Johnstown Flood (I), The [Laws G14]

DESCRIPTION: A distraught father tells a stranger about his share of the Johnstown tragedy. He, his wife, and his children had sought shelter from the flood in the upper part of the house, but the waters tore them from his grasp. He was rescued, but his family died
AUTHOR: Joseph Flynn (source: 1889 broadside by Wehman)
EARLIEST DATE: 1889 (copyright on Wehman broadside)
KEYWORDS: flood death family
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
May 31, 1889 - The Great Flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, kills about 2500 people
FOUND IN: US(MA,MW,NE)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Laws G14, "The Johnstown Flood"
Pound-AmericanBalladsAndSongs, 61, pp. 135-138, "The Jamestown Flood" (1 text)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia1, pp. 153-155, "The Johnstown Flood" (1 text plus a broadside print)
DT 825, JAMESFLD
Roud #3254
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Johnstown Flood (II)" (subject)
NOTES [4032 words]: There have been many histories of the Johnstown Flood. One of the more recent is McCullough, one of the first works of this noteworthy historian, which provided the outline of what follows. I have since augmented it where possible, especially from O'Connor.
Johnstown is about sixty miles from Pittsburg, almost due east, on the line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Interestingly, it is not on one of Pennsylvania's major rivers; the stream which caused the flood was the Little Conemaugh River, which joins Stony Creek (or "the Stony Creek," as the locals called it) at Johnstown to become the Conemaugh River, which eventually becomes part of the Kiskiminetas River, which flows into the Allegheny. McCullough, p. 24, describes both the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek as fast but not particularly large. Stony Creek, because it was deeper, was considered the more dangerous at the time.
Johnstown was a fast-growing town; according to McCullough, p. 23, it had tripled in size in less than three decades. The reason was industrialization; Johnstown made steel and steel products such as plows and rails. It was a logical site for industry, with coal, iron, and limestone (O'Connor, p. 15). It reportedly was home to the nation's first Bessemer steel mill (O'Connor, p. 16). It can't have been a very comfortable place to live, with all the pollution and the noise and the cheap company houses, but it was doing well. At least for the company bosses.
Even in normal years, Johnstown was prone to flooding; about one spring in four saw water in the streets (O'Connor, p. 14). It probably didn't help that the local industries had narrowed the two rivers above their confluence, and even more below (O'Connor, p. 67).
What turned flooding to catastrophe was a man-made lake. A few miles above Johnstown on the Little Conemaugh was the hamlet of South Fork, where South Fork Creek joined the Little Conemaugh. A bit more than a mile above the town on South Fork Creek was a great dam, built some forty years before to create a lake variously called the Western Reservoir or the Old Reservoir or Lake Conemaugh.
The dam itself, made of earth, was sometimes called Three Mile Dam -- which was not very accurate (it apparently was a reference to the size of the lake behind it, but exaggerated). Still, it was an impressive structure, some 72 feet high and more than 900 wide. It was about 279 feet thick at the base. O'Connor, p. 29, says that it was the world's largest earthenwork dam. It had some stone at the base, and an outer casing of rip-rap, but based on O'Connor' numbers, it appears it was about 90% dirt. And the water usually was within six or seven feet of the top (McCullough, pp. 39-41). The total area of the lake was about 450 acres. The surface level was some 450 feet above Johnstown (so McCullough; O'Connor, p. 30, says 404 feet).
The building of the reservoir was one of those things that give government projects a bad name. The Pennsylvania legislature in 1836 had approved $30,000 to build a reservoir, according to McCullough; O'Connor, p. 32, says $10,000. The final cost, though, was $240,000. Worse, according to McCullough, p. 50, "two years after it was finished the whole thing would be obsolete and of no use whatsoever."
The whole thing was a boondoggle. Pennsylvania was jealous of New York's Erie Canal and wanted its own water transport system, even though that meant running a canal across the mountains! The idea was to haul barges over the passes using railroads. According to O'Connor, p. 31, the canal boats were actually assembled and disassembled as they went from canal to being carried on the train. It all worked, more or less, but it needed more water than was reliably available. So the Conemaugh was dammed to supply a steady flow of water in the summer (McCullough, p. 52).
Unfortunately, the whole project was a money pit, and construction was halted at times because the state of Pennsylvania couldn't come up with the cash. And this even though the South Fork dam was built of earth rather than rock because it was cheap to hire people to move dirt. The thing was finally completed in 1852 (O'Connor, p. 32).
Then the Pennsylvania Railroad finished laying track across the state. The big fancy canal system, which couldn't possibly compete on price with the railroads, instantly lost any purpose, and within two years, Pennsylvania was trying to sell it -- and found no buyers. Finally the Pennsylvania Railroad itself bought the canal -- not for the canal itself but for the land it rested on. They paid a low price -- and, naturally, stopped doing any work on the canals and on the useless (to them) dam maintaining the Western Reservoir (McCullough, p. 54); they had acquired the dam only because it was part of a package deal (O'Connor, p. 31).
Not long after, on June 10, 1862, the dam failed for the first time (McCullough, p. 54). The surviving records aren't really good enough to indicate why (O'Connor, p. 33, thinks the culvert under the dam collapsed). The result was a 200-foot-wide, 50-foot-deep gap in the dam.
The break was finally repaired in 1879. The repairs were, however, rather casual; it appears that little work was done on the dam's foundations (which had been undermined by the first break), and the pipes which relieved pressure, which had failed, were not replaced. The goal, after all, was not to control water flow; it was simply to built a country club for rich men who wanted to fish and breath clear air (McCullough, pp. 56-57). They may not even have wanted to replace the pipes -- that would allow the fish to escape (O'Connor, p. 43).
The club got the dam for almost nothing -- $2000, according to O'Connor, pp. 33-34 -- and fixed it with anything that came to hand, including leaves, sand, and tree stumps (O'Connor, p. 37). This flotsam apparently was not even rammed down (O'Connor, p. 42).
The locals were somewhat worried -- the regular spring floods, which had been a problem from the start, were growing worse each year as the rivers were more tightly channeled and deforestation increased runoff (McCullough, pp. 64-65). But there were enough people who thought the town was safe to make it impossible for the worriers to do anything about a reservoir outside their jurisdiction. A manager of the local ironworks at one point sent an engineer to look things over, and he sent a dire report -- but the club owners refused to pay any attention (McCullough, pp. 73-74; O'Connor, p. 39) even though the ironworks offered to help pay the costs (McCullough, p. 75).
The dam, in fact, had been rendered even more vulnerable than the engineer had noticed: The top had been lowered to allow a two-lane road across the top, meaning that the spillway to relieve pressure on the dam were barely below the dam's new crest (and the great danger to an earth dam was that water would go over the top and erode the soil). The spillway itself had had bars installed to keep fish from escaping -- but which also meant that the spillway could easily be blocked by rubbish. It is also likely (though not certain), that the vulnerable center of the dam sagged below the edges. McCullough, p. 76, concludes that, at the center, the top of the dam was only four feet higher than the spillway.
Conclusion: Any serious rise in the water level, unless water was released in an orderly way, would result in the overtopping and destruction of the dam. And, because the pipes at the bottom had been removed, there was no possible way to release water. Not only was the dam a disaster waiting to happen, it was a disaster that couldn't even be repaired, because the lake could not be lowered because all the drainage pipes and such had been destroyed! (McCullough, p. 77).
McCullough, p. 41, estimates the weight of the water at 20 million tons. That's 18 million cubic meters, or 18 thousand million litres, or 5 thousand million gallons. (O'Connor, p. 43, agrees with the figure of 20,000,000 tons but computes this as 4.5 thousand million gallons.)
The flood was the result of a very major storm, first observed in Kansas and Nebraska on May 28, 1889 (O'Connor, p. 11). The next day, it dumped rain from Kansas to Michigan and Indiana. Then it arrived in Pennsylvania on May 30 (O'Connor, p. 12).
It wasn't just Johnstown; there were floods throughout the state, including in Williamsport and along the Juniata River (Shank, pp. 19-22). But Johnstown was more or less dead center.
To make matters worse, it had been a wet spring, and most wetlands in the area were saturated (O'Connor, p. 12). There was no place for additional water to go except straight into the rivers. And the storm was described as the worst storm ever recorded in the western parts of that state. In the Johnstown area, rainfall totals were usually in the six to eight inch range, though Pittsburg suffered only an inch and a half of rain (McCullough, pp. 21-22).
Johnstown was already starting to fill with water before the dam went out (McCullough, p. 79); by the second day of the downpour, the flood was higher than even the previous 1887 record (McCullough, p. 82). At least one landslide had been reported in the town (O'Connor, p. 50); others had affected the railroad in the area. The ironworks closed down due to flooding. Some people left town, but others, with strong houses or on slightly higher ground, stayed behind.
It appears that, at some point, a message was telegraphed to the townspeople saying the dam was in danger, but the text has been lost and it is not clear just what it said; in any case, it does not appear to have changed people's behavior much, perhaps because similar messages had been sent in the past (McCullough, p. 87; O'Connor, p. 63). A rider also took a message (O'Connor, p. 80), and there were attempts to telephone Johnstown, but many of the lines were down (McCullough, p. 93). Plus the Western Union telegraph office was flooding (O'Connor, p. 61).
The dam was now so full that it could not be ignored; workers were reportedly trying to cut a new spillway and to raise the central weak point (McCullough, p. 90). But the second spillway would have to be cut through rocky ground (O'Connor, p. 77), and there were only so many workmen; it was too late. An attempt to clear the original spillway, now largely blocked by debris, also failed (O'Connor, p. 76). By about noon, water started going over the top of the dam, and there were leaks lower down as well (McCullough, p. 95; O'Connor, p. 51, implies that leaks had begun some days earlier).
At 1:52 on May 31, a message went out that water was going over the top of the dam. Word that the dam was in the process of failing reached Johnstown around 2:45 (McCullough, pp. 96-97). It appears that, by 3:00, workmen were refusing to do any more work on the dam itself and were simply trying to clear the spillways. Then, at 3:10, the whole thing crumbled (McCullough, p. 100).
Estimates of how long it took the lake to drain ranged from about half an hour to forty-five minutes (O'Connor, pp. 80-81). Taking even the longest estimate and the lowest estimate for the content of the lake, that means roughly one hundred million gallons of water per minutes, or a million and a half gallons per second! This makes the total amount of water flowing at any given moment roughly equal to Niagara Falls (McCullough, p. 102; Internet sources give Niagara Falls a flow rate of about 750,000 gallons per second but peaking higher). The crest was said to be forty feet high (O'Connor, p. 83).
The first place to be affected by the flood was the town of South Fork, where the first casualties occurred (McCullough, p. 105). But the town was mostly on hillsides above the valley of South Fork Creek. The deluge wrecked a bridge and a low-lying mill, but most of the town survived. Johnstown, nine miles away in a straight line but thirteen along the course of the river, would not fare so well, nor would the hamlets in between.
Unfortunately, there was a great bend in the Little Conemaugh a couple of miles below South Fork, and a great railroad viaduct cutting across it. The wreck of this viaduct, plus the miscellaneous refuse picked up along the way, seem to have temporarily blocked the flow of the flood, allowing it to build up another big pressure head (McCullough, pp. 107-109). The village of Mineral Point was next to feel the flood; it was nearly destroyed, though only 16 people were reported killed (McCullough, p. 111; O'Connor, p. 84). There was quite a tangle as trains in the area had to be halted or re-routed (and places had to be found to put them while the lines were repaired and trains diverted). McCullough, p. 122, says that at least 23 train occupants died, in part because the train's crews did little to warn the passengers that they might need to flee.
Then it was the turn of the towns of East Conemaugh and Franklin, which were largely flooded and saw at least 28 people killed. Then the flood reached Woodvale, a relatively new town of about 1000 people. It had no warning at all, and was almost completely submerged. 250 houses were destroyed, and 314 people listed as killed (McCullough, p. 127). Supposedly only a few walls were left standing of the whole town (O'Connor, p. 93). It was still only about an hour since the dam had broken.
Finally the flood reached Johnstown -- by now carrying much heavy debris as well as water. The best guess is that the crest arrived in the town at 4:07 p.m., and took ten minutes to pass through the town (McCullough, p. 147; O'Connor, p. 95, says it came at 4:10 p.m.). Slowed slightly by the wash up the valley of Stony Creek, the flood built another dam of debris at a bridge below the town, which later caught fire (McCullough, p. 149). The bridge stood firm -- indeed, it was still in service carrying rail traffic when O'Connor wrote his book (O'Connor, p. 123). As a result, most of the wreckage of Johnstown and the other villages piled up there.
Hundreds of people were trapped in the debris pile, many of them still alive; it is estimated that only about 80 died in the debris prior to the fire (McCullough, p. 173). Reportedly some 300 bodies were burned (O'Connor, p. 124), meaning that only about a quarter were dead when the fire started. The debris would eventually have to be dynamited to clear the river (McCullough, pp. 227-228).
But even once the fires died down and the waters ran downstream, the ordeal was not over. Probably in excess of 5000 people huddled on the hills above Johnstown (McCullough, p. 184; O'Connor's estimates are higher), many of them ill or injured, with their homes destroyed in the valley below. And the weather at the time was bitterly cold (McCullough, p. 197). Plus the gas and power were out -- there was fear of a gas explosion (O'Connor, p. 146).
To make things even harder, at a time when many desperately needed medical help, six of Johnstown's 35 doctors were dead (O'Connor, p. 146). Even those who survived had seen their offices and supplies washed away.
The locals eventually decided to hold a town meeting to appoint a "dictator" to try to manage emergency operations (McCullough, p. 189). At first, there wasn't even enough paper to take notes about the descriptions and properties of the dead bodies (McCullough, p. 192). There were so many curiosity seekers that eventually a system of passes had to be set up so that the militia could keep out those who did not belong (O'Connor, p. 197).
Lurid initial newspaper reports claimed ten thousand dead (McCullough, p. 203); one went so far as to claim 15,000 dead (O'Connor, p. 166).
McCullough, p. 193, notes that there was never an exact count of the dead; he lists 2209 as the "official" total (and gives this full catalog in an appendix) -- though he notes (p. 196) that two bodies were not recovered until 1906; it was obviously impossible to come up with an absolutely correct count. O'Connor, p. 200, cites 2205 as the "lowest official estimate" and 2287 as the highest. Shank, p.24, thinks the total dead were around 3000. Of the bodies recovered, 663 would never be identified (McCullough, p. 194), in some cases because of decapitation by debris or burns so severe that features could not be made out. Plus many bodies were not discovered until they decomposed beyond recognition. (This probably explains Shank's high number of dead; he combined the known corpses with 900+ missing to get 3000, not realizing that most of the missing were probably among the unidentifiable corpses.)
The total population of the Conemaugh valley was believed to be about 23,000, so a tenth of the population was killed. The rate for Johnstown itself was higher, though only slightly.
Nearly 400 children under age ten were killed, and 98 lost both parents. Hundreds more lost one parent (McCullough, p. 195).
The song's account of a family literally torn apart by the flood, with most of them dying, seems to be artificial, but many such things did happen. The largest part of O'Connor's chapter "The Flood Strikes" consists of such tales -- for example, the account on pp. 110-111 of the Fenn family. Mrs. Fenn saw her husband killed in the street. She and her seven children ended up on the roof when their home was destroyed. One by one the children were lost; only Mrs. Fenn survived.
Newspaper coverage of the event was constant -- O'Connor, p. 163, declares, "The editors of the nation's daily newspapers quickly seized upon the Johnstown flood as the biggest news break since Appomattox." (Ironic, given that most modern histories don't even mention it!) Coverage however was poor, simply because communications were so bad. O'Connor, p. 176, notes instances of newspapers lifting descriptions of the flood from George Elliot's The Mill on the Floss and even a book by the reforming novelist Charles Reade. It wasn't until June 3 that Western Union had enough wire strung to carry all the traffic (O'Connor, p. 177).
A number of stories accused foreigners of looting or even worse crimes; curiously, a number of these stories were reported from places that did not even exist (O'Connor, p. 188). However, O'Connor in p. 193 concludes that most of the instances of crime were committed by those who came from outside to take advantage of, or just to see, the chaos.
Relief efforts began quickly, naturally enough, and often raised quite a bit of money (McCullough, p. 199; on p. 225, he notes contributions totalling over $3,700,000, and that's in 1889 dollars! O'Connor's figure, on p. 247, is 17 million. Many relief supplies were sent as well, although some of them were of extremely poor quality, according to O'Connor, p. 212. The flip side is, Benet, p. 566, lists the damage at ten million dollars). And there was flooding in many areas beyond Johnstown (O'Connor, p. 200), so it was hard to bring in supplies.
There was at the time no organization really devoted to emergency relief -- no FEMA, and while the Red Cross existed, it was still fairly new and didn't have standard procedures yet; Clara Barton -- although by now 68 years old -- herself would lead the trek to Johnstown (O'Connor, p. 205). It would be the largest operation in Red Cross history to this time (McCullough, p. 231).
It would be several days before the Pennsylvania militia showed up (McCullough, p. 202). O'Connor, p. 204, says that a full regiment of 600 men arrived on June 5. That's a big force at a time when the army numbered in the tens of thousands -- but they needed time to set up, and in the interim, there was a lot of crime and mismanagement. Often volunteers would just wander into the Conemaugh valley and, having no idea what to do, simply added to the burdens of those who were doing their best. Still others showed up to work -- but got drunk and caused trouble at night (O'Connor, p. 194), resulting in the establishment of a temporary nail (O'Connor, p. 195).
Fears of epidemics were felt as far away as Pittsburg (after all, the waters of the flood flowed into the Allegheny river); eventually men were assigned to try to clean up the river (McCullough, p. 209). They hauled, sawed, chopped, and eventually dynamited the great heap of flotsam trapped at the bridge (O'Connor, pp. 218-219) -- a process which caused secondary damage (O'Connor, p. 220). It was not until August 22 that the rivers were entirely clear.
In a small stroke of luck, the weather was cold and wet for more than a week after the disaster. It made everyone miserable, but it also helped prevent disease and decay (McCullough, p. 229). There was only one relatively minor outbreak of typhoid, which killed 40 and sickened 421 others (O'Connor, p. 224).
In the aftermath, attention naturally turned to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the maintainers of the dam. There were of course engineers who had publicly stated their concerns about its construction. The newspapers had a field day with this, though often exaggerating the engineers' reports (McCullough, pp. 242-249). Some members of the club did contribute to the relief funds -- the Carnegie Company gave $10,000, e.g. (McCullough, p. 255), but many club members did not give, and the club as a whole offered nothing. Nor were their officers making public statements (O'Connor, p. 226).
Lawsuits eventually began to be filed, but there was a limit on what this could yield -- after deducting a mortgage, the club had assets of only about $15,000 (McCullough, p. 257). The members had more, of course, but the whole principle of a corporation is limited stockholder liability.
There are few records of the actual trials, since transcripts were not kept (McCullough, p. 258), but in the end the club was not held liable. McCullough speculates that the great wealth and power of the club's members helped them.
Plus the great downpour was clearly natural. The only real fault was in the construction of the dam, and only a few officers would have known about that.
McCullough seems to consider the officers guilty, and I would too, but they too got off. The people of Johnstown were apparently bitter (McCullough, p. 264), but they were helpless. Perhaps they derived some small consolation from the fact that the flood, while it didn't destroy the club (except for the dam and the lake), did cause it to shut down (McCullough, p. 264); there wasn't much point in a fishing club with nowhere to fish!
Johnstown would be rebuilt, and the iron mills came back; there were soon jobs for all the remaining workers. But its prosperity seems to have been damaged; the town has only about 30,000 residents now (more than in 1889, but not as much as its pre-flood population growth would suggest). The steelworks would again be flooded as early as 1891 (O'Connor, p. 244), and a major flood took place in 1936 (Shank, p. 43, says that the water was actually higher in 1936 -- which was a year of record floods in Pennsylvania -- but destruction and death far less). The fact that there was no single great release of water was a great help in 1936 (O'Connor, p. 246). Still, power and telephones went out, and a third of area residents lost their homes, although only two dozen died. This finally promoted a real flood control project (O'Connor, p. 282), which spared the city from damage in the major floods of 1972 (Shank, p. 65), but there was another fairly major flood in 1977, according to Merriam Webster's Geographical Dictionary, though none to compare with 1889.
It is little surprise that the event produced songs; it was the biggest news of the day, and McCullough, p. 204, notes that a Pittsburg newspaper actually had to reduce the size of its pages to have enough paper to meet the demand. (Ironically, much of what they published was fiction, such as accounts of a messenger named Peyton who tried to warn people of the flood.)
Laws believes this song to be too literary to be a purely folk composition; he suspects it of having been originally printed in a newspaper. This even though several papers loudly proclaimed that no such poems should be written! (O'Connor, p. 240). McCullough, p. 221, mentions poems written about the event. A popular piece of 1889 was "The Johnstown Flood" of Joe Flynn; I haven't seen a copy to compare. - RBW
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