The Johnstown Flood (10 page)

The run to East Conemaugh took about ten minutes, with the mail train in the lead, followed by the first and second Day Express, in that order. At East Conemaugh all trains were stopped and held for further orders. There was trouble up the line at Lilly. Bear Run had risen more than six feet, burst over its banks, and washed out a quarter of a mile of track. Nothing could move east or west. Two earlier eastbound trains, the
Chicago Limited
and a freight from Derry, had gotten as far as South Fork, where now they too were being held.

The first section of the
Day Express
was made up of seven cars—five coaches, a baggage car, and one Pullman. On board were some 90 passengers plus crew. The second section had three sleepers, one baggage and two mail cars, and perhaps 50 passengers and crew. The mail train had only three cars, one for the mail, plus two coaches. Most of its passengers were members of the
Night Off
company, who were on their way to Altoona for their next performance.

East Conemaugh was the main marshaling yard for Johnstown. Eastbound trains picked up their “helpers” there, the extra engines for the climb over the mountain. There was a huge sixteen-stall roundhouse, water towers, four main tracks, sidings, sheds, repair shops, coal tipples, dozens of locomotives, rolling stock of every description. So that the trains now detained there in the driving rain were only part of a whole concentration of equipment set along a broad flat where the Little Conemaugh makes a sweeping curve between the hills.

For the people of the little town set just back from the yards, the morning was turning into a fine show. The river was still within its banks but rising fast. There was every sign that the wooden bridge above the station was about to wash out, and rain or no rain, most of the town had gathered along the riverbank to see it happen.

Sometime between noon and one o’clock a telegraph message came into the East Conemaugh dispatcher’s tower from the next tower up the valley to the east. The message was directed to the yardmaster at East Conemaugh, J. C. Walkinshaw, and to the head of the entire division, Mr. Robert Pitcairn, at Pittsburgh. No one would later recall at exactly what moment the message arrived, and numerous people who should have seen it later claimed that they never did. Nor was there ever agreement on its precise wording, but the consensus was that the message said something close to this:

It was signed simply “Operator.”

At Johnstown the message was received at the telegraph office at the depot only a few minutes later. The freight agent, Frank Deckert, was told it had come in; he glanced at it, but he did not stop to read it. As he said later, he knew that “it was in regard to the dam; that there was some danger of it breaking.” But it created no alarm in his mind. He had heard such warnings before. When he passed the word along to the few people who happened to be about the station, their response was the same as his, with only one or two exceptions. Two men who were shown the message by Charles Moore, the assistant ticket agent, read it and laughed out loud.

Deckert made no further effort to spread the warning. He did not move his family from their home just down from the station, nor did he bother to send the message over to the central part of town.

2

No one on the mountain could remember there ever being a night like it.

John Lovett, who was seventy-one and had a sawmill on South Fork Creek a quarter of a mile from the head of Lake Conemaugh, said it was the hardest rain he had ever heard. He could not see it, he said, but he could hear it all right, and the creeks got so vicious they carried off logs that had been on his place for forty years. William Hank and Sam Peblin, who had farms farther up the mountain, at the headwaters of South Fork Creek, said much the same thing. Sylvester Reynolds, another farmer, reported that Otto Run, which feeds into Yellow Run, was running four feet deep, compared to its normal depth of two inches. F. N. George, Justice of the Peace at Lilly, said he had never known a cloudburst like it in fifty years. At Wilmore, H. W. Plotner, a druggist who was nearly seventy, said he could recall no worse storm. Dan Sipe, who owned the flour mill on the Little Conemaugh at Summerhill, Sheriff George Stineman, the coal operator at South Fork, and Mrs. Leap, who kept the general store at Bens Creek, all agreed it was the mightiest downpour and the highest water ever in their memories.

There were also “weird and unnatural occurrences” reported. One family by the name of Heidenfelter later described how they had been suddenly awakened and badly frightened by a “rumbling, roaring sound” that seemed to come from some indefinable object not far from their house. It was then followed by a terrific downpour, which, according to Mrs. Heidenfelter, sounded as if a gigantic tank had opened at the bottom and all the water dumped out at once.

“Indeed I thought the last day had come,” she later told a newspaper reporter. “I never heard anything like it in my life. I wanted my husband to get up and see what the matter was, but it was dark and he could have done no good. In the morning, as soon as we could see, the fields were covered with water four or five feet deep…. People say the noise we heard was a waterspout, but I’ve never seen one and don’t know how they act.”

Apparently the storm did tear big holes in the ground near the Heidenfelter farm, and other families close by the lake reported hearing sounds much like thunder but which they were certain were not thunder.

In any case it was a wild night on the mountain, and when morning came virtually every farm in the area had swamped cellars and pastures. Freshly plowed fields were sliced through with gullies that carried water as much as three feet deep. Acres of winter wheat and corn planted a few weeks earlier had been washed away. Every backwoods road had turned into a creek; every little mountain spring, run, creek, and stream was on a rampage. The earth could not absorb any more water.

It was about six thirty that morning when young John Parke awoke in his high-ceilinged room upstairs at the clubhouse on the shore of Lake Conemaugh. He had awakened once before, about an hour earlier, and had heard the rain hammering against the big frame building, but thinking nothing of it, had dropped off to sleep again. Now, outside his window, there was little to be seen but a heavy, white mist that had closed down over the trees and water.

Parke dressed quickly, went downstairs, crossed through the main living room, out the porch door into the cold morning, where, for the first time, he heard what he would later describe as a “terrible roaring as of a cataract” coming from the head of the lake to the south. He also noticed that during the night the lake had risen what looked to be perhaps two feet. Yesterday the water had been at its usual level, which, he reckoned, was about four to six feet below the crest of the dam. Now, it might be no more than two or three feet from the crest. What he could not tell was how much water was still coming in, and that he knew would be the crucial factor for the next several hours. But the sound from the head of the lake was far from encouraging.

He went inside again, had breakfast, then, along with a young workman who had been helping on the sewer project, he got hold of a rowboat and started off to have a look at the incoming creeks.

“I found that the upper one-quarter of the lake was thickly covered with debris, logs, slabs from sawmill, plank, etc.,” he wrote afterward, “but this matter was scarcely moving on the lake, and what movement there was, carried it into an arm or eddy in the lake, caused by the force of the two streams flowing in and forming a stream for a long distance out into the lake.”

As he and his companion neared the far end, he was astonished to discover that they were rowing over the top of a four-strand barbed-wire fence which stood well back from the normal shore line. Then, rowing against the strong current, they proceeded to cover another hundred yards or more across what was normally a cow pasture. They passed by the place where Muddy Run emptied into the lake and went on to South Fork Creek, which Parke described as “a perfect torrent, sweeping through the woods in the most direct course, scarcely following its natural bed, and stripping branches and leaves from the trees five and six feet from the ground.”

The two of them pulled their boat onto what seemed the driest spot in sight and started up along the creek by foot. For half a mile the woods boiled with water. The trees dripped water, their drenched trunks black against the mist. The very air itself seemed better than half water.

When they returned for their boat, they found that the lake had come up enough in that short time to set it slightly adrift. From there they struck out straight for the clubhouse. From what he had seen, Parke knew that the situation at the dam must be growing very serious and that an appreciable letup in the volume of water pouring into the lake was most unlikely.

As near as he could tell, the lake was rising about an inch every ten minutes. If this were so, it would be only a matter of hours until the water started over the top of the dam, unless something could be done to release more water than the spillway was handling.

At the clubhouse Parke was told that he was needed at the dam immediately. He went to the stable for his horse and within minutes was galloping off through the cold rain.

There were close to fifty people at the dam when he came riding out of the woods. There was a clump of bystanders, South Fork men and boys mostly, under the trees over at the far side, next to the spillway. Along the road that crossed over the dam itself, a dozen or so of the Italian sewer diggers were working with picks and shovels, trying, without much success, to throw up a small ridge of earth to heighten the dam. Bill Showers, Colonel Unger’s hired man, was also making little progress with a horse and plow. Despite all the rain, the road was so hard packed that thus far they had managed to make only a slight strip of loose earth across the center of the dam hardly more than a foot high.

At the center of the dam the water level was only two feet or so from the top.

At the west end another ten or twelve men were trying to cut a new spillway through the tough shale of the hillside but were able to dig down no more than about knee-deep, and the width of their trench was only two feet or so.

Also among the onlookers were several of the clubmen who had come up from Pittsburgh for the Memorial Day weekend. But the man who was directing things, and deciding what ought to be done as the water advanced steadily toward the crest, was Colonel Elias J. Unger, who had retired from business in Pittsburgh the year before and had only recently been named the club’s president and over-all manager. He was living at the lake the year around now, in a modest farmhouse just beyond the spillway.

The Colonel had started life on another farm in Dauphin County, in the eastern part of the state. His father was a Pennsylvania German, as was his mother, who came from the big and well-known Eisenhower family. At twenty he got a job on the railroad and managed to work himself up from brakeman to conductor to superintendent of the Pennsylvania’s hotels, from Pittsburgh to Jersey City, including the one at Cresson, where he was manager for a time and so got to know Carnegie and the others.

About the time the South Fork club was being organized, he had gone into the hotel business on his own in Pittsburgh and made even more of a name for himself. By 1888 he was well enough situated to buy the place on Lake Conemaugh and settle down to a quiet retirement in a glorious setting where there was also the added interest of a not very taxing job to keep him occupied, plus, in the summer months at least, the chance to keep up with his Pittsburgh friendships.

Unger had come a long way from Dauphin County. But even so, socially and financially, he was a noticeable cut below the other members of the South Fork fishing and hunting organization. His experience in hotel management, it would appear, had something to do with his position in the club.

The Colonel had returned home only the night before, after visiting friends in Harrisburg. When he got out of bed that morning at six, it looked to him, he later said, as though the whole valley below was under water, and he was baffled as to what it all meant. He put on his gum coat and boots and walked down the hill in front of the house, crossed the wooden bridge over the spillway and walked out onto the dam, where he began taking measurements of the rising water.

About eight thirty Unger’s caretaker over at the club grounds, a man by the name of Boyer, came by in a spring wagon with D. W. C. Bidwell, who was on his way to South Fork intending to catch the 9:15 train to Pittsburgh. Bidwell, who evidently had had enough of the soaking weekend at the lake, stopped to ask Unger how things were going.

“Serious,” answered Unger, who later that morning was heard to say that if the dam survived the day, he would see that major changes were made to insure that this sort of thing never happened again.

When Boyer got back from South Fork, which was sometime near ten, Unger sent him off to bring the Italian work crew down to the dam. He had decided to try digging another spillway at the western end, where he thought the hillside would be solid enough to keep the water from cutting through it too rapidly. There was brief disagreement over the idea, with some of the men protesting that the water would rip through any new wasteway so fast that the dam would quickly fail.

“It won’t matter much,” Unger said, “it will be ruined anyhow if I can’t get rid of this water.”

When it became clear that even the shallowest sort of ditch could barely be cut through the rocky hillside, Unger then set several of his men to work trying to clear away the debris which by now was clogging the iron fish screens in the main spillway and seriously reducing its capacity.

Among the bystanders taking all this in was a small fourteen-year-old boy with the big name of U. Ed Schwartzentruver, who, with some of his friends, had been there all morning in the rain watching the excitement. Seventy-six years later, sitting on his porch on Grant Street in South Fork, not quite ninety and nearly blind, he would talk about what he had seen that morning as though it had happened the day before.