by David DeKok
So it is not hard to understand why people were scared of the proposed dam on Six Mile Creek. Ithaca, somewhat larger than Johnstown, was barely two miles below the dam site, far less than the fourteen miles separating Johnstown from its doom. Johnstown’s dam was shorter, at seventy feet, but much thicker: 265 feet at the base, eighteen feet on top. If such a large dam could give way, what possible assurance could Professor Williams offer that his design was safe? Had they known the truth, that Williams came up with his radical design because Morris and Ithaca Water Works couldn’t afford a more conventional dam, which he confessed to an obscure professional journal in 1904, they might have rioted.8
Williams believed that the narrow gorge where he intended to build the dam was nearly ideal for his design, but he could do nothing to assuage public fears. “Many citizens are opposed to the construction of the dam under any circumstances,” the Ithaca Daily News reported on September 29. “They regard it as a perpetual menace to the lives and the property in the lower sections of the city.” An unidentified Cornell professor told the newspaper that Williams’s design worked on paper but that he would hesitate to trust it. One member of Ithaca Common Council began agitating to have the design examined by an independent third party. Morris told the Ithaca Daily Journal that he had no problem with that proposal provided “a competent engineer” conducted it.9
In the middle of October, with work on the dam already begun, downtown Ithaca businessmen petitioned Common Council to appoint that engineer. They worried that the city was insecure “on account of the great height, length, and comparative thinness of the dam . . . and realizing the vast volume of water that will accumulate and the horrible deluge and the loss of life that must occur in this city by the breaking of that dam.” A letter to the Daily News questioned whether any sane person would “trust to the feeble device of man to avert a calamity which is too horrible to consider.”10 Some people likened Ithaca to St. Pierre, Martinique, which had been wiped out the previous spring by the eruption of Mount Pelée. More than twenty-eight thousand people died. They wondered why the additional water the reservoir would provide was even needed, given the many streams in the region and the vast amount of water in Cayuga Lake.11
The arguments in Ithaca foretold, at least in style, the debate over the construction of nuclear power plants in the 1970s, especially the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. General Public Utilities Corporation, the ultimate owner of that nuclear plant, was the direct corporate descendant of Ithaca Water Works and the rest of William T. Morris’s utility empire. In both eras, in both debates, citizens could not find a way out of the thicket of their fears, and scientists could not admit there was any risk worthy of serious discussion.
In the case of the dam, matters came to a head on the evening of November 6, 1902. Professor Williams appeared at a meeting of Ithaca Common Council and answered questions about the dam for more than two hours. “Throughout he strenuously insisted that the dam will be perfectly safe, and that it will never give way,” the Ithaca Daily Journal reported. Williams scoffed at the idea that another Johnstown disaster would result even if the ninety-foot dam broke. He said that at most, the wave of water would be no more than a foot high by the time it reached downtown Ithaca, and damage would be minimal. Few believed him, just as seventy years later GPU’s nuclear engineers changed few minds among their critics when they insisted that a nuclear core meltdown was impossible at Three Mile Island.
The events of 1979 proved the nuclear brotherhood wrong, but Williams was quite correct. His design for the dam, while radical and scary to the citizens of Ithaca, was brilliant. The threat to Ithaca came not from the dam itself but from the workers imported to build it, and the typhoid they carried.
Although surveying for the dam began within days of the referendum, actual construction did not begin until late September. During the summer of 1902, Ithaca Water Works built a 275-foot tramway for lowering pipes and other supplies to the bottom of the gorge from the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western switchback. Hills were unavoidable obstacles in Ithaca, whether in taking the railroad down to where the city was or in getting supplies to the gorge where the dam would be built. Once the general contract for the work had been awarded to Tucker & Vinton and approximately sixty Italian workers along with a number of striking Pennsylvania anthracite coal miners had been hired, work began to clear trees and brush from what would become the bottom of the mile-long reservoir that would form behind the dam. Once the ground cover was removed, rainwater raced down the hillsides to Six Mile Creek, carrying along dirt and anything small that got in the way.12
By early October, workers were digging into the soft shale at the dam site, getting down to the bedrock on which the dam would rest. Vinton, who was supervising the overall work, hoped to have seventy feet of the ninety-foot dam in place before winter weather suspended construction. He had the Italians working day and night.13 Some workers quit around October 17 to return to their old jobs in the Pennsylvania anthracite mines. A long coal strike had been settled, and the miners were going back to work on October 23.14 Tucker & Vinton hired more Italians to replace them.
About a dozen of the Italians lived in a bunkhouse near the dam, and both the bunkhouse and the outhouse that served it were close to Six Mile Creek. The outhouse, which was also used by the workers who commuted in each day, quickly became filled and foul, based on eyewitness accounts. The workers—as construction workers, soldiers, and anyone who toiled in the outdoors were wont to do in 1902—simply defecated wherever the spirit moved them, often near the stream. It is entirely likely that they washed their hands in the creek afterward. Six Mile Creek, of course, was the source of most of the drinking water that Ithaca Water Works provided to customers. The intake pipe was about a half-mile below the worker camp.
One Sunday in early November, Holmes Hollister, fifty-eight, a planing-mill owner who was a member of the Ithaca Board of Public Works, walked out to the construction site. He was hardly the only Sunday visitor. “Hundreds and hundreds” of men, women, and children, taking advantage of Indian summer weather, turned out on November 2 and 9 to watch the never-ending work on the dam or the turning of the eight large pumps that kept water out of the work pit.15 Some of them managed to drive their carriages close to where the work was being done. But Hollister strolled away from the main work area and was appalled by what he found. About two hundred to three hundred feet below the shanty where the workers lived, “I observed human excretions on the bank and adjacent to the creek in different places from 15–20 feet of the creek bank extending for some distance up and down the creek,” he wrote in a letter to Veranus A. Moore, professor of bacteriology in the Cornell Veterinary School. But the letter was sent much later, during the epidemic. Hollister was concerned enough, though, that the following morning, he went to the office of Dr. Edward Hitchcock Jr., the health officer of the city of Ithaca, to let him know what he had observed.
Hitchcock was the son of Edward Hitchcock Sr., director of the Department of Hygiene and Physical Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts and considered a nineteenth-century pioneer in physical education in colleges. The Hitchcock system made physical and health education mandatory for all Amherst students.16 The younger Hitchcock, who never achieved anything close to his father’s fame, graduated from Amherst in 1878 and from Dartmouth College School of Medicine in 1881. He practiced for a time in the village of Amherst but then was appointed an instructor in physical culture under his father at the college. He taught the same class at Massachusetts Agricultural College [today the University of Massachusetts] before joining the Cornell faculty in 1884. His duties included teaching physical culture and hygiene, running the gymnasium, and acting as the Cornell medical officer. Hitchcock had not had an active medical practice since his early days in Massachusetts.
When Hollister confronted him with the news, Hitchcock displayed the shortsightedness seen too often on the road to catastrophes.
Because the fouled area was outside the Ithaca city limits, Hitchcock proclaimed, he had no jurisdiction. Nor is there any evidence that he raised the issue with Ithaca Water Works.17
Hollister was not the only local resident to witness the ground littered with human excrement along Six Mile Creek near the dam site. Emile M. Chamot, the clean water crusader who was conducting water quality tests under contract to the Ithaca Board of Health, saw the mess around the same time. So did Professor Elias J. Durand, who taught botany at Cornell, and two of his graduate students, Herbert H. Whetzel and James M. Van Hook, who observed the filth on several plant-specimen-collecting hikes through the Six Mile Creek valley. Even Gardner S. Williams, who had designed the dam, admitted in court testimony in 1905 that Six Mile Creek had been “used” by the workers hired to build the dam.18
Tucker & Vinton had agreed in its contract with Ithaca Water Works to provide sanitary facilities for the workers and “so enforce their use, as will preclude the possibility of fecal or other contamination of the water of the creek.” The contract specifically prohibited “committing of nuisances” at or near the work site.19 So why was this not enforced?
The construction firm hired a young Cornell engineering graduate, Shirley Clarke Hulse, to supervise the workers at the dam. Hulse, one of Williams’s former students, graduated from Cornell with a civil engineering degree in 1902, and Williams got him the job. Hulse later claimed that he was always under the direct supervision of his professor at the dam site. From the piles of human excrement observed along Six Mile Creek and overflowing from the single outhouse, it is logical to assume that either Tucker & Vinton had little interest in enforcing sanitation or young Hulse was unable to work his will over the foreign workers. He probably couldn’t speak their language, but he also appears to have been an arrogant upper-class jerk, qualities that would come to the fore during the typhoid epidemic. One has little sympathy for Hulse by the time all is said and done. The consequences of the failure to enforce the contract’s sanitation provisions were too awful to excuse his youth and inexperience, even if the ultimate line of responsibility goes all the way up to Morris.
Cornell University and its president, Jacob Gould Schurman, were at the top of their game in the fall of 1902. Total enrollment at the main campus in Ithaca and the medical school in New York City topped three thousand for the first time. Stimson Hall, which was to house the Ithaca branch of the College of Medicine, had been finished in time for the start of the fall semester. On October 8, speaking to the state convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Schurman announced the location of the new Rockefeller Hall of Physics. And he urged the Board of Trustees to approve the construction of a hall for the arts and humanities to be named after Goldwin Smith, who taught English history at Cornell from 1869 to 1894. Schurman called Smith “the most illustrious exponent of liberal culture who ever sat in the Cornell University.”20
All the buildings, new and old, were to be tied into a grand, new master plan for the campus approved by the Board of Trustees on October 25, about a year after it approved the university’s fateful investment in the bonds of Ithaca Water Works and Ithaca Gas Light Company. The board employed the architectural firm of Carrère and Hastings of New York City, considered one of the best Beaux-Arts architecture firms in the United States. The architects would realign the campus to take advantage of the beautiful views of Cayuga Lake and “the lovely valley toward Newfield.” The master plan was aimed at making the Cornell campus “undoubtedly the grandest in the world.”21
Cornell University in the fall of 1902 had a good, but not great football team that ended its season with an 8-3 record. While the game looked somewhat different—players wore leather helmets and quilted pads that evoked ancient Japanese battle gear—it was no less exciting than it is today. The season’s most anticipated game came on October 18, when Cornell lost at home 10-6 to Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Open from 1879 to 1918, Carlisle was a federal government boarding school for young men and women from Indian tribes in the West. The purpose of the school was to forcibly assimilate Indian children into white culture. The great athlete Jim Thorpe would first make his name as a football player at Carlisle a few years later. The opposing teams were coached by brothers, the immortal Glenn S. “Pop” Warner for Carlisle and Bill Warner for Cornell.22 They were sons of a Union Army captain who had been a wheat farmer in New York but later moved to Oklahoma. Glenn graduated from Cornell in 1894 and coached the football team at the school until 1898. Bill was both a player and a coach—the rule, adopted the previous season, was that the team captain would be the head coach, assisted by three recent graduates.23
Freshman Graham B. Wood went to his first Cornell football game at Percy Field on September 27 when the Big Red opened their season against Colgate University, winning 5-0. He wrote in his diary that it was the first chance he had to let off any yells as a Cornell man. And the songs! “After the game, every mother’s son of a Cornellian rises, doffs his hat, and sings, or does the best singing he can. The tune which evokes such reverential feeling is no other than ‘Alma Mater.’ There is no joking while that is going on. Even the pipes and cigarettes are for a time forgotten. You certainly feel glad that you are in college.”24
By the end of the season, even with losses to Princeton and Carlisle Indian School behind them, Cornell students were as excited as ever about the Big Red team. Andrew Newberry wrote to his mother on November 26, gushing about the excitement of the previous night when the football team departed on a southbound train to its final game, against the University of Pennsylvania. He called the festivities “the grandest ever” and continued:
Our class drew the float by a rope a block long on which every man had a hand. The seniors and juniors marched in front and the ‘frosh’ brought up the rear. Red lights and Roman candles blazed and popped all the way from the Ithaca Hotel to the Lehigh Valley Station. The yelling was immense. . . . After the team went to bed on their car, we came up town and lapped up a few beers, the first time this fall for me.”25
Or so he told his mother. Yet this night of happiness and celebration was also tragic. A young restaurant cook in downtown Ithaca, who could only be a spectator of these college frolics, was caught up in the excitement and climbed to the rooftop of a building across from the Ithaca Hotel, according to Newberry’s letter to his mother. Following the procession, the young man ran across the roof in the darkness and then jumped onto the roof of the adjoining building. But instead of landing on the roof, he crashed through a skylight and fell to his death. The parade did not stop, and probably few knew of the tragedy until the next day. Cornell narrowly lost to Pennsylvania, 12-11, at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.
Workmen that fall finished building the adjoining mansions of Robert H. Treman, Charles E. Treman, and Mynderse Van Cleef. These grand homes were located along University Avenue (today Stewart Avenue) with magnificent views of Cayuga Lake and the valley toward Newfield. William H. Miller, the architect, intended to make the three mansions “symmetrical” and to decorate their grounds with formal gardens. Each would have “a beautiful rolling lawn sloping to the west, and so arranged as to catch the lights and shadows of the afternoon sun.”26 Miller was a member of Chi Phi, a fraternity brother of Morris and Rob Treman.
As much as the Treman brothers and Van Cleef had profited from their connections to Cornell and its students, they did not want the students intruding into their personal lives. On November 18, 1902, the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees approved a “reservation.” In return for a payment of $8,500, or about $219,000 in twenty-first-century dollars, the board agreed to never build any athletic field near the mansions. And for fifty years, no fraternity house or dormitory could be built nearby. The Treman brothers and Van Cleef were members of the Executive Committee and were at the meeting when the “reservation” was approved, as were their good friends Charles H. Blood and Jared Treman Newman. Ther
e is no indication any of them recused themselves from the vote. That was just not how things were done on the Cornell Executive Committee, whether they were helping their friend William T. Morris by investing in Ithaca Water Works or keeping annoyances out of their own lives.27
Work on the Six Mile Creek dam ended for the season in late-November when the weather turned cold and wintry. The Italian workers left the gorge around the middle of the month, although they labored on other projects for Ithaca Water Works. All but a dozen were gone entirely by December 12, and the rest a week later. The U.S. Weather Bureau station on the Cornell campus recorded ten inches of snow on December 4 and 5, the opening salvo to one of the snowiest Decembers in Ithaca memory. Andrew Newberry wrote to his grandfather that he took advantage of the storm by going skiing.28 The snow covered the human excrement along the banks of Six Mile Creek in a thick blanket of white, hiding, freezing and preserving the wickedness it contained.
