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

by Geoff Williams

  Charles wanted to get a shot of a boat that someone had already brought up and was passing by his house. He took his picture—which did not survive to today—and then he and Ottie realized that getting back to the house would be almost impossible.

  But they did reach it by walking down another street, knee-deep in the water on the sidewalk, and, while Ottie waited behind, Charles scaled a wall against his back yard, wading through the water, and reached his house. The back door was locked, and so Charles raced around to the front and hurriedly packed an assortment of provisions into a basket. He was looking around for what else he might take when he noticed water coming onto the kitchen floor.

  Charles made haste for the back door.

  Charles was wading through his back yard for the wall when he heard one of his neighbors, Mr. Bach, shouting for him from an upstairs window. Mr. Bach needed help bringing out his wife, who couldn’t walk. Charles shouted for him to bring her down, and he and his uncle would help. The water wasn’t too deep in the back yard yet, and Charles, Mr. Bach, and Uncle Ottie carried Mrs. Bach to the wall and managed to get her over it and into a nearby apartment building.

  Then Uncle Ottie and Charles made their way to Warder Street, where Viola, the twins, Grandpa Adams, and a slew of others were no doubt anxiously waiting for them. But on their way, they saw their first real glimpse of what they might be in for. As they climbed the sidewalk toward Warder, rivulets of water racing under their feet and along the road, they looked back and could see, on Rung Street, a young man hanging from a gas light post. He looked exhausted, as if he couldn’t hold on much longer, and was shouting for help. A man in a boat tried to reach him but couldn’t; a second boat made the attempt, and the young man, whose grip on the wet metal post was loosening, literally fell into the boat just as his hands couldn’t hang on any longer. Charles and Ottie, relieved, hurried up the hill and hoped that their quota for danger and excitement had just been filled.

  They could not have been more wrong.

  * The nation was still 35 years away from the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments of 1948, the federal government’s first stab at trying to give the public clean water to drink, bathe, and cook their food in.

  * Often called John A. Bell in the press, probably because his friends and family called him by his middle name, John.

  * The entire state of Ohio is 40,000 square miles, far more than the 8,000 square miles mentioned, and Montgomery County, where Dayton is, is approximately 460 square miles, far less than the 8,000 square miles mentioned, so it’s not entirely clear what land mass the bureau was looking at, but it is still clear that the rainfall was unprecedented.

  Chapter Five

  A Time to Run

  Dayton, 8:30 A.M.

  The river could not be contained. Some people said that a 350-foot section of the levee broke free, and others said that a five-foot wave of water simply went over the side. Either way, a wave of water, anywhere from five to ten feet high, crested over the levee and then rushed down Third Street, spilling through Perry, Wilkinson, and Ludlow streets. About the same time, the water stormed over the levee and shot down N. Jefferson Street. Before long, nearly all of the roads in downtown Dayton were waterlogged.

  As soon as the levee broke, someone at a fire station on Taylor Street pulled the fire whistle. Edsy Vincent, one of Dayton’s firefighters, went out on call the moment it sounded. He and a driver hitched their team of horses faster than they ever had before and set off at a gallop. They were met by a wall of water at least ten feet high. The driver turned the horses around and searched for higher ground at full gallop. Somehow they did and avoided becoming a statistic of the flood.

  But there was a house on Taylor Street that was directly in the path of the ten-foot-high wave, and the residents couldn’t avoid it. C. R. Meyer, an employee at the National Cash Register Company, saw a woman and daughter in the second story window, there one minute, and gone the next. Meyer didn’t stick around to watch more. He was too busy running for his life.

  At an upscale, three-story 150-room hotel known as the Beckel House, populated by professionals and some transplants who lived there indefinitely, was Walter D. Jones, a lifelong resident of the nearby city of Piqua and common pleas judge for the Second Judicial District of Ohio. He was an overnight guest after having held court in the town of Greenville. He stepped out of the hotel lobby and into the rain. It was then that he saw water rushing down Jefferson Street. Still, it didn’t look dangerous; at first, he thought someone had opened a fire hydrant.

  But as the water began to spill over the curb on the sidewalk, Jones went back into the Beckel House and told the clerk that, you know what, he would keep his room a little longer.

  The 56-year-old judge trudged up the stairs because the elevator wasn’t running, intending to leave his satchel and coat in the room and then return to watch the scene unfold outside. Then he thought better of it and went to watch out the rain-beaten window instead.

  He was astonished. It looked like the Atlantic Ocean had suddenly moved inland several states; that is, if the Atlantic Ocean had been a muddy river. But before he had a chance to really digest what he was looking at, there was a crashing sound, the floor shook, and plaster fell into his hair. He could hear women screaming from the nearby rooms.

  Jones rushed for his door, but it wouldn’t open. He heard men shouting in the hall, and so he called for them to throw their weight against the door. They did, and Jones got out. Someone screamed “Fire,” but a guest or hotel worker quickly silenced that person. Walls were cracking and plaster continuing to fall. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t good. Jones and the others ran down the stairs, to get their bearings and figure out what was happening.

  Meanwhile, guests who were in the lobby were running upstairs. They at first hadn’t understood that their city was flooding, even when the water came into the lobby, although some people instinctively started running for the stairs. It was only when the northeast corner of the building caved in, causing a racket, a cloud of dust and debris, and scaring the hell out of everyone, that the guests recognized that they had a problem that wasn’t going to go away any time soon.

  It was an eclectic group. There was Judge Jones and a fellow judge from Piqua, Squire W. T. Marshall. Melville N. Shreves, a 26-year-old office supplies salesman from Lima, Ohio, later noted that after the caving in, some of the women were screaming and hysterical, but who could blame them, or anyone, for that?*

  There was also present a traveling theatrical troupe, actors, a crew and the director, all putting on George M. Cohan and his partner-producer Sam Harris’s farce, Officer 666. The actors were supposed to perform that night at the Victoria Theatre. With the playhouse in the middle of the flood district, that would no longer be happening, however. Not that this likely concerned them, with everyone worried about getting out of the hotel and escaping with their lives; the phrase “break a leg” now had an entirely different meaning. Later that day, in New York City, Cohan and Harris’s executives—whether that was Cohan and Harris themselves, or their staff, is anyone’s guess—tried to contact the Beckel House to see how their actors were faring but, like anyone across the country worried about friends, family, and colleagues in Dayton, couldn’t get through to the city.

  Another person who stood out was the 57-year-old owner of the Beckel House, Clarence E. Bennett. He was ill—had been for some time, although what his malady was isn’t clear—and if the staff and guests were to leave the building, as people were beginning to discuss, they would have to take the bedridden owner with them.

  For now, the Beckel House guests were simply glad to be inside. Looking outside, they saw madness. Later, Dayton and Springfield, Ohio’s papers would run excerpts of a journal written by a traveling salesman, C. C. McDowell, who was staying at the Beckel House. As McDowell remembered the first few minutes of the flood, “Everyone began scurrying to places of safety. People dodged into doorways and onto anything that was higher than the stree
t. Everything loose began to float down the streets; horses were washed off their feet and wagons were overturned.… Great blocks of pavement on Third Street were torn up, many of them being 15 feet square. Plate glass store fronts were broken by the force of the water, which rushed down the street with the fury of a mill race on a rampage,” McDowell observed, referring to a stream of water that runs to and from a mill.

  “Everywhere was a scurry for safety,” McDowell continued. “Horses were unhitched and taken into buildings.”

  In the Algonquin Hotel, debris quickly started piling up at the front door. A bellboy named Johnny Flynn tried to dislodge it, evidently fearing the door would be crushed and not considering that maybe the first floor of the hotel was beyond saving. Flynn opened the door and was clobbered by a wave of water that rushed inside and swept down the street.

  Three streetcars stalled in front of the Algonquin Hotel, and the perplexed passengers struggled to decide whether to run or stay put. Seconds later, they realized they had no choice and began climbing onto the seats and then to the roof of the cars. Someone in a building across from the Algonquin threw a rope to one of the passengers, who tied it onto the streetcar, and everyone was able to use the rope to pass through the rushing water in relative safety and reach the building.

  Not that going through the water was safe. Automobiles, pianos, furniture, garbage—it was all speeding through the street.

  Boxcars were knocked over on their sides, and one was carried part of the way up a side street. Cattle in two boxcars met a terrible end. The force of the water meant that anything not bolted down to the ground and plenty of items that were, from trees to railroad ties, telegraph poles, furniture and cars, wires, and cables, was being carried down the streets.

  One block from the Algonquin Hotel was the Phillips House, a luxury hotel that had opened in 1850, where Adam Harnisch, of Syracuse, New York, was staying. Harnisch was in a shoe store across the street when the water came rushing into the street. He ran across the street to the Phillips House and seconds later saw a young man—possibly the bellboy Flynn—carried down the street.

  If it was Flynn, he was carried by the current into the middle of the street, where a whirlpool of muddy water was forming. He managed to stand up, the water only up to his knees, but the currents were colliding, making it impossible for him to push his way through the water, and as if that wasn’t enough, rain was pounding him. A young man, a bystander, trying to stretch out an arm and pull him out of the mess, became caught in the whirlpool as well. Harnisch watched all of this from a window or door, terrified, as a police officer, clinging to a lamp post, attempted to stretch a leather strap toward the young men. But it wasn’t anywhere near long enough to do any good.

  Moments later, both men were gone. Harnisch never learned what had happened to the young man who tried to save Flynn’s life, but he suspected that he was killed. Johnny Flynn’s body was later found smashed against a tree.

  Harnisch didn’t have much time to process what he saw. The walls of the hotel lobby caved in, almost taking out the news and cigar dealer, who somehow managed to scramble to his feet and get to a higher floor.

  Harnisch did, too.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He couldn’t be sure yet, but Mr. Harnisch, who like a handful of others had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, believed he was experiencing something worse than another similar disaster he had survived: the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood.

  On another street in downtown Dayton, Ray Stansbury, a nineteenyear-old foundry worker at NCR, immediately rushed into the water and started offering to carry women and children from their rickety homes to somewhere safer. He was six foot four, and, at 218 pounds, his physicality instilled a lot of confidence in people. If the numbers reported were accurate, 150 women and children that morning would take him up on his offer.

  On the other side of the Great Miami River, in Riverdale, Charles Adams and Uncle Ottie—or more formally, W. Otterbein Fries—reached the house on Warder Street where a whole host of family was anxiously waiting for them, including his Aunt Fannie, Grandpa Adams, Viola and the twin babies as well as Ottie and Fannie’s son, Emerson, and his wife, Mary.

  Mary was anxious about her parents, who lived in the lower part of Riverdale, and so shortly after Charles and Ottie arrived, Emerson decided to embark by boat and check on them. Charles and Ottie urged him not to—they had seen firsthand what was out there, and to go down to lower Riverdale was to go into the worst of the flood waters and perhaps never come out. But Emerson insisted, joining river-flooded streets that already had quite a few rescuers on them, like Frank A. Schleeman, a barber who worked on the NCR premises. As soon as the river rushed into Riverdale, Schleeman grabbed a boat and, pairing up with a police officer, started rowing up to houses and offering to take people to safer ground.

  Another person caught up in the flood was Harold E. Talbott, a 25-year-old whose father was a prominent engineer in the city. Talbott himself was on his way up in life, with his own contracting business. He was driving to it when he found that Fifth Street was under water and horses and garbage were floating past. He turned his car around and drove toward a planing mill,* an idea already coming to him to order some boats to rescue the numerous people he imagined would need help. But before he could get there, the water rose around his car, rising three to four feet. His car sputtered to a stop, and several men—running away from the water—were nice enough to help him push it to higher ground.

  Soaked from chin to shin, Talbott made his way to the National Cash Register Company to discuss the situation with Patterson, who knew the young man and his father, Edward Deeds; and after a quick conversation, they agreed. Talbott’s instincts—to have some boats made to begin rescue operations—were right on the mark with what Patterson was thinking, and both men believed that the city was on the cusp of a serious flood. While it’s impossible to know what exactly was in their minds and hearts, Patterson and Deeds, like so many business leaders then and now, were plugged in to their community and presumably cared deeply about their city. They knew that if they didn’t get moving, many people were going to die.

  Patterson gave young Talbott full command of his carpentry department, where the men were ordered to start building rowboats immediately. The crew in the cafeteria, it was eventually decided, should start baking two thousand loaves of bread and cook hundreds of gallons of soup. Patterson also ordered that as many cots and beds as possible should be set up for the refugees who he was certain would soon be coming. He also ordered twenty men on horseback to collect as much food, bedding, clothing and emergency supplies from farming communities in the south as possible. Not all of these orders were issued right away, except for the boats; some of the commands would go out later in the day and days to come. Patterson was starting to morph his company into a rescue and relief command center for Dayton, but he didn’t really know that yet.

  Still, if Noah of Noah’s Ark fame had been around to comment, he would have been proud of Patterson and Talbott’s boat-making abilities. Before the day was up, Talbott’s operation would make 167 boats with four oars. They were “cranky” and really only safe “for use only in comparatively still water,” the engineer Arthur Ernest Morgan would write later, adding, “but there is no doubt that many people owe their lives to them.”

  Sometime in the morning, Indianapolis

  Mischa Elman, a 22-year-old Russian-born American violinist who is still considered one of the best violinists in history, realized that something was amiss Tuesday morning when the bathroom water at the luxurious Claypool Hotel stopped working, and he couldn’t turn on the electric lights.* The elevators had stopped running as well. Elman had performed in Indianapolis the night before with Rudolph Ganz, a Swiss pianist. As Elman, Ganz, their unnamed accompanist, and all of the hotel guests would soon learn, they wouldn’t be leaving the city anytime soon: for miles, east, west, north, and south, every river, stream, creek, brook, lake, and p
ond was flooding.

  Sometime in the morning, New Castle, Pennsylvania

  City officials were still guardedly watching the rivers and blissfully unaware of what was occurring in the state to the west of them. The rain was intermittent now, but when it came, it came down hard, and the Shenango River had risen right up to the Erie Railroad tracks. Nobody could remember seeing that before.

  Columbus, Ohio, 8:30 A.M.

  The police department was overwhelmed. For hours, they had been rescuing individuals and families as fast as they could, including one man in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t get officers out to houses fast enough. A little boy with a small dog under his arm pleaded for someone to save his sick mother trapped at their house. A little girl was in tears, begging that a boat be sent out to her mother’s home. There were many situations just waiting to become tragedies.

  At least one officer manning a boat found himself on the Scioto River in pursuit of a floating boxcar with two hoboes on it. He helped the two men into his river vessel just before the car submerged. Around this time was another frustrating report, this one concerning the body of a male that had been seen floating down the river. Police officers located the body and tried a variety of methods to catch up to it and bring it in—presumably using boats and lassoing ropes—but they couldn’t reach him.