Patterson sounded like the mayor of the city, and indeed his factory was becoming more like a city within a city every day. If Fred Ward, reporter for the Columbus Citizen, was right, NCR even had turned its basement into a jail, where guards were keeping robbers and vandals. Patterson’s company not only embraced the idea of reporters visiting NCR, Patterson set up a separate living quarters for them, on the upper floors of the building, which were now stocked with beds. It made sense, even if Patterson hadn’t understood the value of favorable publicity—he did—because the hotels weren’t exactly welcoming new customers, unless the new customers had a canoe handy, and the reporters had to stay somewhere. But Patterson not only gave journalists lodging, he had their muddy clothes cleaned and pressed overnight, and the reporters were welcome to use other amenities the company provided, like the dining room, the barber shop, and shoe-shining services. Even more helpful, Patterson managed to get a Western Union wire for the reporters to use at NCR, and for the next three months, newspaper men—sometimes as many as seventy-five—gathered at Patterson’s company to collect news.
City Hall couldn’t have done it better. As Carlos F. Hurd, staff reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, observed, “To me, as I walked through the eleven floors of its administration building, it seemed that its work could not be more effective if it had been built for the express purpose it is now serving.”
But why shouldn’t Patterson act like the city’s mayor? Dayton’s actual mayor, Edward Phillips, had hardly been seen or heard from since the flood started, and while it wasn’t first and foremost on people’s minds in the beginning, as they struggled simply to survive, it was a question that was coming up more and more: Where was the mayor, anyway?
The mayor was marooned at his house with his family. He was stuck at home for about seventy hours, only escaping late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, after rescuers took Phillips and his family away. As he told a reporter, “The water caught us early Tuesday morning. During Tuesday, the water was fourteen feet deep around the house, and that night, I chopped a hole through the ceiling of a second-floor room, and we spent the night in a little attic. The big west side fire was just two blocks from us, and when the wind began to carry burning embers in our direction, it looked serious. I watched the roof nearly all night.”
Phillips probably had no choice but to wait out the flood, but it didn’t help his political career. By the following year, he was out as mayor; and as if to add insult to injury, Dayton would change its system of government, reverting to a then-relatively new way of running a city, in which a five-member commission—which includes the mayor, functioning as the commission’s chairman—chooses a city manager to run the show. Phillips’s most enduring legacy may not be as a businessman, but that today most cities employ a city manager.
Not surprisingly, given how many communities were in the flood’s way, Mayor Phillips wasn’t the only politician who didn’t exactly receive praise for how he handled the flood. Governor Ralston of Indiana was roundly thrashed in the editorial pages of the Indianapolis News.
As it observed in the days after the flood, “The people in West Indianapolis leaped into action to aid flood victims within an hour the night of the flood. The Governor, however, was still struggling more than a day and a half later about the issue of possibly losing control over the distribution of the relief supplies the flood victims needed so desperately. He was worried that some glitch might spring up concerning the method of distribution and then criticism might fall on him. He followed the safest course. He equivocated.”
3 P.M., New Castle, Pennsylvania
The bridges kept collapsing. The Black Bridge, a wooden bridge, had been the first to fall into the Shenango River, followed by the Grant Street Bridge on Wednesday afternoon, and now the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge. As was a common practice during heavy rains, railroad cars—in this case, coal cars—were loaded up on the edges of a bridge, to keep it weighted down, and so everyone believed the bridge would survive. But the waters proved too strong, and in another three hours the bridge at Gardner Avenue would fall too.
Around this time, Thomas Thomas was joined by an alderman, John H. Gross. Thomas, on continuous duty since Tuesday, was exhausted and must have welcomed having a partner to help him help others. Still, Thomas should have found a warm bed instead and left the rescuing to others after more than forty-eight hours at the helm. But then one wonders if he knew about some of the graft among his fellow officers who were not as pure of heart as he. Maybe he felt that he simply couldn’t leave the rescuing to men like William Kerr, who were busy blackmailing stranded families.
Gross was going to help Thomas with his latest rescue. Thomas had brought back a mother of six children. Her kids and the father were back at the house, and Thomas was going to go back for them, or some of them, anyway, since it would be impossible to fit nine people, including the rescuers, in a single boat.
But they never made it. Thomas and Gross’s boat overturned. Fortunately, they were in the vicinity of two Shenango Mill employees, John Henderson and Abe Rhoner. They had found themselves trapped at their place of employment, a tin mill, the same that Thomas had worked at before becoming an officer, and they ended up constructing a wooden boat out of factory scraps to use for rescues. It was a rudimentary boat, to say the least. They had no oars; just wooden boards for paddling. By the time Thomas and Gross fell into the drink, Henderson and Rhoner had saved at least twenty-five women, taking them from the windows of two-story homes.
Both men heard Thomas and Gross scream and immediately hopped into their skiff and started rowing toward them. They found Thomas and Gross, their necks just above the churning water, hanging on to a fence, in the middle of a pile of garbage and driftwood, all piling up from the current.
Rohner held the boat to the fence, and Henderson went into the water and took their rope and tied it to the front of the porch. At least whatever happened next, they wouldn’t lose their boat.
Neither Gross or Thomas could talk, they were so cold. Their fingers were so cramped that they couldn’t hold a rope. Henderson and Rohner were at first at a loss—the men couldn’t use the rope to make their way to the boat—but they ultimately helped Thomas onto the roof of the porch. Then they aided Gross, who, when he tried to stand, fell back down.
Both men seemed delirious from the shock and the cold, and after searching the house for a place to light a fire and coming up empty, it was clear that Henderson and Rohner couldn’t just leave them there, nor could they take them anywhere far either.
Fortunately, a woman in an upstairs window, three houses away, shouted that she had a fire going in her room and they could bring the men there. Henderson and Rohner did, taking each man one at a time on the skiff, making their way as carefully as possible to the woman’s house. Once the officers were with the woman, whose name we may never know, Henderson and Rohner then rowed back to the tin mill on an errand for coal. They brought it back for the woman’s fire, so they could keep it going. Gross, and especially Thomas, were fine with where they were. They didn’t want to go anywhere. Thomas recognized his limits. He was officially off the job.
Henderson and Rohner then bid the three farewell and boarded their skiff. It isn’t clear if Henderson and Rohner were asked to go to the police station and report the whereabouts of Thomas and Gross, or if they simply took the initiative. Either way, it would have been better if they had simply rowed back to the factory. Henderson and Rohner rowed their skiff to dry land and then headed to the police station, carrying their skiff with them in case it was needed, and probably fearing that someone might take it in a city where boats were now very valuable. They came to the Gardner Avenue Bridge, which looked unsteady but crossable.
After making it across, Henderson and Rohner found an officer, Lew Thomas, and informed him of the whereabouts of Thomas Thomas and John Gross. The two men made it clear that they were safe and warm and should remain in the house until the water had settled down.
Feeling very lucky and shaken, they found another bridge belonging to a railroad and traveled as far as they could until they put their skiff back into the water, rowing to the tin factory they were now calling home. They felt very good about how they had spent their afternoon and that everyone knew Thomas and Gross were safe and sound. They had no idea that what they had actually done was inspire people to form a rescue party.
But that is what happened. Two police officers went after Thomas and Gross, a national guardsman named Fred Moore and another man of very questionable moral character, the one who had been taking money before saving flood victims: William Kerr.
Evening, March 27, Portsmouth, Ohio
As the Portsmouth Times would observe fifty years later, everyone in this river city, with the Ohio River to the south of them and the Scioto River to their west, was pretty apathetic when it came to devising escape plans in case their homes were suddenly underwater. The residents were well aware that they could be flooded out and had faced down many floods, but that was exactly why nobody worried. The city had a 62-foot flood wall, and one local official had recently theorized that maybe someday there would be a fifty-foot flood at the maximum. He apparently forgot or was unaware of the 1884 flood that had reached 66.3 feet on February 12.
Still, for those who remembered that flood, that was one for the record books. It seemed inconceivable that the river would ever get that high again.
And while the rest of the state was worried about its bridges, Portsmouth had its brand new $75,000 steel bridge crossing the Scioto River, and they were confident that it could survive anything mother nature threw at it.
But during the evening and night of March 27, the Ohio River rose to 67.9 feet. Some people reported seeing a tidal wave, fifteen feet high, going down the Ohio River and smashing into the Kentucky shore. The river soon poured over the flood wall, into downtown Portsmouth, and for anyone thinking of escaping across that steel bridge—no such luck. Perhaps to the concrete industry’s collective smug satisfaction, the Scioto River knocked Portsmouth’s pride and joy into oblivion.
And yet, while the flood wall was nowhere near high enough to save Portsmouth from flooding, it was high enough to save the community from being blotted off the map—and high enough to save lives. There was a stampede of horse-and-buggies, galloping up into the hills, and a swarm of people, grownups and children, racing down the streets and sidewalks, carrying kerosene lanterns and lamps, all running for higher ground. Those who didn’t feel they could make it that far knew the drill, running for their second floor or the roof. Horses left alone were drowned in their stalls. Buildings, many of which were boarded up by shopkeepers hoping to save their plate glass, were overturned. Everything that wasn’t nailed down became part of a muddy sea of debris. The waters were as high as nine feet in downtown Portsmouth, and an estimated 4,500 houses were flooded. By the time it was all over, the mayor estimated that there was half a million dollars in damages.
But thanks in much part to the flood wall, which bought everyone more time and kept much of the river out of the community and from swamping the city even more than it did, not one man, woman, or child in Portsmouth was killed.
Sometime during the evening, Alto Pass, Illinois
While the rivers, creeks, and streams weren’t flooding elsewhere as dramatically as they had been in Indiana and Ohio, the water was still picking off its victims in other states. It was around this time, in Alto Pass, Illinois, that George and Ella Van Cavaness, farmers and parents of five children, discovered that their two-year-old was missing and found their child’s body floating in Hudgeon’s Creek.
7:30 P.M., New Castle, Pennsylvania
William Kerr and Fred Moore reached the house where Alderman Gross and Officer Thomas Thomas were. By the time they reached the home, there wasn’t a ray of light left in the sky. Thomas and Gross were roused awake and taken to the boat. It was never said, but one imagines the kind and hospitable woman who sheltered them was left behind.
That Kerr wasn’t the most honest person in the world doesn’t, of course, mean that he meant any harm toward Thomas. They may have been best friends. He might have been subconsciously trying to make amends for his sleazy behavior in the last couple of days. He may have been ordered by a superior to go after Thomas. But the fact remains that Thomas would have been better off sleeping through the night. He was so weak that he couldn’t sit up in the boat.
Gross felt ill as well, but he managed to at least sit while Kerr and Moore rowed in the choppy water. There was no light, save a searchlight that someone was operating, which moved up and down the muddy creek. They were heading toward a railroad bridge, the same one that, several hours earlier, Thomas and Gross’s original rescuers, Henderson and Rohner, had crossed on their return trip for the police station. Near the bridge was a slew of submerged railroad cars, and the current was sweeping everything it could underneath, including the boat that Kerr and Moore were rowing.
It capsized, and everyone pitched into the river. Knowing Thomas’s condition, Gross lunged for his friend and managed to place him on the roof of a boxcar, just barely over the rushing water. Gross grabbed on to something—but he would never remember what—a branch from a tree? Part of the boxcar? Gross hung on and looked back at Thomas, horrified by what he saw.
In front of his eyes, the current knocked Thomas’s limp body off the boxcar, and he was swiftly pulled under the water.
Gross had a quick thought that he would be joining him soon. Then everything went black.
FRIDAY,
MARCH 28, 1913
Chapter Eighteen
Water Retreating
Friday, March 28, 1913
Midnight, Columbus
Ernest Bicknell’s train pulled into Columbus. After five days of being on a train, first heading to Omaha and then back toward Dayton, the Red Cross’s national director was at last getting closer to his destination.
Morning, Hagerstown, Maryland
The Potomac climbed its banks and hit the streets. The residents were bracing for it and most of them, well acquainted with what was happening in the states to the west of them, were ready. As the local paper put it, using their city’s nickname: “Harrystown soon knew what it was to be—Omahahawed and Daytonized. This morning early, the people in Liberty Street were awakened by the lapping of gentle waves at their door steps. They hastily arose, as did people on Jefferson and Valentine, all those streets being in the midst of the flooded district and found their cellars abrim with yellow wavelets and their gardens flooded and no escape except by waiting.”
But Hagerstown was quite lucky compared to Omaha, Fort Wayne, and Dayton. While there were thousands of acres submerged and a lot of damage, there were no deaths in the city from the flood, and after about noon, when the Potomac River reached a high of eighteen feet, the water levels began to slowly recede.
Hagerstown wasn’t the only community in Maryland affected by the flood. Cumberland, sixty-seven miles to the west, had considerable damage to its farm lands thanks to Evitts Creek, rising to higher levels than anyone could remember. The Hampshire Southern Railroad, which ran forty miles from Romney to Petersburg, was expected to close for several days due to a bridge being knocked into oblivion. Another railroad based out of Maryland, the Baltimore and Ohio, had to close all of its tracks after a mudslide near Connellsville, Pennsylvania.
And while almost everyone in Maryland came through the flood unscathed, one man did not: John Hoke of Emmitsburg. Exactly what happened will never be known, but it’s safe to say he wouldn’t have been a casualty of the flood if, the evening before, he hadn’t been drinking.
The night of March 27, Hoke, the head carpenter at Mt. St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, had to cross Tom’s Creek at Hartman’s Bridge to
reach his house. He probably would have made it, had he not stopped after work for a drink or two … or maybe five.
A friend of his walked with him through the town most of the way, but then Hoke must have felt that he was sober enough to get home on his own.
The friend never saw Hoke again.
The next day, Hoke didn’t turn up for work, and his wife was frantic. If she was able to call their older daughter living in Hagerstown, or John’s brother or sister, they, too, were panicked. All day, everyone wondered. Where was John Hoke?
Late in the day, a little boy in the town provided the answer. He revealed to presumably his parents that earlier that morning, he saw a man in waist-deep water, clinging to a bush and shouting for help. Probably frightened by what he saw, the little boy said nothing to anyone all day. Or maybe he was on the fast track to becoming a future demented serial killer.
Once people learned that Hoke had been alive in the morning, they started hazarding the guess that the inebriated carpenter had decided not to go home but to sleep near the creek. When he woke up, he was surrounded by water and, either frightened or still hung over, wasn’t able to get out of his predicament before the current swept him away.
Morning in New Castle, Pennsylvania and surrounding areas
The worst may have been over for Dayton, but other communities were still in a pitched battle against their rivers and creeks. Residents in Cairo, Illinois were preparing for trouble with the Mississippi River, and down south along the Mississippi in Memphis, Tennessee, the city was warning everyone to prepare for a flood. This was, of course, the big difference between the start of the flood and the end. People had enough warning to get out of harm’s way.
Yet not everyone could. Samuel Whitlatch, rowing a boat on Main Street in Parkersburg, West Virginia, capsized and drowned. Parkersburg in general was having its share of problems on this day: the county jail was flooding, and the prisoners, hopefully none of them too dangerous, were being released.
Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Page 31
