Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (22 page)

Most of the afternoon, the guests stared outside, at noisy and never-ending currents, at least twelve to fourteen feet deep, as far as Jones could tell. In the front of the hotel, Jones watched the world pass by: driftwood, chairs, counters, shelving, barrels, boxes, crates of fruit from a grocery, pianos, piles of lumber, and occasionally a struggling, drowning horse. That pained him to see, although it was even worse going in the back of the hotel. Horses that had been released from a nearby stable seemed to be cornered in, in the back, struggling in the water, and occasionally surrendering to it.

When he wasn't staring outside, Jones would occasionally go to his room on the fourth floor, just to look at it. The floor was sunken in. In the room below his, the floor was completely gone, having collapsed onto the second and first floor and somewhere in the basement. Jones was told by a jewelry salesman that his trunks, with $30,000 worth of wares in them, had been in one of those rooms and was now floating somewhere in the basement.

Mostly, though, Jones stayed on the second floor with the remaining Beckel House guests, where everyone talked among themselves, the discussion likely sticking with the flood or wondering what family members back home thought of all this. Jones was worried about his wife, Laura, who he had married back in 1879, and their daughter, also named Laura but whom everyone called Lola. He also likely thought about his grandchildren, Randolph and Charlotte.

It seems likely that a nineteenth-century poet and novelist, Jean Ingelow, came up in conversation at one point, either among some of the guests or perhaps between just Jones and Lucia May Wiant, director of physical training for Dayton Public Schools, who lived at the Beckel House. Ingelow had written a well-known poem entitled “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” about a devastating sea
tide, and both Jones, when he wrote about the flood later, and Wiant, when she penned an article about the flood for an educational journal, mentioned Ingelow's poem. In fact, they each quoted the same passage from Ingelow's 176-line poem:

“…
the heart had hardly time to beat

Before a shallow, seething wave

Sobbed on the ground beneath our feet.

The feet had hardly time to flee,

Before it broke against the knee,

And all the world was in the sea.”

The guests watched out the windows at the muddy sea, climbing higher and higher up the outside of the buildings, and wondered how high it could go.

Jones and his fellow guests also kept a close eye on their own building. Nobody knew why the northwest corner of the Beckel House had collapsed. While the water seemed a likely culprit, the collapse had occurred quite early in the flood, and several people speculated that a small boiler might have exploded in the basement.

“We made and enforced a peremptory order that not a match should be struck in the house,” wrote Jones later in a religious newspaper, the
Herald of Gospel Liberty,
published by the United Church of Christ. “From the very first, the dread of fire was on the heart of everyone. One fellow tried to light a pipe but was properly taken care of. We had, as far as I know, no other such creature among us.”

Many Dayton residents were afraid—if not for themselves, for their loved ones who they couldn't find. Still having no idea where their father had been taken, or if the canoe he was in might have overturned, Orville Wright and his sister Katharine posted signs in the neighborhood they were staying in that alerted passers-by that they were looking for their father. They also told any stranger they encountered that they were searching for Bishop Milton Wright. But so far, as the day wore on, they had heard nothing.

John P. Foose, then a 74-year-old Dayton resident and the Civil War veteran who sent his daughters to look at the river after being awakened at 4:30
A
.
M
., was certainly worried, if not for himself, for his
city. He described what he saw Tuesday from his home in a letter to his brother: “Boats moved past the house with old men and women in the last stages of dejection and despair. Some sat in boats with bowed heads, holding to the sides, expecting every moment to be overturned. Some boatmen were unable to manage the boats for there was a terrific current sweeping past the house. Small and large sheds and stables, even small houses swept past.”

Probably only the children managed to enjoy the flood. Dayton resident Rita Rosemary Abel Gabel recalled in her memoirs of helping her father carry books upstairs and then walking on the floorboards, unable to hear the usual sound of her footsteps on the wooden floor and being told that it was because water was right on the other side. Not long afterward, a rescue boat—probably one from NCR—came for her family, and they climbed into it from the second-story window.

“I remember Daddy, the last one into the boat, turning around and carefully closing the window,” wrote Gabel. “There we started up the street toward the Main Street Bridge with the man telling us to be sure to duck under the streetcar trolley wires. I, clutching my beloved teddy bear, wasn't the least bit scared, just excited at all that was going on.”

2:30–3:30
P
.
M
., Dayton, Ohio

On the roof of the building that housed O. G. Saettel's and William Paterson's saloon, Lydia Saettel prepared to board the boat with her eight-month-old baby, Oliver, Jr., or Ollie, as they called him. Her father-in-law, George, warily eyed the rescue boat and the current and suggested she leave the baby with him.

“No way,” Lydia is said to have said, and with the baby and the store's cash wrapped in a baby blanket, left with the rescuers. Her husband, Oliver, had already gone ahead, which sounds a little odd at first—isn't it women and children first?—but the Saettels' thinking was that Oliver could find a place for them to stay and either return or send someone back for them.

George stayed behind for reasons unclear, and so did another two tenants: Caroline “Carrie” Schunk, the 36-year-old wife of a barber, and possibly her baby. It may be that there wasn't room for them, and the rescue boat was going to come back; or, it seems more likely, since
George wanted Ollie to stay behind, that neither Carrie or George liked the looks of the water and felt that they were safer waiting out the flood on the building. It's understandable—climbing into a boat from your second-story window, when the waves are splashing into your home, has to be a terrifying idea. Even so, it was a tragic miscalculation on their part.

For about an hour later, there was an explosion in the building. A neighbor, Lillie H. Kilpatrick, believed it came from the saloon, although some would suggest it was a gas leak in the basement, and still others said Mrs. Schunk was lighting the stove to warm up milk for her baby.

People for miles heard the explosion. George Saettel and Carrie Schunk were hurled into the air, along with burning embers, or wood, which landed in the loft of a nearby stable, still untouched by the water and filled with hay. It quickly caught on fire. Then the flames shot across the street and onto several other homes. That the other homes were damp and drenched didn't matter; they caught on fire anyway. The interior of the buildings' walls, not to mention the second stories, which still had ample carpeting, bedding, clothing, and furniture in them, provided plenty of fuel for the fire.

Incredibly, when Saettel came crashing onto terra firma, he was alive, and he landed on another roof.

A floating roof.

She should have been blown into oblivion, but Mrs. Schunk landed in the water and incredibly had enough presence of mind to cling to a spike in a telegraph pole about twelve or fifteen feet away from one of the buildings. But Carrie Schunk, while alive, was not well. Her clothes were in shreds, and so was the skin on her face and hands. She shrieked for help.

Saettel wasn't much better off than Mrs. Schunk. Like her, he was injured and the roof he landed on wasn't attached to a building. It was a rogue roof, wedged against the building Harry Lindsey lived in and across the street from the grocery store.

Saettel had family members who also lived across the street, and he was about two buildings away from his sister-in-law Mellie Meyer's home, where she, her son Ralph, her niece Norma Thoma and the rest of the Thoma family were camped out. Some of the family and
possibly all of them saw the patriarch of their family clinging to the floating roof.

Across the street, George Timmerman, the moulder trapped in an attic with a mother and three kids, had heard the explosion and ran to the window to look across the street and see the walls of the grocery store collapsing into the wild river. If Timmerman and his group saw Saettel and Mary Schunk, and he must have, he didn't say. What his group positively saw was the fire. It quickly spread to a stable and then a stack of hay. It wouldn't take long for an inferno to skip from the stable and mow down the buildings until it had reached them.

Everyone in the immediate vicinity was terrified, and everyone tried something different to escape the burning homes, which burned slowly enough, possibly because everything was so wet from the rain; but by the end, nine homes on the east side of Main Street would go down and then spread to the west side, where four more houses went down in flames. In order to escape, Lillie Kilpatrick and her uncle and some neighbors had to get to a bakery, ten feet away from their own building, which they did by building a bridge made of bed slats. After that, they climbed into a shed and used it as a raft.

Harry Lindsey had thirteen neighbors and family trapped in his home. They all went from building to building until they were able to hail a rescuer in a boat who made multiple trips to bring everyone to safety. After three trips, though, the rescuer pled exhaustion and wouldn't make any more. There was just one more trip needed and three people to save; people pleaded, and after begging and offering the man fifteen dollars, he finally relented.

After shouting unsuccessfully for help, Timmerman and his group quickly climbed up to the roof, where they started going from one building to another. They didn't have a lot of time to waste.

Meanwhile, injured and weak, both Carrie Schunk and George Saettel were still floundering in the water, still trying to stave off the inevitable. Nobody could reach either of them, although two young men got into a boat and rowed toward Mrs. Schunk. The current sent them flying past her, though, and they were unable to catch hold of her, which may have been just as well since their boat capsized. The men swam to the barn, stopping there only for a moment since it was on fire, and navigated their way to a tree and then to another home.

It took about half an hour or maybe even sixty minutes, but Carrie finally lost her strength and became lost in the watery, yellow churn. George Saettel could only hold on to his floating, unsteady roof, which was bobbing up and down violently—and then watch disbelievingly as about twenty horses passed him in the water, struggling to swim and stay afloat, their hooves frantically struggling to find firm footing. Around Saettel and his loved ones and neighbors watching him, the fires only grew in intensity. Making matters worse, other houses, unmoored and floating, crashed into the fire, making the blaze instantly bigger.

Driftwood and debris kept ramming into it, chipping away at the only thing holding the 66-year-old man up. Finally, the roof Saettel was holding on to couldn't hold his weight, and the grocer was adrift again and flowing with the current. He was never seen alive again. His family—and Harry Lindsey, who had been helping his son move his goods earlier in the day—would be haunted by the experience for the rest of their lives.

As Saettel and Schunk fought for their lives, smoke was blowing toward Timmerman, the mother, and children, with the flames closing in, and they were all screaming and crying, running up one roof slope, down another. The houses were close enough, or adjoining, so they could go from roof to roof, but it was an exhausting run across about a dozen roofs, with the flames slowly but methodically giving chase.

And then they suddenly realized they could go no farther. They were out of houses.

Timmerman looked around in the water, hoping to find something useful, like a boat; but all he saw within reach was some driftwood and some hulking figure in the water, possibly a dead horse or maybe a human. There was something else that he found himself looking at, but he could hardly contemplate what he was considering. Telephone wires were jutting out from the home, stretching over the water, and he could see that, far off, maybe six blocks, there were people in buildings. They might be trapped, too, but it looked as if the people were in a lot better control of their situation than Timmerman and his comrades were of theirs. Certainly, there was no fire six blocks away.

But it would be insanely dangerous and impossible for the children to attempt.

Timmerman, however, believed he could walk along the telephone wires, and if he could get somewhere else, maybe he could send help to the mother and child. The mother agreed, although she probably felt she didn't have much choice but to agree.

He started onto the wire, the way everyone did—hands on one wire, and feet on a wire below. If his foot slipped, he would have to hope that his hands could hold his weight. Therefore, he promised himself he would not slip. He walked as carefully as possible and as quickly as he dared. But it wasn't just a nerve-racking exercise; it was actually exercise. His muscles tense, Timmerman sweated in the cold March air, constantly wondering if there would be a point when his arms and legs would simply give out and he would drop into the water.

It became painfully clear to George Saettel's family, once their patriarch was gone, that they couldn't remain where they were.

There was no time to pull a Timmerman and walk along the roofs, looking for an escape route. It was right there in front of them, and they would have to do what many Dayton residents, including Timmerman, as it turned out, were doing: walk across the telephone cables.