, not in death, and as if it were not the fifth dead child of his that he had identified. “Is that you, Mrs. James,” said one woman to another on the foot-bridge over Stony Creek. “Yes, it is, and we are all well,” said Mrs. James. “Oh, have yo
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CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XV.
Five days after the disaster a bird’s-eye view was taken of Johnstown from the top of a precipitous mountain which almost overhangs it. The first thing that impresses the eye, wrote the observer, is the fact that the proportion of the town that remains uninjured is much smaller than it seems to be from lower-down points of view. Besides the part of the town that is utterly wiped out, there are two great swaths cut through that portion which from lower down seems almost uninjured. Beginning at Co
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CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVI.
Travel was resumed up the valley of Conemaugh Creek for a few miles about five days after the flood, and a weird sight was presented to the visitor. No pen can do justice to it, yet some impressions of it must be recorded. Every one has seen the light iron beams, shafts, and rods in a factory lying in twisted, broken, and criss-cross shape after a fire has destroyed the building. In the gap above Johnstown water has picked up a four-track railroad covered with trains, freight, and passengers, an
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CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE DÉBRIS ABOVE THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD BRIDGE. One of the first to reach Johnstown from a distance was a New York World correspondent, who on Sunday wrote as follows:— “I walked late yesterday afternoon from New Florence to a place opposite Johnstown, a distance of four miles. I describe what I actually saw. All along the way bodies were seen lying on the river banks. In one place a woman was half buried in the mud, only a limb showing. In another was a mother with her babe clasped to her br
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CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The first train that passed New Florence, bound east, was crowded with people from Pittsburgh and places along the line, who were going to the scene of the disaster with but little hope of finding their loved ones alive. It was a heart-rending sight. Not a dry eye was in the train. Mothers moaned for their children. Husbands paced the aisles and wrung their hands in mute agony. Fathers pressed their faces against the windows and endeavored to see something, they knew not what, that would tell th
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CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XIX.
RUINS OF THE CAMBRIA IRON WORKS. An interesting story of endeavor was related on Monday by a correspondent of the New York Sun , who made his way to the scene of disaster. This is what he wrote:— Although three days have passed since the disaster, the difficulty of reaching the desolated region is still so great that, under ordinary circumstances, no one would dream of attempting the trip. The Pennsylvania Railroad cannot get within several miles of Johnstown, and it is almost impossible to get
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CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XX.
The experience of the newspaper correspondents in the Conemaugh valley was the experience of a lifetime. Few war correspondents, even, have been witnesses of such appalling scenes of horror and desolation. Day after day they were busy recording the annals of death and despair, conscious, meanwhile, that no expressions of accumulated pathos at their command could do justice to the theme. They had only to stand in the street wherever a knot of men had gathered, to hear countless stories of thrilli
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CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXI.
Where the carcass is, there will the vultures be gathered together. It is humiliating to human nature to record it, but it is nevertheless true, that amid all the suffering and sacrifice, and heroism and generosity that was displayed in this awful time, there arose some of the basest passions of unbridled vice. The lust of gain led many skulking wretches to rob and despoil, and even to mutilate the bodies of the dead. Pockets were searched. Jewels were stolen. Finger-rings and ear-rings were tor
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CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXII.
While yet the first wild cry of anguish was thrilling among the startled hills of the Conemaugh, the great heart of the nation answered it with a mighty throb of sympathy. On Tuesday afternoon, at Washington, the President called a gathering of eminent citizens to devise measures of relief. The meeting was held in Willard’s Hall, on F street, above Fourteenth, and President Harrison made such an eloquent appeal for assistance that nearly $10,000 was raised in the hour and a half that the meeting
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CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Spontaneously as the floods descended upon the fated valley, the American people sprang to the relief of the survivors. In every city and town subscription lists were opened, and clothing and bedding and food were forwarded by the train-load. Managers gave theatrical performances and baseball clubs gave benefit games to swell the fund. The Mayors of New York, Philadelphia and other large cities took personal charge of the collection and forwarding of funds and goods. In New York a meeting of rep
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CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The city of Philadelphia with characteristic generosity began the work of raising a relief fund on the day following the disaster, the Mayor’s office and Drexel’s banking house being the chief centres of receipt. Within four days six hundred thousand dollars was in hand. A most thorough organization and canvass of all trades and branches of business was made under the following committees: Machinery and Iron—George Burnham, Daniel A. Waters, William Sellers, W. B. Bement, Hamilton Disston, Walte
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CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXV.
New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburg were, of course, the three chief centres of charitable contributions, and the sources from which the golden flood of relief was poured into the devastated valley. One of the earliest gifts in New York city was that of $1,200, the proceeds of a collection taken on Sunday morning, June 2d, in the West Presbyterian Church, after an appeal by the Rev. Dr. John R. Paxton, the pastor. The next day a meeting of prominent New York business men was held at the Mayor’
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CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVI.
And now begins the task of burying the dead and caring for the living. It is Wednesday morning. Scarcely has daylight broken before a thousand funerals are in progress on the green hill-sides. There were no hearses, few mourners, and as little solemnity as formality. The majority of the coffins were of rough pine. The pall-bearers were strong ox-teams, and instead of six pall-bearers to one coffin, there were generally six coffins to one-team. Silently the processions moved, and silently they un
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CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Upon a pretty little plateau two hundred feet above the waters of Stony Creek, and directly in front of a slender foot-bridge which leads into Kernsville, stands a group of tents which represents the first effort of any national organization to give material sanitary aid to the unhappy survivors of Johnstown. It is the camp of the American National Association of the Red Cross, and is under the direction of that noble woman, Miss Clara Barton of Washington, the President of the organization in t
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CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
It is now the Thursday after the disaster, and amid the ruins of Johnstown people are beginning to get their wits together. They have quit the aimless wandering about amid the ruins, that marked them for a crushed and despairing people. Everybody is getting to work and forgetting something of the horror of the situation in the necessity of thinking of what they are doing. The deadly silence that has prevailed throughout the town is ended, giving place to the shouts of hundreds of men pulling at
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CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Day after day the work of reparation goes on. The city has been blotted out. Yet the reeking ruins that mark its site are teeming with life and work more vigorous than ever marked its noisy streets and panting factories. As men and money pour into Johnstown the spirit of the town greatly revives, and the people begin to take a much more favorable view of things. The one thing that is troubling people just now is the lack of ready money. There are drafts here in any quantity, but there is no mone
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CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXX.
The first thing that Johnstown people do in the morning is to go to the relief stations and get something to eat. They go carrying big baskets, and their endeavor is to get all they can. There has been a new system every day about the manner of dispensing the food and clothing to the sufferers. At first the supplies were placed where people could help themselves. Then they were placed in yards and handed to people over the fences. Then people had to get orders for what they wanted from the Citiz
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CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXI.
At the end of the week Adjutant-General Hastings moved his headquarters from the signal tower and the Pennsylvania Railroad depot to the eastern end of the Pennsylvania freight depot. Here the general and his staff sleep on the hard floor, with only a blanket under them. They have their work systematized and in good shape, though about all they have done or will do is to prevent strangers and others who have no business here from entering the city. The entire regiment which is here is disposed a
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CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXII.
It is now a week since the flood, and Johnstown is a cross between a military camp and a new mining town, and is getting more so every day. It has all the unpleasant and disagreeable features of both, relieved by the pleasures of neither. Everywhere one goes soldiers are lounging about or standing guard on all roads leading into the city, and stop every one who cannot show a pass. There is a mass of tents down in the centre of the ruins, and others are scattered everywhere on every cleared space
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CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
A mantle of mist hung low over the Conemaugh Valley when the people of Johnstown rose on Sunday morning, June 9th; but about the time the two remaining church bells began to toll, the sun’s rays broke through the fog, and soon the sky was clear save for a few white clouds which sailed lazily to the Alleghenies. Never in the history of Johnstown did congregations attend more impressive church services. Some of them were held in the open air, others in half-ruined buildings, and one only in a chur
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CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
It is characteristic of American hopefulness and energy that before work was fairly begun on clearing away the wreck of the old city, plans were being prepared for the new one that should arise, Phœnix-like, above its grave. If the future policy of the banks and bankers of Johnstown is to be followed by the merchants and manufacturers of the city the prospects of a magnificent city rising from the present ruins are of the brightest. James McMillen, president of the First National and Johnstown S
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CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
Among the travelers who were in or near the Conemaugh Valley at the time of the flood, and who thus narrowly escaped the doom that swallowed up thousands of their fellow-mortals, was Mr. William Henry Smith, General Manager of the Associated Press. He remained there for some time and did valuable work in directing the operations of news-gatherers and in the general labors of relief. The wife and daughter of Mr. E. W. Halford, private secretary to President Harrison, were also there. They made th
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CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
No travelers in an upheaved and disorganized land push through with more pluck and courage than the newspaper correspondents. Accounts have already been given of some of their experiences. A writer in the New York Times thus told of his, a week after the events described: “A man who starts on a journey on ten minutes’ notice likes the journey to be short, with a promise of success and of food and clothes at its end. Starting suddenly a week ago, the Times’s correspondent has since had but a smal
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CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Nor was the life of the correspondents at Johnstown altogether a happy one. The life of a newspaper man is filled with vicissitudes. Sometimes he feeds on the fat of the land, and at others he feeds on air; but as a rule he lives comfortably, and has as much satisfaction in life as other men. It may safely be asserted, however, that such experiences as the special correspondents of Eastern papers have met with in Johnstown are not easily paralleled. When a war correspondent goes on a campaign he
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CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
The storm that filled Conemaugh Lake and burst its bounds also wrought sad havoc elsewhere. Williamsport, Pa., underwent the experience of being flooded with thirty-four feet of water, of having the Susquehanna boom taken out with two hundred million feet of logs, over forty million feet of sawed lumber taken, mills carried away and others wrecked, business and industrial establishments wrecked, and a large number of lives lost. The flood was nearly seven feet higher than the great high water of
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CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
There was terrible destruction to life and property throughout the entire Juniata Valley by the unprecedented flood. Between Tyrone and Lewistown the greatest devastation was seen and especially below Huntingdon at the confluence of the Raystown branch and the Juniata River. During the preceding days of the week the rain-filled clouds swept around the southeast, and on Friday evening met an opposing strata of storm clouds, which resulted in an indescribable down-pour of rain of twelve hours’ dur
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CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XL.
The opening of the month of June will long be remembered with sadness and dismay by thousands of people in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and the two Virginias. In the District of Columbia, too, it was a time of losses and of terror. The northwestern and more fashionable part of Washington, D. C., never looked more lovely than it did on Sunday, but along a good part of the principal business thoroughfare, Pennsylvania avenue, and in the adjacent streets to the southward, there was a dreary was
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