Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (48 page)

It was also this year that the Miami Conservancy District was formed, devoted to protecting the Miami Valley, where Dayton lives and portions of nine Ohio counties, from flooding. Morgan, however, was just getting started. Ultimately, he was spearheading a plan that required twenty-one draglines (a piece of heavy equipment used in engineering), twenty-nine trains, and two hundred dump cars, sixty-three automobiles, many miles of railroad track, over a hundred pumps, over a hundred transformers and, was the largest public works project of its time, employing two thousand people.

There were five camp villages with 230 major buildings, 200 sheds and various buildings. Bunkhouses were put up with running water, and each camp had a mess hall and a store. Each camp village existed to build an earthen dam, dams made up of impervious clay and silt, sand, gravel, and boulders, all which would protect Dayton, Hamilton, Middletown, Piqua, Troy, and a slew of communities in the area that had all been besieged by the 1913 flood. These weren't any ordinary
dams Morgan's crew ultimately made. For instance, the dam near Englewood, Ohio, is said to have enough dirt to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza. It can hold 6,350 acres of water. The area in the Miami Valley that was flooded took up 3,285 acres. There would have to be a flood twice the size of the Great Flood of 1913 for Morgan's work to be diminished.

When the rivers through the Miami Valley flow normally, the water passes through the dams without any trouble, and behind the dams is no water whatsoever. If the Englewood dam were to reach its maximum capacity, it would take twenty-three days for the water to drain and evaporate.

But when there are heavy rains, and the water starts to overflow its banks, the extra water travels through special conduits in the dams and collects in a space called the retarding basin, which is upstream of the dam. If it sounds confusing, it is the stuff engineers live for, and Morgan was clearly in his element. He would oversee the dams until they were all finished in 1922.

1920

Mrs. Ida Overmeyer gave her resignation to the orphanage after a quarter of a century of service and would live out her final years in St. Louis with her son, his wife, and their two daughters. Around this time, Theresa Hammond was married according to her niece, Sara Houk. Miss Hammond ended up marrying Dr. James Francis Dinnen, who everyone called Frank. He was the doctor who had cared for the orphans that fateful week more than eight years before.

He was married when he and Miss Hammond met, and the romance came well after the flood and his divorce, as far as the family knows, and that may be true. The doctor continued caring for the orphans and Miss Hammond remained teaching there for years to come, and so it may be that it took some time before love blossomed.

Because Dr. Dinnen was married in the Catholic Church, and he didn't want to scandalize his ex-wife, he and Theresa married in secret, in a civil ceremony, and eventually moved to Cleveland. They both lived into their seventies and passed away during the 1950s.

Charles Gebhart, Hammond's boatmate during the terrible tragedy at the orphanage, was accused several days after the incident of being drunk when he was rowing. At the time, he was a saloon owner—he
also had been a gardener for many years—and the charge that he was inebriated during the rescues could have stuck, except that he had about thirty people, including Miss Hammond, sign a petition stating emphatically that he hadn't touched a drop that day. Gebhart claimed he hadn't had a drink for at least three months.

Gebhart himself, however, seems to have lived otherwise a fairly sedate and normal life free of tragedy and disasters. He gave up his saloon about a year after the flood, and during the 1920s, he was a truck farmer, the term used for a local farmer who sells directly to consumers and restaurants. On March 17, 1932, he passed away quietly, hopefully with his wife Tracy and their three sons and daughter at his side.

1921

The dams were meant to save communities, but one community was something of a casualty of Morgan's vision. In February of this year, the town of Osborn was moved to a new site. The land was purchased as part of the conservancy reservoir, with the idea being that it would store up flood water and pass it down to Dayton in reasonable amounts. The state was going to wreck Osborn's buildings but decided to sell them to be moved to the new site and gave the old owners the first chance to buy them. A company was formed to manage the moving, and bids were requested.

It was a major undertaking, as described in a December 1925 issue of
Popular Mechanics
that told the story of E. W. LaPlant, who had made moving large buildings his specialty. One of his finest moments was when he engineered the transport of a 4,800-ton department store in Montreal, Canada.

But with the town of Osborn, LaPlant designed a move that required 552 buildings to be hauled out of a valley to a hilltop a mile and a half away. The town is still on that hill, at least in part. Never able to regain its former self-sufficiency, Osborn and the neighboring town of Fairfield merged to become Fairborn in 1950.

1922

The year that Arthur E. Morgan wrapped up his work on saving Dayton from any future flooding, it was almost as if fate decided that John
H. Patterson would be called for duty in the next world. He died a little over nine years after the flood, passing away on May 7, 1922. He was seventy-seven and busy to the end, dying two days after working on plans with General Billy Mitchell, a U.S. Army general who is considered the father of the Air Force. They intended to build an aviation research center in Dayton, Patterson's beloved city. He was as generous with his time and his money as he was during the flood until the end of his days.

1927

Christian Dane Hagerty, the intrepid Associated Press reporter, died far too young. His life ended in Chicago at the age of fifty-one. It was a sad end, an ill-fitting one considering all of the adventure he appears to have crammed into his life. The hard liquor and hard living caught up with him, and in his last few years in life, he was, as one paper described him, “an invalid.”

It was a fate worse than death for such an active and curious man, and on July 26, 1927, he sent a last telegram to his brother, went to his hotel room, picked up a gun, aimed it near his heart, and became the depressing subject of at least one short article in the newspaper.

1928

Hagerty's one-time nemesis and friend Ben Hecht fared much better. This was the year his stage play
The Front Page,
a comedy, which he wrote with Charles MacArthur, another former Chicago journalist, made its Broadway debut.

Hecht left journalism to become one of America's most successful screenwriters as well as a director, producer, playwright, and novelist. He was the first writer to get an Oscar for a screenplay, for the 1927 silent crime film
Underworld,
and he either wrote or worked on numerous movies including
Scarface, Nothing Sacred, Gone with the Wind, Some Like It Hot,
and the original comedy spy film
Casino Royale,
which was released in 1967, three years after his death at the age of seventy.

But Hecht never quite forgot what it meant to be a newspaperman. His well-received stage play, about newspaper men covering the crime beat, was adapted by another screenwriter and became the 1934 film of the same name starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and then later, Hecht rewrote the film
The Front Page
into a new adaptation,
which became a much more famous and beloved film classic,
His Girl Friday
(1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

After being presented with a gold medal by the Ohio governor, life went on for telephone operator and Dayton flood hero Arthur John Bell. He remained at his post in Dayton into World War I, briefly working at his company's branch in nearby Middletown, and then being sent to the center of the state in Chillicothe, where he was in charge of the electrical installation at Camp Sherman. From there, he was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, where he oversaw a crew of a thousand men loading munitions for the war effort overseas.

After the war, Bell decided to leave the telephone industry and with his wife moved to Detroit, and he got involved with construction work. He was given the position of overseeing a crew working on the Cadillac Building, which was completed in 1920 and is now part of Wayne State University. A few years later, he started working for a sewer contractor. It was at that job that he came to a noble and yet such an ignoble end.

On August 6, 1928, Bell, now forty-six, was leading his men in installing a new road sewer in Detroit. Bell noticed that one of the workers was missing and, according to conflicting accounts, saw him fall down in the sewer and went down after him or couldn't find him and then descended the ladder into the sewer.

Once again, Bell was heralded as a hero, but there would be no happy ending followed by a medal and a meeting with the governor. Like his coworker, Bell was overcome by fumes and passed out. After spending nights and days doing everything he could to help his fellow citizens avoid drowning, Bell once again tried to save another fellow human being but would meet his end drowning in a sewer.

1933

Twenty years after the Great Flood of 1913, three flood survivors made their annual trek up to the attic where they had spent three days with six other people, with nothing but crackers to eat. Edward Wagner, a manufacturer, and Clark and Edwin Stoner, grocers and brothers, gathered in the attic of the Stoner home and dined on cheese and crackers. It was the last such reunion, however. Edwin, fifty-eight,
was in poor health and low spirits. He would commit suicide in his store before the year was up.

That same year, Arthur E. Morgan was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who selected him from 150 suggested names—to be the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which involved construction that was twelve times the size of the Egyptian pyramids. Morgan, who, in the midst of overseeing the dam work in Dayton, became the president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, a charming village in Greater Dayton, in 1920. When Roosevelt offered him the job to create a flood control system in the same vein as the successful work in the Ohio Valley for the neighboring Tennessee Valley, which includes parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia as well as the state it's named for, Morgan, forty-eight, jumped at the chance.

Roosevelt received some criticism as the cost of the construction mounted, but he defended his selection of Morgan, saying simply, “He builds good dams.”

Roosevelt was correct; and that same year, Dayton was reminded of what Morgan had done for them. After a tornado invaded the nearby city of Xenia and crushed a house, killing its sixty-year-old dweller, George Gibbs, rivers and creeks left their banks, sweeping poor William Voelpel, forty-five, to his death in a drainage tunnel, and an emergency dam north of Dayton broke, sending waters through the villages of Miami Villa and Eldorado.

But the main dams of the Miami Conservancy District? Those held fast. In fact, the Miami Conservancy District would be a model that was imitated across the country, including in Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, and Florida. American engineers and international delegations still make pilgrimages to Dayton to probe for lessons on how they have resolved their own flooding problems.

1937

This was the year when Morgan's magic truly came to light, and Roosevelt's wisdom in hiring the man was borne out. A flood swamped the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, affecting cities from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, and killing, most accounts say, 250 people. In Ohio, which got off relatively lucky with ten deaths, Kentucky, and Indiana, it was
estimated that one of every eight people were left homeless. Almost one-fifth of Cincinnati, Ohio, which had managed to mitigate much of the damage in 1913, was now only accessible by boat. The city had no power, although fortunately they were able to bring in some emergency power—from Dayton.

The streets of downtown Dayton didn't have a drop of water on them.

1961

On January 11, the little baby that miraculously survived the ravaging current, Lois Adams, died suddenly at the age of forty-eight. She was, in a sense, the last victim of the 1913 flood.

It sounds far-fetched, but it was always the theory of her twin brother, and there may be some rationale behind it. Two days after Charles Adams and Grandpa Adams began cleaning their house, both Lois and Charles Jr. developed pneumonia. It wasn't due to being in their flood-ravaged house. Viola's brother, Nelson Hicks, had come down, posing as a doctor since the National Guard wasn't yet allowing visitors to Dayton. Hicks—who at least was a pharmacist, if not a physician—convinced Viola and Charles to bring the babies up to his house in Fostoria, Ohio. A few hours before boarding the train, Charles, Jr. became very sick, and they called in an actual physician.

The doctor did what he could and apparently cleared them for travel. In any case, the Adams family traveled north, but before they reached Fostoria, Lois was ill, too. Both babies had the aforementioned pneumonia, and once again, Charles and Viola feared for their children's lives. For several weeks, in Charles's words, the two parents “nursed them back to life,” and during the moments that the babies seemed like they might live, Charles would think about their house back home and wonder how moldy and dilapidated it was becoming. But after three weeks, Charles finally felt comfortable enough to leave Fostoria and return to the task of rehabilitating their house. Not that there was all that much to do. Grandpa Adams, who always seems to have put his family first, had been cleaning it for the last three weeks, largely ignoring his own home in the process.

So the kids grew up, and became quite famous in Dayton, being known locally as “the flood twins.” They married and had kids, and
the flood twins' parents lived good long lives as well. Charles Adams died in 1950 at the age of sixty-three. Viola passed away in 1973. She was eighty-seven. Then in 1961, Lois, who evidently had been healthy throughout her life, simply passed away. Her heart just stopped. Charles, Jr. would always feel her heart and lungs were permanently weakened as a result of the exposure and pneumonia from their near-drowning experience and suffering through weeks of pneumonia. It's hard to argue that.