The Johnstown Flood (5 page)

The construction technique was the accepted one for earth dams, and, it should be said, earth dams have been accepted for thousands of years as a perfectly fine way to hold back water. They were in fact the most common kind of dam at the time the South Fork work began and they were the most economical. The basic construction material was readily available at almost any site, it was cheap, and it required a minimum of skilled labor. Virtually any gang of day laborers, and particularly any who had had some experience working on railroad embankments, was suitable. But since the basic raw material, earth, is also highly subject to erosion and scour, it is absolutely essential that a dam built of earth, no matter how thick, be engineered so that the water never goes over the top and so that no internal seepage develops. Otherwise, if properly built and maintained, an earth dam can safely contain tremendous bodies of water.

The South Fork embankment was built of successive horizontal layers of clay. They were laid up one on top of the other after each layer had been packed down, or “puddled,” by allowing it to sit under a skim of water for a period of time, so as to be watertight. It was a slow process. And as the earth wall grew increasingly higher, it was coated, or riprapped, on its outer face with loose rocks, some so huge that it took three teams of horses to move them in place. On the inner face, which had a gentler slope, the same thing was done, only with smaller stones.

The spillway, as Welsh had stipulated, was not cut through the dam itself, but through the rock of the hillside to which the eastern end of the dam was “anchored.” The spillway was about 72 feet wide. The over-all length of the breast was just over 930 feet. The width on top was about 20 feet. The thickness at the base was some 270 feet.

At about the exact center of the base, there were five cast-iron pipes, each two feet in diameter, set in a stone culvert. They were to release the water down to South Fork, where it would flow on to the Johnstown basin by way of the Little Conemaugh. The pipes were controlled from a wooden tower nearby. On June 10, 1852, the work on the dam was at last completed; the sluice pipes were closed and the lake began to fill in. By the end of August the water was 40 feet deep.

But about the time the dam was being finished, J. Edgar Thomson, who was then chief engineer for the up-and-coming Pennsylvania Railroad, was making rapid progress with his daring rail route over the mountains, which included what was to become famous as the Horseshoe Curve. The canal was about to be put out of business.

The Pennsylvania was racing to complete a route west to compete with the New York Central, the Erie, and the B & O, which were each pushing in the same direction. The last part of the run, from Johnstown to Pittsburgh, was ready in late 1852. On December 10, six months after the South Fork dam had been finished, a steam engine made an all-rail run from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. J. Edgar Thomson became president of the road about the same time, and the company was on its way to becoming within a very few years the biggest and far and above the most powerful single force in the state (and in the Statehouse); the biggest customer for nearly everything, but especially coal, iron, and steel; the biggest employer; and the biggest influence on the way people lived from one end of Pennsylvania to the other. By the end of the ’80’s it would be the mightiest of the nation’s many mighty railroads.

The effect of the new railroad on the state’s troublesome, costly, and beloved canal system was disastrous—almost immediately. Within two years after the railroad opened, the legislature voted to put the “Main Line” up for sale for not less than $10 million. Understandably there were no takers. The one likely prospect was the Pennsylvania itself, which could readily use the right of ways. Three years later the sale was made, with the Pennsylvania paying $7.5 million for the system, which included the Main Line, the Portage Railroad, and, as it happened, the South Fork dam.

Having no use for the dam, the railroad simply let it sit. Nothing whatsoever was done to maintain it. In fact, from 1857, the year the railroad took possession, until 1879, twenty-two years later when the Pittsburgh men took over, the dam remained more or less quietly unattended, moldering away in the woods, visited only once in a while by fishermen or an occasional deer hunter.

And it was only five years after the state sold it to the Pennsylvania that the dam broke for the first time.

In the late spring of 1862, about the time the Union Army under McClellan was sweating its way up the blazing Virginia peninsula, for a first big and unsuccessful drive on Richmond, the mountains of Pennsylvania were hit by heavy thunderstorms. Hundreds of tiny creeks and runs and small rivers went roaring over their banks, and in Johnstown the
Tribune
ran the first of its musings on what might be the consequences should, by chance, the dam at South Fork happen to let go. Eight days later, on June 10, the dam broke.

The break was caused by a defect in the foundation near the stone culvert. The accepted theory locally was that various residents had been stealing lead from the pipe joints during the years the dam had been abandoned, that serious leaks had been the result, and that the break had come not long after. Exactly how big the break was is not known, as no records were made and no photographs were taken. The important fact was that though there was much alarm in the valley below the dam, the break caused little damage since the lake was less than half full, the creeks were low, and a watchman at the dam, just before the break, had released much of the pressure by opening the valves. (It was also somewhere along about this time that the wooden tower for controlling the discharge pipes caught fire and burned to the ground.)

From then on until the Pittsburgh sportsmen appeared on the scene seventeen years later the lake was no lake at all, but little more than an outsize pond, ten feet deep at its deepest point. At the southern end, grass quickly sprouted across acres and acres of dried-up lake bed and neighboring farmers began grazing their sheep and cattle there.

In 1875 Congressman Reilly, who had spent most of his working life with the Pennsylvania in nearby Altoona, and who must have thereby known about the dam for some time, bought the property and, like the Pennsylvania, did nothing with it. He just held on to it, apparently on the look for another buyer, which he found four years later in Benjamin Ruff. But before selling at a slight loss to Ruff, he removed the old cast-iron discharge pipes and sold them for scrap.

Ruff’s idea of what to do about the dam was relatively simple and seemed realistic enough at first. He would rebuild it to a height of only forty feet or so and cut the spillway down some twenty feet deeper to handle the overflow. But when he found that this would cost considerably more than repairing the old break and restoring the dam to somewhere near its original height, he chose the latter course.

The first indication in Johnstown and thereabouts that a change was in the offing above South Fork was an item in the
Tribune
on October 14, 1879. “Rumors” were reported that a summer resort was to be built by a Western Game and Fish Association. The next day there was a notice calling for fifty men to work, but no name of the organization was given.

For some reason or other, intentionally or otherwise, the Pittsburgh men kept the correct name of their organization from receiving any kind of public notice. It was a course of action which would later be interpreted as evidence that they had had no desire for anyone to come looking into their business in general, or their charter in particular.

Ruff set about repairing the dam by boarding up the stone culvert and dumping in every manner of local rock, mud, brush, hemlock boughs, hay, just about everything at hand. Even horse manure was used in some quantity. The discharge pipes were not replaced, and the “engineering” techniques employed made a profound impression on the local bystanders.

The man immediately in charge of this mammoth face-lifting was one Edward Pearson, about whom little is known except that he seems to have been an employee of a Pittsburgh freight-hauling company that did business with the railroad and that he had no engineering credentials at all.

The entire rebuilding of the dam ended up costing the club about $17,000, and there was trouble from the start. On Christmas Day, 1879, only a month or so after work had begun, a downpour carried away most of the repairs. Work was discontinued until the following summer. Then, less than a year later, in February of 1881, once again heavy rains caused serious damages.

No one seems to have been particularly discouraged by all this, however. Along toward the end of March the lake was deep enough for the clubmen to go ahead with their plan to stock it. The first of the small steamboats was being assembled and the clubhouse was close to being readied for the grand opening. In early June the fish arrived by special tank car from Lake Erie, 1,000 black bass, which ended up costing the club about a dollar apiece by the time the last expenses were paid. According to the
Tribune,
which noted these and all other bits of news it could uncover concerning the club, only three of the fish died, “one of which was a huge old chap, weighing over three pounds.”

The
Tribune
had also reported earlier that the Pennsylvania was planning to build a narrow-gauge spur from South Fork to the lake and that the clubmen were shopping about for land downriver from Johnstown where they intended to establish a private deer park of 1,500 acres. Neither claim was true, but both seemed perfectly reasonable and fitted in with the picture most Johnstown people had of the club and its members. Would not even the high and mighty Pennsylvania Railroad gladly provide any number of special conveniences for the likes of such men? Was not a deer park a fitting aristocratic touch for their new mountain domain? Certainly money was no problem. Were not the members of the club millionaires to the man?

The plain truth was that a goodly number of them were; quite a few of them, however, were not, and two or three of them were a great deal better than millionaires. But by the standards of most men, they were, every last one of them, extraordinarily rich and influential. Yet, one of the curious things about the club is that the make-up of its membership, exactly who was who at the lake, was not generally known around Johnstown. If the club appears to have been rather cozy about its name, it was even more so about publicizing who belonged to it. Not until well after the events of May 31, 1889, was a full list of the membership published publicly. And quite a list it was.

The membership of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, according to its initial plans, was never to exceed one hundred sportsmen and their families. The membership fee was $800. There was to be no shooting on Sundays; and those members who did not have cottages of their own were limited to a two-week stay at the clubhouse. As the summer season of 1889 was approaching, there was a total of sixty-one names on the membership roster.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, it should be kept in mind, was a most unostentatious affair by contrast to such watering spots of the time as Newport, Cape May, or the lavish new lakeside resort in New York, Tuxedo Park. There was no opulence. There were no liveried footmen, no Tirolean-hatted gamekeepers such as at Tuxedo, no “cottage” architecture to approach the likes of Newport. There was not even a comparison to be made, unless the South Fork group was to be measured by the per capita worth of its members—or the industrial and financial power they wielded—which, everything considered, was often the way such things were measured. On that basis the little resort on Lake Conemaugh was right in the same league.

One Pittsburgh newspaper called it the “Bosses Club,” and aptly so. Carnegie’s name by itself on the membership list would have been reason enough. And the same holds for Henry Clay Frick, for much had happened to the young “Coke King” since he had first joined with Benjamin Ruff to launch the club.

In 1881, while in New York, Frick had stopped by the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue to pay a call on Carnegie and his mother and to talk a little business. (Frick happened to be on his honeymoon at the time, but he was not the man to let that, or anything else, stand in the way of progress.) When the meeting was over, he and Carnegie were partners in the coke trade, and from then on it did even better than before. By 1889 the H. C. Frick Coke Company was capitalized at $5 million; it owned or controlled 35,000 acres of coal land and employed some 11,000 men. Moreover, in January of that year, Frick had been made Chairman of Carnegie, Phipps & Company, which meant that he was commander in chief of the whole of the Carnegie iron and steel enterprises, which were by then the biggest in the world.

Carnegie by this time had said something to the effect that he was not much interested in making more money and was spending no more than six months a year at his business. He wanted someone who could manage things. In Frick, whom he did not especially like and whom no one seemed quite able to fathom, he found exactly the right man. By 1889 this humorless, solitary, complex son of a German farmer, who was then still six months from turning forty, was the most important man in Pittsburgh.

Along with Frick, the club roster included Henry Phipps, Jr., Carnegie’s partner since the earliest days of the business, before the Civil War. A pale, painstaking man who stood no more than an inch taller than the five-foot-two Carnegie, Phipps was the financial wizard of Carnegie, Phipps & Company. In the early days he had won certain acclaim for his ability to borrow money for the struggling ironworks and for an old horse he owned, which, according to Pittsburgh legend, was capable of taking him on his rounds of the banks without any guidance whatsoever. By 1889, however, Phipps was one of the three or four top men in the steel business and one of the wealthy men of the country.

Besides the big three—Carnegie, Frick, and Phipps—the Carnegie empire was also represented at South Fork by John G. A. Leishman, the vice-chairman of the firm, and by Philander Chase Knox, a bright little sparrow of a man, who was the company’s number-one lawyer as well as the personal counsel for both Carnegie and Frick.