Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

by Geoff Williams

  It was a tough call, and ultimately the wrong one, but Mrs. Overmeyer understandably decided that they would remain where they were. The children seemed happy, and they had ample food and water for the time being, and coal for the three stoves that had been moved upstairs, although it was in short supply. The flooding couldn’t continue much longer, and they could revisit the idea of leaving the orphanage in the morning.

  Sometime in the evening, Cincinnati, Ohio

  The Queen City hadn’t seen much flooding, but there was plenty of wind: witness a 22-year-old male whose name, according to the papers, was Valenti Boeh, son of a cafe store owner. One can only wonder what went through his mind in the last moments of his life as he was blown off the street and into the raging waters of the Ohio and Erie Canal.

  7:10 P.M., Makanda, Illinois

  Whether technically part of the storm system affecting the Midwest, Northeast, and parts of the South, or just some additional fun that nature wanted to throw into the mix, a storm with 75-mile-an-hour winds ripped through the village. Almost nonstop lightning kept the sky bright, and a funnel cloud emerged, possibly the seventh or thirteenth tornado, depending, again, on what sources one wants to go with. The wind targeted an Illinois Central freight train with forty-one cars, blowing twenty-one of them off the track and obliterating ten of them, such was the power of this tornado.

  The contents of the train and much of the village spilled onto the track, fields, and roads but were soon washed away by three inches of rain.

  Thirty-nine farmers saw either their house or barn blown to bits, ten people were injured, and three people were killed.

  7:30 P.M., Peru, Indiana

  The flooding didn’t seem all that serious to many people in this town of approximately sixteen thousand, located seventy miles north of Indianapolis and sixty miles southwest of Ft. Wayne. It was probably easy to dismiss something like the weather. The bustling community was on the move, with plenty to distract it. The city had five public schools, several society clubs, a much-admired library, and numerous manufacturing plants. Six rail lines, three electric and three steam, brought goods and passengers into the city. Peru supported three daily newspapers and two weeklies, and in recent years, the community had opened up a city park with electric lights and a bandstand. The fire station had just been modernized in the last year, purchasing two trucks, with pumps that could spray five hundred gallons of water per minute. It was a growing, dynamic city that would soon be covered in muddy river water. The elevenman police force would be tested as never before.

  But on the evening of March 24, Peru residents had no idea what was coming. Nobody could turn to a 24-hour news network to learn that some random people had drowned in communities several hours away and start putting the dots together that this was not an average seasonal flood. There were no radio stations to listen to, although radio technology was making inroads into some levels of society, with the Titanic memorably using their radio room almost a year earlier. Information was dribbling in to the local newspapers, which were preparing issues for the next morning. People could look out their window or get the occasional phone call or telegram to learn what was going on away from their own home.

  The river ambushed Peru in a surprise attack, with the river storming the city all at once, versus gradually coming into the streets. Officials would conclude that part of the reason the river rushed out of its banks was a railroad bridge that had been built too low. Debris piled up, creating a dam that eventually burst, allowing an obscene amount of water to come into the city at full force.

  The water attacked downtown Peru. Clarence Breen, the section foreman for the railroad leading into Peru, was one of the first to see it coming. He didn’t stick around to regard it for long, of course, since he and his crew were too busy running for higher ground. Up until then, the 33-year-old and his men had been clearing the railroad of debris. The storm that had come through the day before, part of the tempest that hit Omaha, Nebraska, littered the tracks with ripped-off barn roofs, fragments of horse-drawn buggies, and, mostly, downed tree branches. Breen and his crew had spent much of Sunday night and Monday tending to this task.

  But then, after the dam at the bridge broke apart, Breen’s job instantly became impossible. From out of nowhere, the water from the 500-mile-plus Wabash River, which passes directly through downtown, covered the tracks of the Lake Erie & Western railroad and then invaded Peru.

  Breen and his crew spent the rest of their evening trying to warn the town of what was coming.

  Some people didn’t need to be told. When the dam broke, the fire whistle blew, alerting residents that trouble was coming; but they were already clued in, since the lights immediately died. Glenn Kessler, a visitor to Peru from northern Indiana staying with a cousin, told the paper later that he had just finished dinner, and that he, along with everyone else, it seemed, went outside after the power went out. It was dark and raining, making it impossible to see and hear what was coming.

  Once it did, it swirled around his ankles. Kessler rushed back to his cousin, and by the time he found her in the darkened house, the water was at their waists. Neighbors were crying and screaming. Gunshots punctured the air as a warning to others, and in the din, Kessler and his cousin could hear people shouting “To the courthouse! To the courthouse!” which was seven blocks away from the river, and it was a building plenty sturdy enough to withstand whatever the river had to offer. The courthouse was made of oolitic limestone, mined in Oolitic, Indiana, which twenty years later would provide the limestone for the Empire State Building. More importantly, the courthouse was one of the most modern buildings in the state of Indiana—only two years old—and it was three stories high. It was one of the few places in the city people could be reasonably sure of being safe.

  Half running and swimming, Kessler and his cousin floundered their way to the courthouse, the sanctuary for the beleaguered and drenched. It was also the destination for resident Alexander Clevenger, who carried each of his children and then his wife on his back through water waist-deep from their home to the Miami County courthouse. After that, he found a rowboat and rescued a neighbor and her baby.

  But then if Clevenger hadn’t completely figured out what his town was dealing with, he knew now. A telephone pole came crashing down onto the boat, crushing it into oblivion. When he emerged from under the freezing water, gasping for air, Clevenger saved the mother, who had grabbed some wires to help her stay afloat. But her baby—in the crashing of the telephone pole, the confusion, the cold water—could not be found.

  Many residents inland had no comprehension of what was happening to their community. The river had overflowed its banks before, coming up as far as five blocks in from the water and hitting Fifth Street. But since it wasn’t yet at Fifth Street, everyone from Sixth Street, especially those with second stories to retreat to in an emergency, didn’t see much reason to panic.

  Oblivious to the idea that they were facing something unprecedented, many families went to bed, unaware that the waters were rising six inches every hour.

  There was a reason many Peru residents—and people throughout Indiana, Ohio, and other states—were not terribly concerned about the rain over the past three days. Flooding was terribly common, as it had been throughout the nation’s history.

  It was common throughout world history, actually. Europe had had ample floods in its past, one of the most famous being in 1236 when the Thames River overflowed into the Palace of Westminster. Palace and rescue workers wound up steering their boats through the halls. On December 14, 1287, a dike broke in a storm in the Netherlands and Germany, and the resulting flood killed ten thousand, and a similar incident happened again in the Netherlands on the night of November 18, 1421. Millions of people around the world since the days of the Ice Age have come to a miserable end due to flooding.

  But in the United States, as early as 1726, French residents built a levee made of earth six feet high and a mile long near the opening of the Mississippi R
iver for protection.* Israel Ludlow, the founder of Dayton, Ohio, which bore the worst that the Great Flood of 1913 had to offer, was—according to local legend—warned in 1796 by the few remaining Indians about the floods. But Ludlow ignored their warnings. Consequently, the city of Dayton had its first serious flood—on record—in March 1805. Thawing deep snows and heavy rains were to blame for the flood, which covered most of the town except for a part of the business center. Townspeople considered moving their downtown to higher ground but decided against it. The next big flood came in 1814, where it was deep enough that a horse could swim in the streets. Yet another tempest came on January 8, 1828, when a warehouse was washed away from the front of Wilkinson Street and the southern part of the city was submerged. And another arrived on January 2, 1847, in which the entire town was covered with water, although it wasn’t as deep as it had been back in 1805. September 17, 1866, brought a fairly deep flood—it was four inches deep on the floor of the Phillips Hotel, and there was $250,000 in damage, a pretty serious blow considering there were only fifteen thousand residents in the city and that $250,000 in today’s dollars would be $3.6 million.

  More flooding hit Dayton in 1883 and then in 1896, during the centennial anniversary of the city, historian Mary Davies Steele wrote about the flooding her community had seen. “Some of us can remember how certain aged pioneers used to upbraid the founders of the town for putting it down in a hollow, instead of on the hills to the southeast, and expatiate on the folly which the people were guilty of in voting against the removal, after the terrible freshet of 1805, to high ground,” Davies wrote. “‘Someday there will be a flood which will sweep Dayton out of existence,’ those ancient men and women used to prophesy to their grandchildren.”

  Steele, in her mid fifties, would not live to see the 1913 flood. She passed away in February 1897, a year of a big flood in Dayton, followed by a worse flood in 1898, which was especially grim. Six more inches, and it would have gone over the levee.

  But, of course, it didn’t overflow the levee, and that was the problem for the people of 1913. As communities grew and built businesses literally along the riverbank, every generation could look back to floods of the past, and as long as it only affected a minority of the people who lived or worked along the riverbanks, or was a close call, a flood could seem not all that threatening. It might even almost appear amusing and certainly interesting as a work of Mother Nature—especially if you lived far enough from the river.

  But for the unlucky soul who didn’t take floods seriously, or simply showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time, the power of water was fatally evident, and it certainly wasn’t only Dayton that repeatedly found itself threatened by flooding. In 1913, anyone eighty and over who happened to live in Philadelphia would have remembered the serious flood the city had had in 1843. One paper during the time, after telling of bridges being destroyed, brick houses being knocked down, and pigs struggling in the current, reported that two young men, Russell Flounders and Josiah Benting, had been killed in the flood.

  “It is supposed that they were crushed by the bridge, as a portion of its materials were seen to roll over onto them as they were engulfed in the flood,” reported the Adams Sentinel, of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “Their bodies were never found.”

  The paper went on to say that a house had been carried off, and a Mrs. Julia Nowlin and her four children had been drowned.

  During the early days of the Civil War, in November 1861, a Union captain from Pennsylvania, and some members of a New York regiment, discovered five bodies floating down the Potomac after some heavy flooding. Two were a husband and wife and a third a private from Massachusetts, named either Bumford or Burford, of Company K, Fifteenth Massachusetts Volunteers, judging from the soggy identification papers. Those weren’t the only items Bumford—or Burford—had in his possession. Newspaper editors and reporters, either feeling it was important information or believing readers curious and gossipy, always seemed to go out of their way to report what contents were in the pockets of flood victims. Bumford—or Burford—had in his possession a medallion and $25 in gold.

  Mark Twain, who died three years before the Great Flood of 1913, wrote about the flood of 1882 in his book Life on the Mississippi, saying about it: “It put all the unprotected low lands under water from Cairo to the mouth; it broke down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river; and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the Mississippi was seventy miles wide! A number of lives were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful.”

  The Johnstown flood of 1889 also highlights how common flooding was, in that at least a couple of its survivors went on to experience the Great Flood of 1913. The New Castle News of New Castle, Pennsylvania, reported that a Mildred Abel, who lived in Johnstown at the time of the flood, also was stuck in her surrounded, flooding home in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, for two weeks in 1908, and then once again was trapped in her house in New Castle, Pennsylvania, during the 1913 flood. And according to the Columbus Citizen-Journal, a Mr. and Mrs. C. M. Sipes* were living in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 when they lost everything. In Columbus, Ohio in 1913, they would lose everything yet again, becoming some of the more unlucky people in history. On the other hand, considering that they lived to tell the tale of surviving major floods twice, they might also be considered some of the luckiest.

  The Flood of 1898 was memorable as well. Richmond, Indiana lost a bridge. Middletown, Ohio saw its nearby Great Miami River, normally about four hundred feet wide, stretch out a mile wide. In nearby Hamilton, Ohio, where every boat in the city was pegged as a rescue boat, seven people died, including a mother and three young daughters. In Columbus, the flood took out the water pumping system, denying people fresh water and flooding homes, some businesses, and the local asylum.

  And in Creekside, Pennsylvania, on March 23, 1898, Martin Fisher tried to set an example of what it means to be a good citizen—or, if you’d rather, people who hate the idea of serving on jury duty can point to him as an example that there may be something to their complaints. Fisher, a postmaster and merchant, not to mention a father and husband and provider to his aging mother, was determined to do his duty and get to the courthouse in Indiana, Pennsylvania, despite rain and severe flooding.

  There was some water in front of the bridge, but not much, and Fisher, in his horse and buggy, believed—surely like other drivers had before him and many more would later in their cars—that he could traverse a little water without any problems. It must be a quirk of human nature. We as a people become so wrapped up in our day-to-day issues, like trying to get to jury duty or reach a friend’s house, that we minimize the danger in front of us. Fisher, like so many people before him and after, surveyed the swollen river and decided he was perfectly capable of crossing it.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t know that underneath the water there was a ditch waiting for him. His horse and buggy waded in fine, but then the wheels got stuck and the buggy pitched forward, throwing Fisher out. Several bystanders attempted to save Fisher, who was able to stay afloat long enough to scream for help. One man ran to grab a boat but couldn’t lift it over a fence, and two men unsuccessfully attempted to throw out a rope to Fisher.

  There was the will but not a way to save him. Weighted down in his overcoat and shoes, Fisher drowned and was washed away.

  The next day, the village authorities found his body stuck in the willows. In Fisher’s possession, the Indiana Weekly Messenger couldn’t help noting, were a watch and a pocketbook containing almost a hundred dollars. Yet his sad story would prove to be repeated again and again and the lesson of not trying to ford the water went unheeded in the years to come.

  * For those who are not familiar with dam terminology, a levee is a dam, but a dam is not a levee. A levee is generally an earthen dam, not damming up and stopping the water altogether, but built alongside the riverbank, with a high wall designed to keep the river inside the riverbed. Conversely, a dam like the Hoover
dam stops a river altogether at one end.

  * C. M. Sipes was possibly house painter Charles M. Sipes and his wife Stella, who were both born in Pennsylvania, according to 1910 census records.

  Chapter Four

  The Long Rain

  March 25, Tuesday

  In the wake of a homicide, a police officer or detective searches for a murderer by trying to discover a motive for taking out a person’s life, determining if the killer has an alibi and hunting for clues that prove beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt who did it. In other words, there are many elements factored into solving a murder mystery.

  In the same way, city officials, scientists, and the public at large started looking for causes for the flood right away, especially in its aftermath, and, as it would turn out, rain wasn’t the only culprit. Far from it. Mankind shares the blame as well.

  Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, railroads built their tracks near the water without permits or supervision or consideration that perhaps at some point, these tracks will be underwater. Construction crews built their buildings right up to the water’s edge, their foundations resting on nothing but silt and sand. Mini-dams and blockades were being created all the time, so that after a heavy downpour or even a light rain, mini-floods were constantly being created.