Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (19 page)

Realizing that this was going to be the mode of transportation du jour, some telephone linemen climbed up to the cables, carrying tow ropes that were attached to flat-bottomed boats. Their plan was that people could paddle their way up to dry land, knowing that they were securely tied to the telephone wires and wouldn't be swept away. But the water kept getting rougher, and that idea was abandoned. But people who were athletic and daring, or had no choice, still used the cables to travel, clinging to them with their hands while carefully walking the wires up toward the office buildings.

The day wasn't over, and the headquarters was turning into a shelter and rescue center that surpassed anything the actual city government had set up, which was nothing. By evening, the Dayton populace started referring to it as the Cash Register Hospital. For good reason. It was sheltering three thousand people by nightfall, and an emergency hospital had been set up to treat flood victims with hypothermia, broken bones, and burns from fires that were breaking out across the city, for a variety of reasons from electrical fires to broken gas lines, and collapsing buildings, and sheds with paint and other flammable materials.

That night, in the halls of NCR, three women gave birth. Actually, that last part wasn't true but was a rumor that was circulated in newspapers around the country. It isn't surprising that people thought that
had been the case. If a pregnant woman in labor had come here and hadn't been able to make it to one of the city's hospitals, odds are, the baby would have been delivered just fine.

Having given up the idea of climbing into any more rowboats himself, Patterson was in the midst of the action, issuing orders and running the business like a command center.

His 21-year-old son, Frederick, however, was commandeering rescue boats and going out into the city, searching for people to help. Patterson's nineteen-year-old daughter Dorothy dutifully stayed behind—whether she wanted to or not, women simply didn't go out and rescue people if there were men around—although she chose a fairly uncomfortable job for herself. She stood outside the National Cash Register headquarters in the rain, greeting flood victims as they were brought over in automobiles.

NCR was one of the few bright spots in the city and state, as overall things were bleak. “I have received reports from my men all along the line that indicate an estimate of five hundred dead is a conservative one,” said Frank Brandon, vice president and general manager of the Dayton, Lebanon and Cincinnati Railroad. “At first my men reported deaths at sixty. Later the reports came in so fast, they quit counting. When we are finally able to get the details and the names of the dead, we will find the life loss to be appalling. My men place the property loss at Dayton at six to seven million. The two bridges that were swept away at Dayton were worth half a million dollars each.”

Excello, Ohio, afternoon

In a tiny village just south of Middletown and about thirty miles away from Dayton, the river, the canal, and Dick's Creek all formed a united front, overwhelming the farmhouses and some of the residents. Christian Ramseyer, a 45-year-old farmer, had sent his wife, Pearl, and their four youngest children to higher ground east of their farm home.

He and his sons, Walter, eighteen, and Roy, nineteen, and a 39-year-old neighboring farmer, Edwin “Dock” Cassidy, were trying to save their livestock. In hindsight, it's hard not to think that if it wasn't safe for Pearl and the children to be on the grounds, perhaps it wasn't safe for the Ramseyer men and Cassidy to be in the barn either. But in their defense, the water hadn't reached their home yet, and the four men
were simply trying to save the animals that kept their farm going. They probably would have been just fine if the nearby levee hadn't broken.

But they made a mistake that many flood victims made—staying behind a little too long. The levee did break, and the rushing water first destroyed the Ramseyer house and then came for the barn where the men were. They didn't have a chance. Cassidy had come on horseback, but even if he had mounted his steed, it wouldn't have mattered. A tidal wave crashed through, and the men and animals were swept away.

Walter's body was found that day in a cornfield. Christian Ramseyer, the father, was found in some brush later in the week. Nine weeks after the flood, Edwin Cassidy was located several miles away in the city of Hamilton.

The bones of Walter's brother, Roy, weren't discovered for another twenty years. He was identified by a Sunday school pin next to his bones, a pin that surviving family members remembered him wearing.

*
 He appears not to have met or known them. One would think he would have exchanged names with the mother and children throughout their ordeal, but later, when he recounted the story, he never mentioned their names.

*
 Henry Ford's company sent him replacement parts, and Snider was apparently able to refurbish them enough to drive; but even as late as fifty years later, Snider would ruefully regret not driving each car up a nearby hill, where the river couldn't possibly reach them.

Chapter Seven

That Old College Try

March 25, Tuesday

In a bit of weird irony, a man named Nate Williams, who was a professional diver and possibly worked for a construction crew, which often needed divers for bridge construction, had traveled from the Ohio River community, Portsmouth, at the southern edge of the state, to come upstate to Bainbridge. He was diving in a nearby creek, searching for two men, William Kinzer and John Blackner. They had lost their lives three days earlier, before the flood began, after their boat capsized. But with the flooding, Williams was forced to abandon his search. One has to think he probably soon resumed the search for the two men—and for numerous additional missing men.

Just as with any natural disaster, daily routines ceased to exist when the Great Flood of 1913 showed up. Throughout Ohio and Indiana and various communities throughout other states, schools closed. Businesses shut down. Courthouses and other government agencies either halted or were hampered. Travel by train across the nation was hobbled by the delays and virtual shutdown of railroads throughout the Midwest. Weddings were postponed, or at the very least there was a change of venue. In Indianapolis, on April 2, when Ethel Krouse,
eighteen, said “I do” to Christian Anderson, twenty-one, they married on the day they had planned and at the time they had chosen, two in the afternoon; but instead of marrying in their home or church, both of which were waterlogged, they married at the Y.W.C.A., where the bride had been staying, with many of their friends and guests looking on.

The mail for many communities also came to a screeching halt; by the end of the week, the Columbus, Ohio post office would have 250 tons of undelivered mail waiting to go out.

Communication, of all sorts, was severely curtailed. In central Ohio, the tiny village of Zuck was eliminated. In Warsaw, Ohio, several young women, telephone operators, were on chairs, perched up on their knees, trying to do their jobs, as the water washed over the floor. By noon, they were forced to flee their posts or die for the cause.

Newspaper communication was also halted for many communities. In Middletown, Ohio, just about fifteen minutes away from Dayton today by car, the
Middletown Journal
and the
Middletown Signal,
the two city papers of the day, tell the story of what was going on in the city simply by what they didn't write. On March 24, 1913, the town's 18,000 residents had a newspaper featuring on their front page the tornado that devastated Omaha and much of the Midwest. And then, nothing. They wouldn't produce another newspaper until April 1.

And people were going to be sick and dying whether there was a flood or not. The Newark, Ohio paper reported that on March 25, the day the flood erupted, fifteen-year-old Harry Loughman was seized with convulsions, probably an epileptic attack. His elderly doctor couldn't make a house call the normal way, and so a neighbor, Ben Slate, who thankfully was a husky young man, was called in to help. Slate carried the 175-pound town physician on his shoulders for a hundred feet through the knee-deep water to the Loughman family's home.

A three-month-old baby's funeral in Newark was delayed a day, and a Mrs. Charles McNeal wouldn't be arriving in Newark any time soon; the Texas resident, who was coming to town for her mother's funeral, was trapped on her train in Indianapolis, which couldn't make it any farther since so many railroad bridges had been destroyed. Grave diggers in Newark found their jobs next to impossible, for obvious reasons: water kept rushing into their holes. But that was a better situation
than the cemetery in Tiffin, Ohio, where coffins were dredged up out of the dirt by the flood and were spotted floating down the Sandusky River. Meanwhile, bodies of missing people, who had died somewhere but hadn't been found yet, were revealed thanks to the flood as well.

The badly decomposed body of James Kearney, a Columbus merchant, would be discovered in a tree on March 29, to everyone's surprise. He had been known to have drowned—several months earlier.

In Peru, Indiana, something similar happened. The body of George Baker, a 53-year-old steel mill worker who had been missing since January, was found soon after the flood began, washed up in a tree. Dead men tell no tales, but people were soon telling them at his funeral, remembering an earlier tragedy Baker had been involved with.

Baker married his bride, a Peru resident, Flora Bannon, on July 6, 1887. He was twenty-seven; she was twenty. Unfortunately, Flora's stepfather, James Christianson, was none too happy about the union and vowed he would kill Baker the first chance he got. That July day, Christianson, stinking drunk, stormed to his daughter's new home and asked her to come outside. She did, and not realizing he was about to demonstrate that she was smart for getting married and leaving his home, he beat her to a pulp. Or he would have, if neighbors hadn't come to her rescue, including a Dr. North, who worked for the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific railway and just happened to be walking by.

Christianson, realizing he was outmanned, ran for cover and dashed into the woodhouse. Moments later, they heard a gunshot.

Dr. North assumed the madman had realized what a monster he had become and, full of grief, killed himself.

Or at the very least, injured himself and needed medical attention. Dr. North ran to the woodhouse.

Dr. North's assumption was wrong. As he opened the door, Christianson pulled the trigger, and the bullet pierced underneath the physician's arm and went straight into his liver and kidney, killing the good doctor. The neighbors managed to wrest the gun away from Christianson, who was then taken to the jail at the courthouse. By the next morning, a mob had gathered outside of the jail—and by 12:15
P
.
M
., they were storming it. Christianson was dragged to the Broadway Bridge. A rope was thrown over a beam, Christianson was fitted with
a noose, and after he was hanged, about a thousand people gave three hearty cheers.

None of this could have been healthy for George and Flora's marriage, for while they had two children, they eventually divorced. In 1899, Flora remarried, and George moved in with his sister and her family. That is, until something happened to him in early 1913 and he went missing, and then ultimately resurfaced, his lifeless body found in a tree. And, in a sense, the entire drama surrounding Baker and his stepfather-in-law was finally finished, for the Broadway Bridge where Christianson had been hanged was demolished in the flood.

Roughly 2
P
.
M
., West Lafayette, Indiana

The timing of the flood couldn't have been much worse for college students, many of whom were on their way home in trains and cars for spring break. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio was on high enough ground that their campus didn't experience any serious flooding, and the flood's timing was such that school's officials forbid the students who were still on campus after Easter Sunday weekend from leaving, thus ensuring their safety, although there were a number of petrified parents who, without telephone access to the University, had no idea if their child was safe on campus or stuck on a flooded train car somewhere between Oxford and home.

Miami University fared well; other colleges did not. In Bloomington, Indiana, the home of Indiana University, the land that hosted the university was high enough that the school didn't fare too badly. The northeastern and southern sections of the city were almost under water, however. The “River Jordan,” an amicable nickname for a tiny, easily crossable creek—you can just jump over it in places—that runs throughout the campus, literally became a river. East Kirkwood Avenue, a road leading to the campus, was under more than two feet of water, and the flood was two feet deep in Indiana University's power plant. East Fourth and East Sixth streets were underwater. Indiana Avenue was turned into a lake. Fortunately, it was more inconvenience than calamity, unlike towns around them, like Nashville, where Salt Creek swallowed up and destroyed quite a few homes.

But some universities had serious problems. At Purdue University, most of the students were safe on parts of campus not in the flood
zone, but the situation was becoming worse by the hour. Initially, though, the rain and flooding was more a curiosity than anything else, and so students unwisely went on what one of them called “an inspection tour,” checking out the Wabash River that separated West Lafayette from its sister city Lafayette.

The townspeople came out as well, among them Paul Wangerin, a cashier at the Burt-Haywood Company, a publishing house. Arnold Herbert, one of the younger owners of Kimmel & Herbert Book Store, was in the mix as well as William L. Oilar, the advertising manager of the
Journal and Free Press,
one of Lafayette's two newspapers. Among the crowd of onlookers, Wangerin, Herbert, and Oilar stopped at the edge of the bridge, discussing the river and how bad the flood might get.