Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (45 page)

On March 29, Charles Potter, his wife and six children were all rescued from their house, which was still surrounded by water, and as they were spirited off to safety in a wagon on a muddy road, it overturned. Everyone died, but because they technically weren't victims of the flood, they weren't counted as such; but had the flood never occurred, it seems likely that the family would have lived to see 1914 and many years beyond that.

On March 30, also in Columbus, James T. Aughenbaugh, a blacksmith who had been rescued from a flooded house, died at 12:30
P
.
M
., from, it was said, shock and mostly the toll his body had taken waiting to be rescued in a flooding home without heat and food.

The
Evening Independent,
the paper for Massillon, Ohio, reported that August Peters, a 68-year-old German-American, contracted pneumonia on March 26, when he had spent most of that Wednesday watching rescuers take stranded neighbors from their homes. Presumably Peters's house wasn't thought to be in any danger, but Peters was probably without heat, and chances are the first floor of his home was flooded, and he was breathing in a lot of damp air.

The
Logansport Pharo,
the newspaper of record for Logansport, Indiana, reported that on the afternoon of April 2 the baby of one Joseph Ofazio caught pneumonia and died, and probably never would have if it weren't for the conditions created by flood. The Ofazios's house had been penetrated by the flood, and after the water receded, they returned to the home before the walls and flooring were completely dry. Soon after, their baby was sick. Joseph Ofazio frantically took the baby to the town doctor, who gave the baby some medicine and warned the father to take the baby home to rest as soon as he could. Ofazio surely tried, but before he reached his house, his child died in his arms.

At some point in early April, James Robinson, fifty-five, was a flood casualty, but it also seems unlikely that he was counted in the overall death toll. He lived alone in his houseboat, five miles outside of Evansville, Indiana, and was sick; and while his daughter and her husband took care of him, they lived in a separate houseboat within view of his vessel. After the flood, their houseboat was in no shape to cross the Ohio River, and the tiny boats that they had had all been unmoored and carried away. Robinson's daughter
tried to flag down passing boats, most of them distributing supplies along the river, hoping someone would check on her father, who she had initially seen but then he had disappeared inside the boat and hadn't been seen for days. He was finally found inside his houseboat, not a crumb of food to be found in any of the rooms. He had starved to death.

The morning of April 25, 1913, Elizabeth Crowe, a fifty-year-old African-American, died.
The Indianapolis Star
reported that “a nervous shock as a result of flood experiences is believed to have been responsible.”

Henry Brand, forty-two years old and a blacksmith in Hamilton, Ohio, had been washed out of his home during the flood, but he seemed fine. And perhaps he was fine. But a few weeks after the water receded, the evening of April 28, Brand's nose began bleeding. It wouldn't stop. By 3:15 in the morning, he was dead. Speculation was that a latent head injury in the flood had done him in, but nobody could be sure.

Mrs. Lucy Chalsont didn't die in the flood either, but she was a casualty nonetheless. The forty-year-old who lived in the river town of Marietta, Ohio, lost virtually everything she had in the flood, reported the Associated Press, which noted in a June 21, 1913 article that the night before, she had waded into the Muskingum River and drowned herself.

Hamilton, Ohio, Saturday

Eventually the numbers relating to material damage would start coming in, too. In Hamilton alone, 5,600 houses were flooded, and another 335 completely destroyed. Even after the water evaporated, there was still the matter of getting people fed and clothed and keeping a roof over everyone's heads. In Hamilton, two bankers were given the disheartening assignment of recovering bodies and managing a morgue. It wasn't a straight-forward task. Many of the Hamilton residents had been carried miles away from where they lived.

Underneath the bankers was a team of undertakers from Cincinnati. Bodies were hauled to the lawn of the Butler County Courthouse and eventually taken inside the courthouse assembly room. A local newspaperman later described the sight as “appalling … Scores of dead
bodies lay about the room on temporary slabs, awaiting the attention of the embalmers, while as soon as this was done, they were placed in plain caskets.”

The following day, there would be a funeral for forty-nine victims, the number of people who had been identified. There were thirty-four more victims still to be recognized, and there was another reason the city had to wait until March 30. Its cemetery had been under water.

It was hardly the calming funeral that the community needed. Mourners were well aware that nearby at the courthouse, the remains of two unidentified women and a four-month-old baby were out on the lawn in caskets, there for the public to view and identify.

Then during the ceremony, an automobile brought the body of another flood victim, causing an anxious ripple in the crowd, which seemed both darkly amused and terrified. The reverend had just uttered the words: “The grim reaper has been in our midst.”

EPILOGUE:

THE DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD

Chapter Twenty

Remember the Promises in the Attic

Denver, March 30

Sarah Bernhardt, the 67-year-old legendary French stage actress known around the world, gave a benefit performance for the flood sufferers in Ohio and Indiana with John Drew, Jr., an American stage actor known for his Shakespeare performances. He was also the uncle of the famed actors John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore and thus the great-great uncle of future film actress Drew Barrymore. Together, they raised $5,000, which would be added to a $41,000 fund already raised by Colorado residents.

Everyone seemed to want to send either money or some sort of show of support. In Sacramento, California, at Folson Penitentiary, E. C. McCarty, a forger, drew up a resolution that prisoners there felt bad about the flood sufferers, and the resolution was somehow passed on to the media and published in papers on this day. The convicts said they wanted the public to know how they felt “to show the outside world that the prisoners are not heartless nor heedless of the suffering of others.”

March 31, Garfield, Indiana

Farmers organized a bear hunt to try to bring down what was believed to be one of the escaped circus animals from the Wallace circus in Peru—after he appeared on the farm of one George Enoch. Unfortunately for the farmers at least, the bear managed to escape a hail of bullets.

April 1, Louisville, Kentucky

A large warehouse owned by the Rugby Distillery Company in the western part of the city, weakened by floodwaters, collapsed late in the night, and so into the river went five thousand barrels of whiskey valued at a quarter of a million dollars. Several employees hastily constructed a dam and saved a number of barrels. Presumably, at least a few Kentucky men went looking for these rogue barrels and saved some for themselves.

April 1, Fort Wayne

A full week after the flood began for most people, a poorly dressed and tired-looking man came to the house of one Mrs. Josephine Pfadt, asking for food and explaining that he was a refugee from the flood. She permitted him to come into the house and prepared him a meal. She then left her home for a few minutes to go to the home of a neighbor and when she returned, she learned that he had tried to embrace her little girl. The police were called in but failed to find any trace of him. It's an interesting story, if only to recognize that even in the good old days, there were some really bad people, and for the language that newspapers used when covering a troubled topic such as pedophile (the headline:
ALLEGED INSULTER SOUGHT).

April 2, Bird's Point, Missouri

Forty-eight soldiers from the Missouri National Guard became stuck on a 200-foot-wide and 400-foot-long stretch of an earthen levee after the Mississippi River destroyed most of it. The soldiers had boats, but they were all swept away except for a two-man skiff. The two officers in charge boarded the skiff to make a four-mile trip—against the current—to Cairo, Illinois, where they knew they could get help.

For the remaining soldiers, it was a long rest of the day—and night.

“We could feel the dirt crumbling away beneath our feet,” one of the men told a reporter later, “and we were kept on the move nearly all of the time. The section of levee on which we were marooned was under water as deep as three feet in many places, and time after time, we dragged some of the men away from the water as the earth crumbled away. We made it a point to stand as near the up-stream edge of our island as possible, so if caught in a cave-in, we would not be washed away by the current.”

The Chicago naval reserves immediately went after the soldiers, rescuing them the next morning. Incredibly, all forty-eight men survived the night.

April 2, Missouri and Hickman, Kentucky

For George Shaver, a Missouri farmer, it was tragedy plain and simple, the flood still reaping victims even after the waters receded in Dayton. He and his two young children saw their house destroyed and his wife and their mother killed by falling timbers in their home. Shavers then put his wife's body in his boat, and with his two young children, who were clinging to her body, somehow steered them through the Mississippi River to Hickman, Kentucky, which Shaver deemed a much safer place to be. And it was. Soon after, they buried her in a little cemetery on a hillside.

April 2, New Madrid, Missouri

A resident, William Smith, and his wife, were reported to have attempted to cross the Mississippi River from New Madrid. They didn't make it.

April 2, Washington, D.C. and Catlettsburg, Kentucky

Senator Ollie James of Kentucky appeared at both the Red Cross and War Department to appeal for aid for the three thousand residents of Catlettsburg, Kentucky, who had to flee their homes. He said that conditions were worse there than Dayton or Columbus, now that the levees had broken and everything had been swept away. That hopefully got their attention.

April 2, 7
P
.
M
., Paducah, Kentucky

The river had risen a foot and a half throughout the day and by evening the floors of every wholesale house and many retail stores were flooded. The forecast assumed the river would rise another four feet, flooding almost the rest of Paducah, except for five blocks that seemed high enough to be out of danger. But people weren't so sure. Paducah was on high ground, in general, but the community had never built any levees. Flooding was completely new to this generation. There hadn't been a serious flood since 1884.

Still, as bad as things were in Paducah, it was much worse in nearby Cairo, Illinois, which is why Paducah, a southern Kentucky town, was quickly becoming a rescue center. Situated on the Ohio River just a stone's throw away from Illinois and adjacent to Missouri and Tennessee, Paducah had enough resources that the U.S. military ordered a lieutenant and two non-commissioned officers to take every power boat they could find and three barges and make haste for Cairo.

The military's instincts were apparently spot-on. The remaining canoes, rafts, and the like were enough to save everyone in town, except for one inebriated man who fell out of a boat and into the current. There's a good lesson here for everyone. Floods and drinking heavily do not mix.

April 2, Dayton, Ohio

Despite the waters finally disappearing, the city was still taking stock of what was ahead of them, and authorities were doing everything, from trying to reunite families, to ensuring looting didn't become a problem, to avoiding an epidemic breaking out. People were on edge. C. J. Becker, a prominent real estate agent, had been using his car to help ferry people in and out of the city, and overall was just being a good citizen when a friend of his joked and asked, “How much are you getting for wearing out your tires and machine?”

“Thirty-five dollars a day,” Becker said good-naturedly. He should have added: “Don't I wish.”

A little later, Becker was stopped by a soldier who took him to a Major Hubler of the Ohio National Guard. The major wanted Becker to explain why he was running a sightseeing service, charging people
thirty-five dollars a day to take them to see the hardest-hit areas of the flood.

It took several hours and signatures of people who knew Becker, before the real estate agent could convince the military that he was joking and wasn't some sort of sleazebag making a buck off the flood.

The city gradually was coming to life, however. Historian Judith Sealander, who wrote the book
Grand Plans: Business Progressivism and Social Change in Ohio's Miami Valley
tells of how in the aftermath of the flood, Dayton sent out committee volunteers and soldiers to conduct house-to-house inspections, an operation that reached every home and business in the city, with the goal of taking anyone with a communicable disease to a hospital.

“Groceries, bakeries, restaurants and schools were only allowed to reopen after passing a rigorous inspection and disinfection,” writes Sealander, who then refers to a project Patterson created once it was apparent that his factory couldn't keep flood victims there forever. “The tent city refugee camp built on donated NCR property included electric lights, sewer lines, showers and flush toilets. Ten cleaning stations dotted around the flooded regions of the city offered homeowners free lime, chloride of lime, and cresol, along with instructions explaining how to use these chemicals to whitewash basements and disinfect floors, walls, and furniture.”

April 4, Dayton, Ohio

A ten-hour downpour in Dayton did nothing to create a new flood, but it also did nothing for people's nerves, nor did it help alleviate the problem of further damage to people's homes, businesses, and health in the already-waterlogged city.