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

by Geoff Williams

  The water was going to come into the house whether the doors and windows were shut or not. Boarding the house and making it watertight was not only extremely difficult and virtually impossible, it actually just increased the odds that the river would eventually push the house out of its way. By opening everything up, the river could come into the house and—with any luck—let it stay put. The hole in the ceiling meant that if the water rose higher than the first floor, it would continue to have somewhere to go, rather than pushing against the ceiling and eventually destroying the floorboards of the second floor.

  That was the scenario at the Zang family in Hamilton, Ohio. Sixty years after the flood, Marie Zang Barnhorn recalled that her father first opened the cellar door so the water would run through the house and not push it off the foundation.

  “When the water came up to the second floor, Pop punched a hole in the ceiling, and we climbed up and sat on the rafters,” said Zang. “He took the doors off and put them up there so we wouldn’t fall through.”

  Marie and her family were quite comfortable at first. Her mother had already been cooking dinner that morning when they decided to retreat upstairs, and they brought up sauerkraut, potatoes, and pork. It was a feast, but it would be their only food for the next forty-eight hours.

  Another strategy that Fred Zang employed was that he hung out the second-story window and kicked logs away from the house, so they wouldn’t build up and eventually knock the house off the foundation. One can’t argue with Zang’s strategy. His family lived through the flood; two neighbors on the same street drowned in their own homes.

  Bill Thompson, then six years old, wrote about the experience of being in the flood in Hamilton, Ohio for his company’s newsletter in 1959. His family could see a suspension bridge washed away from their home and much more.

  “We saw houses and sheds floating down the river,” Thompson wrote. “Neighboring houses were broken away as the water kept coming with added depth and speed. As the water began seeping through our second floor, we moved to the attic, using doors across rafters for beds.”

  Eventually, a floating house leaned against the Thompson home, which turned out to be a good thing. It broke the current. “Folks from that dwelling and another broke through their roofs and climbed through a hole made in our roof,” wrote Thompson. “There were about thirty-five praying souls in the same attic by crest time. That crest found the water half way up to the second story windows.”

  It took persistence and patience to thwart the flood. Another Hamilton resident, Clara Clements, wife of a police detective, would have been on the force herself if this had been another era. She was certainly innovative. Five people, including Mrs. Clements, were upstairs in her and her husband’s house, and everyone wanted to escape to the neighbor’s house. Eugene Mueller’s home seemed far sturdier.

  Clara Clements came up with the idea of folding a large carpet into three thicknesses. Then she and her group inserted long poles and, with the Muellers on the other side helping, stretched the carpet bridge over the fifteen-foot gap. Everyone nailed the carpet to the roof on both sides, and Clara and the others safely crossed over.

  George Timmerman, the Dayton moulder who was assured by his neighbors that a little ankle-deep water didn’t mean a thing, found himself on the second floor of a house when the flood wall came. He was in a neighbor’s house, a house he had never been in, seeking refuge with a mother and three children.* Within about an hour, as the water climbed higher, they retreated to the attic, shouting for help. Within about another hour, a rescuer came in a boat. It wasn’t easy, and escaping the flood took some initiative and a lot of luck, but a lot of people did it.

  That was hardly the end of Timmerman and company’s ordeal; rather, it was just the beginning. The rescuer had trouble steering the boat in the current, which wasn’t just fast-moving water but a soup of wagons and buggies, dead horses, dead bodies, and driftwood. For a while, Timmerman was sure he, the family of four, and the rescuer would all capsize. But the rescuer steered Timmerman, the mother, and the kids near the top of a porch. They climbed onto that and bid farewell to the rescuer, who felt he could manage the boat, especially now that it was lighter.

  Timmerman, the mother, and the children scurried into the attic of someone’s abandoned home in an apartment building. It seemed safe enough for the moment, and they even managed to find some food to eat, so they were at least in good company. All of the surrounding homes had people in them, including the building across the street, the one with the sign O. G. Saettel’s. For the moment, they decided they would sit put and wait out the flood. Not that they had much choice.

  12:12 P.M., Hamilton, Ohio

  The Black Street Bridge was the first bridge in the city to collapse. About three minutes later, the High Street Bridge, with high school student J. Walter Wack watching, buckled against the current and the pressing mountain of debris, which was now pinned against the bridge. Then the wires on the bridge began to snap.

  “Everyone ran like hell,” recalled Wack, himself making tracks for his house.

  Elizabeth Hensley Hand, in 1988, told her local paper, “I remember seeing houses floating down the river with people on the roofs waving white sheets for help. Some of the houses hit the bridges and shattered. Horses were floating downstream, trying to swim, but drowning, too.” Seventy-five years later, Mrs. Hand said, she would think about the flood and still cry.

  As resident and jewelry store owner Raymond McComb would write his father: “The water came right through the business section of town, sweeping houses and barns, horses and cows right through High Street.”

  The Great Miami River swamped McComb’s store in turn, knocking over his displays, invading his safe, and destroying the contents.

  12:28 P.M., Hamilton, Ohio

  A second bridge went down.

  In the midst of the chaos, councilman, concerned citizen, and man with possible extrasensory perception J. Henry Welsh, still in the midst of warning people, hadn’t heeded his own advice. He found himself caught in the flood despite being quite a bit inland at Tenth and High Streets and had to swim to a place of safety.

  Middletown, Ohio, afternoon

  Middletown’s residents, hearing about what was happening up north and warily watching the river, anticipated what was to come.

  Daniel Snider, the city’s local Ford dealer who proudly displayed his five new Model-T cars in West Middletown, carefully jacked up his five cars a foot off the ground and put the cars in a coal shed. The 36-year-old Snider tied the shed to a tree, fully believing that at the most, the shed might wind up being a few inches deep in water. He then went to join his wife, Mae, and their three-year-old daughter, at the house, which he also assumed was free and clear of the river.

  The tree was destroyed, or perhaps the rope broke, but, some way or the other, the shed sailed down the river. Snider later retrieved his cars, but they were in no condition to drive.* Snider miscalculated on a number of things that day, but he was the only one in the area who had the foresight to own a boat. His parents always owned one and insisted their son did, too, “just in case,” they said. Daniel’s dad was in the business of making wagons but understood the value of a good boat when living near a river.

  When the Great Miami River spilled into West Middletown, Snider made the rounds to houses in his canoe, passing by their second-story windows and taking families to dry land to a home owned by a family named Childs, who must have lived on a hill, for their residence was becoming something of a relief station. But Snider was so busy working to save his neighbors that he almost forgot or couldn’t reach his own wife and three-year-old daughter. By the time he arrived at his own house, he was able to paddle through the front door and up to the stairway, where Mae and his daughter were anxiously waiting.

  1 P.M., Hornell, New York

  Although Ohio and Indiana were suffering the most from the flood, parts of western New York were now seeing their waterways overflowing to dangerous levels.
The Canisteo River overflowed its banks north of Hornell, and two hours later, Canacadea Creek, which flows through the city, also left its channel. The waters wouldn’t destroy the town or region to the level of what was happening along the Miami River, but one unlucky fellow by the name of Eugene Porter, a farmer on the aptly named Big Creek Road, was surprised by the current and lost his life.

  Sometime in the afternoon, New Castle, Pennsylvania

  Neshannock Creek, which connects up to the Shenango River in New Castle, remained in its bed. The hundred-mile-long Shenango River, however, began slowly making its way across the main streets of New Castle.

  The police force fanned out across the city where they could, helping residents flee to higher ground. Still, the community functioned mostly as normal. School was in session all day. Most people retained power. There seemed to be no reason to fret yet.

  Dayton, afternoon

  Slowly but surely, John H. Patterson found himself running a rescue center instead of a cash register manufacturing business.

  His company’s thirty-one cars were being utilized wherever possible throughout the city; and while seven square miles of Dayton was underwater, there were ample rolling hills where cars were able to carry passengers away from the flooding and to shelters. His boats were in high demand as well, and the NCR headquarters atop a hill on Wyoming Street were perfectly situated as a rescue hub. It was already a city landmark, and so word of mouth spread. If you were in trouble, come here.

  Some people followed the telephone cables leading up to the campus of office buildings. As was the case around the city, there were often six, eight, or more telephone wires, strung out so that one could literally grab hold of a wire, plant their feet on another, and very carefully walk across the telephone wires. It wasn’t terribly dangerous, as long as you didn’t fall into the still-rushing current below, or happen to touch a damaged wire.

  Realizing that this was going to be the mode of transportation du jour, some telephone linemen climbed up to the cables, carrying tow ropes that were attached to flat-bottomed boats. Their plan was that people could paddle their way up to dry land, knowing that they were securely tied to the telephone wires and wouldn’t be swept away. But the water kept getting rougher, and that idea was abandoned. But people who were athletic and daring, or had no choice, still used the cables to travel, clinging to them with their hands while carefully walking the wires up toward the office buildings.

  The day wasn’t over, and the headquarters was turning into a shelter and rescue center that surpassed anything the actual city government had set up, which was nothing. By evening, the Dayton populace started referring to it as the Cash Register Hospital. For good reason. It was sheltering three thousand people by nightfall, and an emergency hospital had been set up to treat flood victims with hypothermia, broken bones, and burns from fires that were breaking out across the city, for a variety of reasons from electrical fires to broken gas lines, and collapsing buildings, and sheds with paint and other flammable materials.

  That night, in the halls of NCR, three women gave birth. Actually, that last part wasn’t true but was a rumor that was circulated in newspapers around the country. It isn’t surprising that people thought that had been the case. If a pregnant woman in labor had come here and hadn’t been able to make it to one of the city’s hospitals, odds are, the baby would have been delivered just fine.

  Having given up the idea of climbing into any more rowboats himself, Patterson was in the midst of the action, issuing orders and running the business like a command center.

  His 21-year-old son, Frederick, however, was commandeering rescue boats and going out into the city, searching for people to help. Patterson’s nineteen-year-old daughter Dorothy dutifully stayed behind—whether she wanted to or not, women simply didn’t go out and rescue people if there were men around—although she chose a fairly uncomfortable job for herself. She stood outside the National Cash Register headquarters in the rain, greeting flood victims as they were brought over in automobiles.

  NCR was one of the few bright spots in the city and state, as overall things were bleak. “I have received reports from my men all along the line that indicate an estimate of five hundred dead is a conservative one,” said Frank Brandon, vice president and general manager of the Dayton, Lebanon and Cincinnati Railroad. “At first my men reported deaths at sixty. Later the reports came in so fast, they quit counting. When we are finally able to get the details and the names of the dead, we will find the life loss to be appalling. My men place the property loss at Dayton at six to seven million. The two bridges that were swept away at Dayton were worth half a million dollars each.”

  Excello, Ohio, afternoon

  In a tiny village just south of Middletown and about thirty miles away from Dayton, the river, the canal, and Dick’s Creek all formed a united front, overwhelming the farmhouses and some of the residents. Christian Ramseyer, a 45-year-old farmer, had sent his wife, Pearl, and their four youngest children to higher ground east of their farm home.

  He and his sons, Walter, eighteen, and Roy, nineteen, and a 39-year-old neighboring farmer, Edwin “Dock” Cassidy, were trying to save their livestock. In hindsight, it’s hard not to think that if it wasn’t safe for Pearl and the children to be on the grounds, perhaps it wasn’t safe for the Ramseyer men and Cassidy to be in the barn either. But in their defense, the water hadn’t reached their home yet, and the four men were simply trying to save the animals that kept their farm going. They probably would have been just fine if the nearby levee hadn’t broken.

  But they made a mistake that many flood victims made—staying behind a little too long. The levee did break, and the rushing water first destroyed the Ramseyer house and then came for the barn where the men were. They didn’t have a chance. Cassidy had come on horseback, but even if he had mounted his steed, it wouldn’t have mattered. A tidal wave crashed through, and the men and animals were swept away.

  Walter’s body was found that day in a cornfield. Christian Ramseyer, the father, was found in some brush later in the week. Nine weeks after the flood, Edwin Cassidy was located several miles away in the city of Hamilton.

  The bones of Walter’s brother, Roy, weren’t discovered for another twenty years. He was identified by a Sunday school pin next to his bones, a pin that surviving family members remembered him wearing.

  * He appears not to have met or known them. One would think he would have exchanged names with the mother and children throughout their ordeal, but later, when he recounted the story, he never mentioned their names.

  * Henry Ford’s company sent him replacement parts, and Snider was apparently able to refurbish them enough to drive; but even as late as fifty years later, Snider would ruefully regret not driving each car up a nearby hill, where the river couldn’t possibly reach them.

  Chapter Seven

  That Old College Try

  March 25, Tuesday

  In a bit of weird irony, a man named Nate Williams, who was a professional diver and possibly worked for a construction crew, which often needed divers for bridge construction, had traveled from the Ohio River community, Portsmouth, at the southern edge of the state, to come upstate to Bainbridge. He was diving in a nearby creek, searching for two men, William Kinzer and John Blackner. They had lost their lives three days earlier, before the flood began, after their boat capsized. But with the flooding, Williams was forced to abandon his search. One has to think he probably soon resumed the search for the two men—and for numerous additional missing men.

  Just as with any natural disaster, daily routines ceased to exist when the Great Flood of 1913 showed up. Throughout Ohio and Indiana and various communities throughout other states, schools closed. Businesses shut down. Courthouses and other government agencies either halted or were hampered. Travel by train across the nation was hobbled by the delays and virtual shutdown of railroads throughout the Midwest. Weddings were postponed, or at the very least there was a change of venue. In Indianapolis, o
n April 2, when Ethel Krouse, eighteen, said “I do” to Christian Anderson, twenty-one, they married on the day they had planned and at the time they had chosen, two in the afternoon; but instead of marrying in their home or church, both of which were waterlogged, they married at the Y.W.C.A., where the bride had been staying, with many of their friends and guests looking on.

  The mail for many communities also came to a screeching halt; by the end of the week, the Columbus, Ohio post office would have 250 tons of undelivered mail waiting to go out.

  Communication, of all sorts, was severely curtailed. In central Ohio, the tiny village of Zuck was eliminated. In Warsaw, Ohio, several young women, telephone operators, were on chairs, perched up on their knees, trying to do their jobs, as the water washed over the floor. By noon, they were forced to flee their posts or die for the cause.

  Newspaper communication was also halted for many communities. In Middletown, Ohio, just about fifteen minutes away from Dayton today by car, the Middletown Journal and the Middletown Signal, the two city papers of the day, tell the story of what was going on in the city simply by what they didn’t write. On March 24, 1913, the town’s 18,000 residents had a newspaper featuring on their front page the tornado that devastated Omaha and much of the Midwest. And then, nothing. They wouldn’t produce another newspaper until April 1.