Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (14 page)

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 pond 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.

Nobody ever learned who the man was.

Dayton, 8:45
A
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M
.-9
A
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M
.

More and more people needed rescuing. The water on parts of Main Street, according to some accounts, was now ten feet deep and still moving rapidly. Oliver Saettel and his neighbor Harry Lindsey had abandoned their efforts to save the rest of the goods in the cellar. Lindsey, in fact, quickly recognized that he couldn't get back to his home and raced up the stairs with Oliver and his family.

Lindsey made the right decision to stick with the Saettels and not attempt a crossing. The roads were no longer roads, as many people were discovering. According to several newspaper accounts, a moving wagon with a driver at the reins, and his passengers, a doctor, his four-year-old son, and an African-American maid or nanny, were caught up in the flood. Their horse and buggy was swept into the current until they crashed into a telegraph pole. Just before the van overturned, the
doctor, servant, and driver managed to climb up the pole with the four-year-old, where they would remain in rain and snow, trapped, shouting for help that wouldn't come for another thirty-six hours.

Fred Boyer, a high school teacher, was on Main Street when the water rushed over the levee. He wrote about it later, stating that at 8:30, his school decided to close since only ten or fifteen teachers and just fifty students had shown up. The staff had also heard that shops were closing, and that Main Street was underwater. Everyone dispersed.

When at nine in the morning Boyer and five others—it isn't clear if he was walking with teachers, students, or both—arrived at Main Street, much of it was covered with water, but at least where they were, it was nowhere near the ten feet that it was further down the road. About then, a modern-day Paul Revere showed up, according to Boyer: “A man came galloping down the street on a horse, a tall, gaunt, ungainly figure, waving his hands in the other direction and crying, ‘The levee's broke, the levee's broke.'”

Everyone began running in the direction the rider was going, including the streetcars, which began backing up, away from where the waters were expected to be coming. Boyer recalled seeing a company of African-American militia, marching up the street from the south, toward the flood, possibly as part of a routine exercise or, more likely, on the scene to see if they could be of help.

But nobody could help. The street gutters were full of water, and suddenly Boyer could see the water coming down Main Street, a wall of water about six inches high in the center of the street. Boyer and his group ran down Fifth Street, where it met Jefferson, but the water was coming there, too.

Miss Flossie Lester, a stenographer, found herself marooned on a horse-drawn moving van when the water rushed through the streets of Dayton. She and several other men had climbed onto the van as the water barreled past them. Eventually, the van tipped over, ripping away from the horses, and everyone went into the muddy water and they were all separated. The van sailed down the street with the horse, Miss Lester, and the men. It isn't known what happened to the men, but Miss Lester managed to stay afloat for a while as the river took her for what looked to be her final swim.

But then she spotted one of the horses swimming near her, and somehow Miss Lester grabbed a dangling strap from the animal and pulled herself up, climbing onto his back, hugging his neck and hanging on. Although thousands of horses were killed in the flood, it was a smart move because this one was a strong swimmer. The horse swam for at least a mile and a half before it navigated to high ground. The horse reached a farmhouse, and Miss Lester, apparently realizing she was safe now, fell off the horse and promptly passed out. The farmer's family took her in and led the horse to their barn.
*

Arthur F. Coulter owned a shoe store. When the levee broke, and the river rushed down Second Street, he grabbed the $30 that was in his cash register, one almost certainly manufactured by Patterson's company, and then he dashed outside.

Big mistake. The water was so high that he was swept off his feet, and a telephone pole or some debris hit him, breaking his arm.

Coulter was being carried along Second Street with groceries, grand pianos, pieces of lumber, broken glass, nails, and other parts of Dayton. As he would tell
The New York Times
later, “The water was dark and furious. Everybody was screaming for help, it seemed to me—and there could be no help. I seemed to realize that, and I tried to stop shouting and save my breath. I swam, or rather I kept afloat. I can swim well, but that was of little assistance in that torrent. I don't know how far I went, but I do know that when I was finally picked up by a boat, I was three blocks away from my store.”

Coulter escaped Dayton in rapid order and traveled to flood-besieged Columbus, where he was robbed of whatever he had left of his thirty dollars. Then Coulter backtracked to Clayton, Ohio, a village near Dayton where he had friends who were able to give him some money. By the time he reached Cleveland three days after being carried down Second Street, he was able to find a doctor who could set his arm, which had been broken and apparently dangling the entire time.

As miserable as that sounds, Coulter was one of the lucky ones.

While Coulter and other Dayton residents were running and swimming for their lives, John Bell was hard at work. The batteries were submerged in the watery tomb of the basement, but he had managed to keep one wire alive by hooking together several dry batteries that he managed to scrape up. He rummaged around and found a lineman's test set, and with that, he was able to rig up a sending and receiving apparatus. That allowed him to cut in upon the wire on the roof of a four-story building, which connected him with a testing station about eight miles north in Phoneton, Ohio.

Phoneton was a community practically built by the telephone communications industry, as the name would imply. Originally named Tadmor, the AT&T Company built a three-story brick building along the National Road, the first freeway built by the federal government in the 1800s, which currently officially stretched from Ohio to Illinois, though one could take various trails from there to the Pacific. By the time 1913 rolled around and the town's name had long switched to Phoneton, there were houses, buildings, a post office, and other trappings of civilization, mostly to support AT&T's building, where numerous operators managed the switchboards that kept the calls moving over the phone lines across the country.

Once Bell had connected Dayton to Phoneton, no easy and quick task, he explained the situation to the operator and asked to be patched through to Governor Cox's office in Columbus.

In the center of downtown, at the Dayton Engineering Laboratory, which everyone called Delco and employed 1,100 workers, the basement began flooding at 8:50
A
.
M
. A crew of workers was quickly dispatched to remove dynamite from the basement, and while they apparently were successful, two employees did not make it back up. Before the day was over, the water would climb seventeen feet into the concrete plant, just eighteen inches from its second story. Many Delco employees hadn't arrived to work yet and wouldn't, and many fled for their lives or attempted to race back home to their families, but twenty young executives found themselves stuck in the watch tower, watching the city fall apart below.

At the Western Union Telegraph Company station, the workers found that they couldn't open their front door—the pressure of the three-foot-deep water wouldn't allow it. The employees had to
escape through a back window and then scale a telegraph pole to the roof.

But it wasn't bedlam everywhere. Not yet, and not at 415 Wayne Avenue, the residence of one Henry Andrews, his wife, his brother-in-law, and a boarder named George W. Timmerman, a foundry moulder who had grown up in nearby Springfield. Timmerman concluded in ankle-deep water that this wasn't a good day to go in to work. Oddly, even as late as 8:45
A
.
M
., with rain still dumping over the city, his neighbors didn't appear to be overly concerned by the flooding, although some people were taking their belongings up to the second story.

This has happened before, after heavy rains, they said.

But fifteen minutes later, the Great Miami River, normally a mile away, came rushing down the street, sending Timmerman and his neighbors running into their homes and upstairs.

9
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M
., Dayton, Ohio

A Western Union operator working with another operator out of Cincinnati abruptly cut off a message he was sending and quickly gave him the news.

Stunned, the operator started spreading the word, and before long it was in morning, afternoon, and evening newspapers around the country. Here's how the first bulletin read, published in the
Akron Beacon Journal
that evening and countless others:

“Cincinnati, O. March 25—It is reported that the Miami River at Dayton has broken and flooded the city.

“At 9 o'clock this morning a Western Union operator working with an operator in this city abruptly cut off a dispatch he was sending, and said:

“‘Good-bye, the levee is broken.'

“Dayton is on low ground, and the river levees rise 25 feet above the level of the town. Right in the heart of the city the Stillwater and Mad rivers merge into the Miami and during high water, the levees are in great danger. If they have broken, until loss of property and loss of life has occurred.”

Another report in the same paper read: “An unconfirmed report here says that 1,500 people lost their lives in the flood at Dayton today
when a levee along the banks of the Miami River went out, and the waters inundated the town.”

Word was getting out. Dayton was drowning.

Chicago, shortly after 10
A
.
M
.

Ben Hecht, an 18-year-old cub reporter for the
Chicago Journal,
was jostled awake by a phone call from his editor, informing him that Dayton was being swamped by a flood, people were dying, and a big story was breaking fast, so get out and cover it! Hecht remembered getting the phone call at 5:30
A
.
M
., which would have been 6:30
A
.
M
., Dayton time. Dayton was in a flurry of activity and worry and some flooding by then, but the levee hadn't broken quite yet. Hecht, in his 1954 biography,
A Child of the Century,
remembered the flood as starting on March 18, 1912, over a year off the actual date, so it's also possible he was sleeping in later much in the morning than he imagined or cared to admit
*
. It's so much more likely that Hecht's editor had seen a bulletin about the levee breaking go on the wire, and that that's when he called the cub reporter.