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

  WASHED AWAY

  How the Great Flood of l913,

  America’s Most Widespread Natural

  Disaster, Terrorized a Nation

  and Changed It Forever

  GEOFF WILLIAMS

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  SUNDAY, MARCH 23, 1913

  Chapter One: Heading for the Cellar

  MONDAY, MARCH 24, 1913

  Chapter Two: The First Flood Deaths

  TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 1913

  Chapter Three: Some of the People in the Way

  Chapter Four: The Long Rain

  Chapter Five: A Time to Run

  Chapter Six: Everyone on Their Own

  Chapter Seven: That Old College Try

  Chapter Eight: From Bad to Worse

  Chapter Nine: Desperation

  Chapter Ten: Heartbreak

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 1913

  Chapter Eleven: Fighting Back

  Chapter Twelve: Waterworld

  Chapter Thirteen: Greed

  Chapter Fourteen: Children in Harm’s Way

  Chapter Fifteen: Jittery Nerves

  THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 1913

  Chapter Sixteen: Another Long Night

  Chapter Seventeen: Light at the End

  FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1913

  Chapter Eighteen: Water Retreating

  SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1913

  Chapter Nineteen: Cleaning Up

  EPILOGUE: THE DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD

  Chapter Twenty: Remember the Promises in the Attic

  Notes and Research and Acknowledgments

  Index

  Author’s Note

  On March 23, 1913, the United States of America was reminded that when it comes to nature, we’re not really in charge. It was an Easter Sunday, but the thunderstorm that almost crushed the Midwest into oblivion could have been straight out of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark—only it didn’t rain for forty days, but, depending where you lived, more like four or five. The rain, in any case, was long enough to create the most widespread natural disaster in the history of the United States. Millions upon millions of 1913 dollars of damage. Hundreds of thousands of families and individuals were driven from their homes. There were at least several hundred, and probably more like a thousand, deaths. It was a flood of such epic proportions that it forever changed how the United States manages its waterways.

  My first memory of hearing about the flood is about as innocuous and ordinary a memory as you can get, so boring that I’m almost embarrassed to bring it up. I was standing with an uncle of mine, Pat Scorti, in Middletown, Ohio, at a gas station. I think I was eight years old, which would place us in 1978. He was pumping unleaded into a beat-up car that he had probably purchased a decade earlier. What exactly he was talking about as he pumped, I have no idea, but suddenly his monologue landed on the 1913 flood. He mentioned how there was water for miles, and that Dayton, a city just north of us, really was hammered by it, and that about a dozen people died in Middletown alone. It was very serious, he said, his voice full of awe, as if he had been there, but he hadn’t. He was born over thirty years after the flood.

  That’s about all I remember. It was a brief, inconsequential moment in time, which somehow stuck with me, but I think the conversation explains a lot about why this flood has now been forgotten. This was a disaster that felt local and wasn’t necessarily viewed by individual communities as a national calamity. But during and after the time the water receded, the Great Flood of 1913—Arthur Ernest Morgan once called it that; he was a famed engineer whose flood control techniques became widely known and disseminated after the disaster—was often compared to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and the sinking of the Titanic just a year before. And for good reason. The Great Flood of 1913 affected far more Americans than both of those previous disasters combined.

  Yet the sinking of the Titanic and the San Francisco earthquake were disasters that were contained and created an easy-to-grasp story. The rest of the country could read about the thrilling adventures (the papers back then described every near-death escape as “thrilling”) and wonder what they would have done if they had been there; and of course, movies, like San Francisco in 1936 with Clark Gable walking around in a daze, and the Titanic films, not to mention shelves of books, all helped to fuel our collective imaginations of the heroes, villains, and victims within each story. Conversely, the Great Flood of 1913 affected so many people that, arguably, people didn’t want to wonder what they would have done if they had been there. They were there. Or they had friends and family who were there. After a while, nobody wanted to talk about it. It was too close for too many. If anything, people wanted to forget about this disaster.

  The flood disaster also, as noted, became very localized. Waterlogged cities adopted the flood as part of their local history, and so instead of becoming known as the Great Flood of 1913, folks around Dayton, Ohio, would talk of the Great Dayton Flood. Residents in Columbus, Ohio, would speak of the Great Columbus Flood. People in Indianapolis thought of it as an Indianapolis flood. My uncle seemed to think of it as a flood that affected only Middletown and Dayton. While it was a national tragedy, or at least a semi-national apocalyptic catastrophe, hitting over a dozen states and terrifying friends and family across the nation, the flood tended to be thought of as a neighborhood event instead of as part of a national narrative.

  It may also have been forgotten because the exact death toll of the flood isn’t known and may never be known, so it’s easy to forget how deadly and damaging it was. Historian Trudy E. Bell, who wrote The Great Dayton Flood of 1913 (Arcadia Publishing) and has written extensively on the topic, has placed the death toll at over 1,000, which sounds right to this author, but the numbers bandied about throughout the 20th century often focused on only the deaths in Ohio and Indiana, when a considerable number of people in other states lost their lives.

  Four hundred and sixty-seven deaths is the most quoted number for Ohio, devised by J. Warren Smith, who in 1913 was a professor of agricultural meteorology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the number of deaths for Indiana quoted is usually 200. A June 5, 1921 New York Times article placed the figure of the deaths in Ohio and Indiana as 730, which may or may not have included victims from other states like Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the hundreds of others who died in the tornadoes that came with the storm that initially brought the flood. In other words, this wasn’t a tidy disaster like the RMS Titanic had been with her loss of over 1,500 souls.*

  The flood has also been somewhat forgotten because there have always been floods, and there always will be. It’s hard for the history books to remember the flood of 1913 when it’s also competing with the Mississippi Flood of 1912, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the Great Flood of 1937, and—well, you get the idea.

  After my uncle brought up the flood, I didn’t think about it for most of my life. Sure, I would occasionally hear about it in the local news when a flood anniversary came up and think, “Wow, sounds pretty bad,” but it never captured my imagination; although in recent years, I started to develop a healthy fear and respect for rivers. My young daughters enjoy wading in a creek that feeds into the Little Miami River, searching for tadpoles, minnows, and the occasional toad or turtle. It’s a few feet deep at the most and home to a lot of tadpoles, guppies, and the occasional tu
rtle and water snake, but in 1913, this meandering waterway was around 50 feet deep for several days. But looking at the docile, picturesque creek now, you’d never believe it. In fact, the creek and the Little Miami River swamped downtown Loveland, Ohio (population in 1913: 1,476), a community I live near and visit often, putting its downtown five to ten feet under water and submerging twenty-five percent of the homes in the area. But what really got me was a death near Loveland, a little over ten years ago. A sixteen-year-old girl was in a SUV with three teenage friends, and the vehicle suddenly found itself floating on a road after a flash flood. Three of the teenagers were able to get themselves to safety, simply by choosing to climb out of the left side of the car; the sixteen-year-old escaped out of the right passenger window and made her way toward a retaining wall that she didn’t see, and she fell over it and into Sycamore Creek. A day or two later, her body was found floating in a lake that my kids and I occasionally visit. It horrified me as a human being and parent, in part because I travel on this road frequently; and I think, for the first time, I started to understand the terrifying, ugly power of a flood.

  Still, I only considered writing about the flood a couple of years ago when I was trying to come up with an idea for a book. My agent, Laurie Abkemeier, asked if there were any local events that would have national interest. For a long time, I couldn’t come up with anything; and even when the 1913 flood popped into my head, I quickly pushed it right out.

  A flood doesn’t sound all that exciting. Water comes into a town, it gets high, it leaves. I had no clue.

  Now I wish I had started researching the 1913 flood immediately after my uncle first told me about it. In communities throughout the Midwest and parts of the South and Northeast, there are so many stories worth telling that one could make researching this flood their life’s work and still feel that they hadn’t learned everything there is to know about it. This is my way of saying that if you lived in a community that was walloped by the flood, and it’s not mentioned in this book, my apologies. There were just so many towns hit by the flood that I couldn’t possibly dig into all of them and still tell the wider story of this flood and what it meant to history.

  This was a gravely serious flood, the United States’ second-deadliest in history, following the infamous one in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889, in which 2,209 people died after a dam failure. In the spring of 1913, men, women, and children perished in communities across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana. Even states as far away as Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey were affected by the flooding.

  What follows are some of the many stories of the thousands of people who lived through this flooding. These are tales of bravery, selflessness, tragedy, and even cowardice and greed, although this is mostly a story about Americans at their best when Mother Nature was at her worst.

  * Depending on the source, it was either 1, 514 deaths or 1, 517.

  SUNDAY,

  MARCH 23, 1913

  Chapter One

  Heading for the Cellar

  March 23, Rock, Wisconsin, 5 P.M.–5:12 P.M.

  Edward Suchomil deserved a lot more in life than to be struck down by lightning.

  At least, the faint remaining paper trail that represents his life suggests that he didn’t have this coming. The 24-year-old had made many good friends ever since moving two years earlier to the tiny town of Rock from his home base of Jefferson, just twenty-seven miles north. Suchomil remained close to his parents, visiting them often.

  Unfortunately, he had the misfortune to step into the middle of an elaborate weather pattern that began two days earlier when a high-pressure system from the Arctic Circle invaded Canada. From there, the system brought in severe winds from the west and stormed most of the Midwest and much of the East and Northeast of the United States. Hundreds of telephone and telegraph poles were uprooted in half a dozen states. Sleet followed, and many of the telephone and telegraph wires that were still standing were felled by the ice weighing down the wires.

  Had those telephone and telegraph poles and wires remained standing, historian Trudy E. Bell has suggested, the U.S. Weather Bureau might have been better able to collect information or send warnings to neighboring communities and come to a quicker understanding of what was befalling the country. The flood still would have occurred, of course, but more lives might have been saved with advance warning.

  Suchomil was probably a goner nonetheless. Even if he had known that he was walking into an evening storm affecting not just his own state but Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Vermont, and New York, he probably would have assumed he could beat the weather. There was the whole invincibility of youth mentality to contend with, after all, and don’t we all think we can beat a little old lightning?

  Suchomil left a neighboring farm to go back to the farm of Edward Ellion, where he undoubtedly planned to partake in a fine Easter dinner. Suchomil noticed the clouds—how could he not?—but it was a short walk through the wet, melting snow, especially if he made his way through the cornfield. He must have figured he could reach Ellion’s home.

  He almost did.

  Suchomil’s right palm was in his pocket when he was struck, a pose that suggests that he may have been in mid-stroll, hands stuffed in pockets and fairly unconcerned about the clouds.* The buttons ripped off his rubber boots, which were otherwise unharmed. His cap blew into smithereens and flew off his head. His pocket watch stopped. His hair was singed, and as the clothes on his body burned, Suchomil fell face forward into the snow, which extinguished the flames. The coming rain also cooled him off.

  Ellion and the dinner guests worried about Suchomil, but, given the night and the nature of the storm, they didn’t venture out until the next day where they discovered him, forty rows deep in the middle of a cornfield.

  March 23, 1913, Omaha, Nebraska, approximately 5–6 P.M.

  Thomas Reynolds Porter mentally wrote down everything he saw. The 43-year-old had almost the perfect name for his profession. He went by the name T. R. Porter, and if one ignored his first initial, you could almost read his middle initial and his last name—R. Porter—as in “reporter.” He was a freelance writer, actually, reporting and writing for both newspapers and magazines.

  Porter thought the skies looked ominous. The weather had been questionable all day, warm and muggy, with rain here and there, plus the requisite thunder and lightning. At the noon hour, however, the sun came out warm and bright. Churchgoers flooded the streets in their Easter Sunday best and strolled to their homes, or friends and family. The clouds quietly returned, but that didn’t trigger any suspicions among most of the city’s residents.

  But Porter wasn’t most city residents. He was trained to watch the world from the moment he was knee-high. After his father died when he was three, Porter’s mother, Elizabeth, had taken over his father’s job of deputy postmaster and was at the center of the action in Russellville, Kentucky. Then Thomas Porter followed his older brother, Garnett, to Omaha and landed an assistant manager’s job with the city court, where he continued his training, studying and learning about the human condition. But it was when Thomas followed in his older brother’s footsteps and became a newspaper man that observing the world was actually part of his job description. And for the last sixty minutes, instead of relaxing on the porch and reading or tending to his garden and clipping the pergola or watering his climbing roses or clematis, Porter was studying the weather.

  There was good reason to be concerned. It had already been a month with frightening weather. March 15 brought blizzards to the Midwest. A hurricane hit Georgia and Alabama, the day after. March 17, a cold wave hit in Tampa, Florida, of all places. On March 21, the first day of spring, a blizzard hammered twenty states, from as far north as Montana and south as Arizona, and ended twenty-one lives. On March 23, in an article written before Omah
a’s destruction, The Washington Post published a lengthy essay about tornadoes that began: “Not since 1884 has there been such an outburst of tornadic storms as that which occurred in the west and south last week.”

  The article was referring to a pair of tempests that, two days earlier, had left behind dozens of people dead across several states, including twenty-eight bodies in Mobile, Alabama, and five more in Michigan, where two young boys skating on a river were blown off course and right into the grip of the Straits of Mackinac’s icy waters.

  Porter couldn’t be sure if a tornado was coming. Nobody alive had actually seen a tornado in Omaha, according to a newspaper account of the time, which made the observation that an old Indiana prophecy that had been handed down for centuries stated that Omaha was immune. That wasn’t quite true. The newspaper reporter apparently had forgotten that there was a tornado in September 1881 that had leveled a few blocks in the city, although the loss of life, according to an issue of The American Architect and Building News that came out that month, was “trifling.” Still, Omaha didn’t have an intimate relationship with tornadoes, and its residents felt no danger or fear toward tornadoes.

  That was about to change.

  Porter called for his nineteen-year-old niece, Clem. Porter had doted on her ever since his older sister, Fannie, a poet from Glasgow, Kentucky, had come to Omaha in 1905. Fannie, forty-seven years old and a widow since the turn of the century, had been sick for the last two years, traveling the West and hoping the warmer climates would improve her health. Whether she came to say good-bye, or if it was unexpected, she died close to her family members. Clem, named for her father, Clement, an attorney, was thirteen years old and all alone. Porter, unmarried, was too. That is, until he met Mabel Higgins a short time later. She was a 28-year-old clerk at a law firm. Both late bloomers for a married couple in 1913, three years after saying “I do,” they still weren’t parents yet. Clem was all they had.