The Johnstown Flood (3 page)

But had not life always been so? Was not hard work the will of the Lord? (“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground…”) And yes, death too? (“…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”)

And besides, was it not a fine thing to be where there was so much going on, so much to keep a man busy and his family eating regularly?

So far it had been a good year. Except for measles the town seemed pretty healthy. Talk was that it would be a good summer for steel. Prices might well improve, and perhaps wages with them, and there would be no labor trouble to complicate things, as there would probably be in Pittsburgh.

The Quicksteps, Johnstown’s beloved baseball team, had made a rather poor showing so far, losing to Braddock, Greensburg, and McKeesport in a row; but they had beaten Altoona once, and most people felt that about made up for it. The newspapers were full of stories about the World’s Fair opening in Paris, and its Eiffel Tower, and about the Oklahoma Territory opening up out west. Towers of structural steel could reach nearly to the heavens, and Americans could turn a dusty prairie into farms and whole new cities overnight. It was some time to be alive.

But perhaps best of all there seemed such a strong spirit of national unity everywhere. The Constitutional government those Grand Army veterans had fought for had just celebrated its one hundredth birthday that spring and there had been quite a to-do about it in the newspapers and picture magazines. “A nation in its high hour of imperial power and prosperity looks back a hundred years to its obscure and doubtful beginning…” one article began. That the next one hundred years would be better still, bringing wondrous advantages and rewards to millions of people who had also come from “obscure and doubtful” beginnings, seemed about as certain as anything could be; and especially in a place like Johnstown, on a day when flags were flying from one end of town to the other, and the “Boys in Blue” were marching again.

When the rain started coming down about four o’clock, it was very fine and gentle, little more than a cold mist. Even so, no one welcomed it. There had already been more than a hundred days of rain that year, and the rivers were running high as it was. The first signs of trouble had been a heavy snow in April, which had melted almost as soon as it came down. Then in May there had been eleven days of rain.

The rivers ran high every spring. That was to be expected. Some springs they ran so high they filled the lower half of town to the top doorstep. A few times the water had been level with first-floor windows along several streets. Floods had become part of the season, like the dogwood blooming on the mountain. Yet, each year, there was the hope that perhaps this time the rivers might behave themselves.

It had already been such a curious year for weather. A tornado in February had killed seventeen people in Pittsburgh. Not much had happened in Johnstown, but the wind carried off a tin church roof at Loretto. The April snow had been the heaviest of the whole year, with fourteen inches or more in the mountains. And all through May, temperatures had been bouncing every which way, up in the eighties one day, down below freezing two nights later, then back to the eighties again. Now it felt more like March than May.

About five the rain stopped and left everything freshly rinsed looking. The Reverend Chapman, back on his front porch after participating at the graveside ceremonies, sat gazing at the park with its big elms and draped chain fence, and thought to himself that he had seldom looked upon a lovelier scene. Or at least so he wrote later on.

The Reverend had been in Johnstown only a few years, and it had been just the month before that he and his wife, Agnes, had moved into the new parsonage. He had grown up along the canal to the west of Johnstown, at Blairsville, where his father had eked out a living painting decorative scenes and designs on packet boats. His first church had been in Ligonier, on the other side of Laurel Hill. Later there had been churches in New Florence and Bolivar, down the Conemaugh, and half a dozen other places between Johnstown and Pittsburgh. He liked every one of them, he said, but Johnstown was something special. His stone church next door was the largest in town, a landmark, and except for St. Joseph’s, the German Catholic church over in Conemaugh borough, no church had a larger membership. His neighbors across the park, Dr. Lowman and John Fulton, were the finest sort of Christian gentlemen, and their homes were as elegantly furnished as any in town. The Dibert bank, Griffith’s drugstore, the post office and the
Tribune
offices on the floor above it, were all but a few steps from the Reverend’s front door. The parsonage faced on to Franklin Street, at almost the exact dead center of Johnstown.

Night settled in and the lights came on along Franklin and Main. A few blocks away William Kuhn and Daisy Horner were being married in a small ceremony at the bride’s home. At the Opera House Mr. Augustin Daly’s New York production of A
Night Off,
“The comedy success of two continents,” was playing to a small house. Daly was the foremost theatrical producer of the day, and A
Night Off
had been his biggest hit for several years. Like some of his other productions, it was an adaptation from a German comedy, a fact which the Johnstown audience undoubtedly appreciated.

Other than that not much else was going on. Because of the holiday there had been no paper that morning, but according to Wednesday’s
Tribune,
rainstorms were expected late that Thursday; tomorrow, Friday, was to be slightly warmer. The barometric pressure was reported at thirty, temperature from forty-six to sixty-five, humidity at sixty-nine per cent.

About nine the rain began again, gentle and quiet as earlier. But an hour or so later it started pouring and there seemed no end to it. “Sometime in the night,” according to Chapman, “my wife asked if it were not raining very hard, and I being very sleepy, barely conscious of the extraordinary downpour simply answered, ‘Yes,’ and went to sleep, thinking no more of it until morning.”

3

George Heiser’s day did not end until after ten. It was his practice to keep the store open until then. With the saloons along Washington Street doing business on into the night, there were generally people about and he could pick up a little more trade. Either he or his wife Mathilde would be looking after things behind the counter, in among the queen’s ware and the barrels of sugar and crackers, the cases of Ewarts tobacco and yellow laundry soap, needles, spools, pins, and Clark’s “O-N-T” (Our New Thread).

George and Mathilde Heiser, and their sixteen-year-old son, Victor, lived upstairs over the store. They had been at the same location, 224 Washington, for several years now and, at long last, business was looking up. At fifty-two, for the first time in his life, George Heiser was getting on in the world.

Washington Street ran parallel to Main, two blocks to the north. From the Stony Creek over to the Little Conemaugh, the east-west streets—the “up” streets they were called—ran Vine, Lincoln, Main, Locust, Washington. Then came the B & O tracks and the B & O depot which was directly across the street from the Heiser store. Beyond the tracks were two more streets, Broad and Pearl, then the Little Conemaugh, and on the other side of that rose Prospect Hill, steep as a roof. With the town growing the way it had been, the Baltimore & Ohio had brought in a spur from Somerset eight years before to try to take away some of the freight business from the Pennsylvania. An old schoolhouse had been converted into a depot, and the steady night and day racket of the trains right by their window had made quite a difference to the Heisers. But with the store doing as well as it was, George Heiser had few complaints.

George had been troubled by bad luck much of his life. During the war, at Fredericksburg, when his unit had been making a rapid withdrawal, his companion in the ranks, a fellow named Pike, got hit and went down grabbing on to George’s leg and pleading for George not to leave him. As a result they were both captured and George spent the rest of the war in Libby Prison. Then, years later, at a time when he seemed to be getting nowhere in Johnstown, George had gone off north to Oil City hoping to strike it rich. He wound up running a butcher shop instead and in no time was back in Johnstown, flat broke, wiped out by fire and his own lack of business sense.

George had not marched in the parade that afternoon. His blue uniform seldom ever came out of the big wardrobe upstairs. He was not much for parades and the like. He seldom mixed in politics, never became an enthusiastic church man. He neither smoked nor chewed, though he would take a beer every so often and once a year he liked to make wine down in the cellar. He did enjoy the Grand Army meetings, but that was largely because he enjoyed being with his friends. People liked him. He was a good storyteller, easygoing. He was also about as physically powerful as any man in town, and he was a very soft touch. He could lift a barrel full of sugar, which was considered quite a feat; but turning away a friend whose credit might not be the best seemed more than he was up to.

Twice in his life he had let friends have money when they came to him; twice he had suffered heavily from the loss. Fortunately for the Heisers, Mathilde was a determined and sensible wife. She was the manager of the two, and after George came back from Oil City she took charge. She kept the books, saw that he did not let much go on credit. Nor would she allow him to set any chairs out on the bare wooden floor. Otherwise, she said, his cronies would be sitting about half the day giving the place the wrong sort of appearance. They had at last been able to add a new window to the store front and appearances would be maintained so long as Mathilde had her say.

Mathilde’s appearance was straightforward and intelligent. She had a fine head of dark-brown hair, a high forehead, and a set to her mouth that suggested she knew where she was going and that chances were good she would get there. She had had a considerable amount of education for a woman of that time and continued to keep up with her reading. Education was the thing, a proper education and hard work. It had been her way of life since childhood in Germany, and she intended to pass it on to the pride of her life, her son.

Victor was her second child. The first, a girl, had died of diphtheria. Victor had been struck down with it too, but he had been stronger. He looked much like his father now, only a ganglier, rawboned version. He was a serious, pink-faced boy, with big feet and blond hair, taller already than most men and far better educated. At sixteen he knew several languages, was well along in advanced mathematics, and had read about as widely as any boy in Johnstown. At his mother’s insistence, his life was a steady round of school, homework, and being tutored in one extra course or another. If George Heiser had had his troubles making his way, that was one thing; Victor, Mathilde Heiser was determined, would not just get on, he would excel. There would be no going off to the Cambria works or coal mines for this young man, and no clerking behind a store counter either.

Now and again Victor had his moments away from all that. His father would step in and see that he got some time off. George Heiser had a wonderful way with children. He was forever telling them stories and listening to theirs. He took a great interest in his son and his schemes, one of which was to build a raft and float down the Conemaugh to the Allegheny, then on to the Ohio and Mississippi. Victor had taken some night classes in mechanical drawing at the library and had worked up plans on how the raft should be built. His idea was to catch the Conemaugh when it was high, otherwise he knew he would run aground.

In summer he would bring home accounts of his long rides out of town to the open country above the valley. Once he and one of his friends had gone all the way to the South Fork dam to take a look at the lake and the summer colony, but they had been sent on their way by the grounds keeper and never got to see much.

Other nights Victor talked about walking to the edge of town to watch the big summer revival meeting. He loved the powerful singing and the whooping and hollering of people “getting religion.” On the way home he and his friends would try to imitate what they had seen, laughing and pounding each other on the back as they came along the streets. This was the kind of education George Heiser understood. He had grown up in Johnstown himself. His people had been among the Pennsylvania Germans who first settled the valley.

After ten the Heiser store was closed for the day, the lights out downstairs. When the downpour began, George and Mathilde did not think much of it, except that there would almost certainly be high water in the morning. But the thought bothered them very little, except for the inconveniences there might be. They listened to the rain drum on the roof and were glad to be inside.

If there was such a thing as a typical married couple in Johnstown on the night of May 30, 1889, George and Mathilde Heiser would come about as close as any to qualifying. Together, like Johnstown itself, they combined an Old World will to make good in the New with a sort of earlier-American, cracker-barrel willingness to take life pretty much as it came. Unlike a large number of Johnstown people, they were not directly beholden to the Cambria Iron Company, but their fortunes, like those of the entire valley, depended nonetheless on how red those skies glowed at night.

They had suffered the death of a child; they had tried their luck elsewhere and had lost. They fought dirt daily, saved every spare nickel, and took tremendous pride in the progress they were making. All things considered, Johnstown seemed a good place to be. It was their home.

1

The lake had several different names. On old state maps it was the Western Reservoir, the name it had been given more than forty years earlier when the dam was first built. It was also known as the Old Reservoir and Three Mile Dam, which was the most descriptive name of the lot, if somewhat misleading, since the lake was closer to two than three miles long. The Pittsburgh people who had owned it now for ten years, and who had made a number of changes, called it Lake Conemaugh. But in Johnstown, and in the little coal towns and railroad stops along the way to Johnstown, it was generally known as South Fork dam.

South Fork was the nearest place to it of any size. Something like 1,500 people lived there in gaunt little frame houses perched on a hill just back from the tracks and the place where South Fork Creek flows into the Little Conemaugh River. Green hills closed in on every side; the air smelled of coal dust and pine trees. It was a town like any one of a half dozen along the main line of the Pennsylvania between Altoona and Johnstown; except for July and August, when things picked up considerably in South Fork.

The Pittsburgh people were coming and going then, and they were something to see with their troops of beautiful children, their parasols, and servants. Two or three spring wagons and buggies were usually waiting at the depot to take them to the lake. On Saturdays and Sundays the drivers were going back and forth several times a day.

The ride to the lake was two miles along a dusty country road that ran through the woods beside South Fork Creek, past Lamb’s Bridge, then on up the valley almost to the base of the dam.

Seen from down below, the dam looked like a tremendous mound of overgrown rubble, the work of a glacier perhaps. It reared up 72 feet above the valley floor and was more than 900 feet long. Its face was very steep and covered with loose rocks. There were deep crevices between the rocks where, as late as May, you could still find winter ice hiding; but wild grass, bushes, and saplings had long since taken root across nearly all of the face and pushed up vigorously from between the rocks, adding to the over-all impression that the whole huge affair somehow actually belonged to the natural landscape. There was hardly any indication that the thing was the work of man and no suggestion at all of what lay on the other side, except over at the far left, at the eastern end of the dam, where a spillway had been cut through the solid rock of the hillside and a wide sheet of water came crashing down over dark boulders. It was a most picturesque spot, and a favorite for picnics. Long shafts of sunlight slanted through a leafy gloom where the mountain laurel grew higher than a man could reach. And at the base of the falls a wooden bridge crossed the loud water and sent the road climbing straight to a clump of trees at the top of the dam, just to the right of the spillway.

There the road divided, with the left-hand fork crossing another long wooden bridge which went directly over the spillway. But carriages heading for the club took the road to the right, which turned sharply out of the trees into the sunshine and ran straight across the breast of the dam where, about a hundred yards out, the drivers customarily stopped long enough for everyone to take in the view.

To the right the dam dropped off a great deal more abruptly even than it had looked from below, and South Fork Creek could be seen glittering through the trees as it wound toward Lamb’s Bridge.

On the other side of the road the bank sloped sharply to the water’s edge, which was usually no more than six or seven feet below the top of the dam. From there the broad surface of the lake, gleaming in the sunlight, swept off down the valley until it disappeared behind a wooded ridge in the distance.

Along the eastern shore, to the left, were the hayfields and orchards of the Unger farm, neatly framed with split-rail fences. Beyond that was what was known as Sheep’s Head Point, a grassy knoll that jutted out into the lake. Then there were one, two, three ridges, and the water turned in behind them, out of sight, running, so it seemed, clear to the hazy blue horizon off to the south.

At the western end of the dam the road swung on through the woods, never far from the water, for another mile or so, to the main grounds of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which, seen from the dam, looked like a colorful string of doll houses against the distant shore line.

From the dam to the club, across the water, was about a mile. Except for a few small coves, the narrowest part of the lake was at the dam, but there was one spot, on down past the club, where an east-west line across the water was nearly a mile. A hike the whole way around the shore was five miles.

When the water was up in the spring, the lake covered about 450 acres and was close to seventy feet deep in places. The claim, in 1889, was that it was the largest man-made lake in the country, which it was not. But even so, as one man in Johnstown often told his children, it was “a mighty body of water to be up there on the mountain.”

The difference in elevation between the top of the dam and the city of Johnstown at the stone bridge was about 450 feet, and the distance from the dam to that point, by way of the river valley, was just under fifteen miles. Estimates are that the water of Lake Conemaugh weighed about 20 million tons.

The water came from half a dozen streams and little creeks that rushed down from Blue Knob and Allegheny Mountain, draining some sixty square miles. There was Rorabaugh Creek, Toppers Run, Yellow Run, Bottle Run, Muddy Run, South Fork Creek, and one or two others which seem never to have been named officially. South Fork Creek and Muddy Run were the biggest of them, but South Fork Creek was at least twice the size of the others. Even in midsummer it was a good twenty feet across. Like the others it was shallow, ice-cold, very swift, and just about a perfect place for trout fishing.

In South Fork there were scores of people who had been out on the dam and had seen the view. There were others who knew even more about the club and the goings on there because they worked on the grounds, tending lawns or waiting on tables at the clubhouse. But for everyone else the place was largely a mystery. It was all private property, and as the club managers had made quite clear on more than one occasion, uninvited guests were definitely not welcome.

The club had been organized in Pittsburgh in 1879. It owned the dam, the lake, and about 160 acres besides. By 1889 sixteen cottages had been built along the lake, as well as boathouses and stables. The cottages were set out in an orderly line among the trees, not very far apart, and only a short way back from the water. They looked far too substantial really to be called “cottages.” Nearly every one of them was three stories tall, with high ceilings, long windows, a deep porch downstairs, and, often as not, another little porch or two upstairs tucked under sharp-peaked roofs. The Lippincott house with its two sweeping front porches, one set on top of the other, and its fancy jigsaw trim, looked like a Mississippi riverboat. The Moorhead house was Queen Anne style, which was “all the rage” then; it had seventeen rooms and a round tower at one end with tinted glass windows. And the Philander Knox house, next door, was not much smaller.

But even the largest of them was dwarfed by the clubhouse. It had enough windows and more than enough porch for ten houses. There were forty-seven rooms inside. During the season most of the club members and their guests stayed there, and the rule was that everyone had to take his meals there in the main dining room, where 150 could sit down at one time.

In the “front rooms” there were huge brick fireplaces for chilly summer nights, billiard tables, and heavy furniture against the walls. In summer, after the midday dinner, the long front porch was crowded with cigar-smoking industrialists taking the air off the water. String hammocks swung under the trees. Young women in long white dresses, their faces shaded under big summer hats, strolled the boardwalks in twos and threes, or on the arms of very proper-looking young men in dark suits and derbies. Cottages were noisy with big families, and on moonlight nights there were boating parties on the lake and the sound of singing and banjos across the black water.

In all the talk there would be about the lake in the years after it had vanished, the boats, perhaps more than anything else, would keep coming up over and over again. Boats of any kind were a rare sight in the mountains. There were rowboats on the old Suppes ice pond at the edge of Johnstown, and a few men had canoes along the river below the city. But that was about it. Not since the time when Johnstown had been the start of the canal route west had there been boats in any number, and then they had been only ungainly canal barges.

The club fleet included fifty rowboats and canoes, sailboats, and two little steam yachts that went puttering about flying bright pennants and trailing feathers of smoke from their tall funnels. There was even an electric catamaran, a weird-looking craft with a searchlight mounted up front, which had been built by a young member, Louis Clarke, who liked to put on a blue sailor’s outfit for his cruises around the lake.

But it was the sailboats that made the greatest impression. Sailboats on the mountain! It seemed almost impossible in a country where water was always a tree-crowded creek or stream, wild and dangerous in the spring, not much better than ankle-deep in the hottest months. Yet there they were: white sails moving against the dark forest across a great green mirror of a lake so big that you could see miles and miles of sky in it.

Some of the people in Johnstown who were, as they said, “privileged” to visit the club on August Sundays brought home vivid descriptions of young people gliding over the water under full sail. It was a picture of a life so removed from Johnstown that it seemed almost like a fantasy, ever so much farther away than fifteen miles, and wholly untouchable. It was a picture that would live on for a long time after.

That the Pittsburgh people also took enormous pleasure in the sight seems certain. There was no body of water such as this anywhere near Pittsburgh. There were, of course, the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, but they were not exactly clean any longer, and with the mills going full blast, which they had been for some time now, the air around them was getting a little more unpleasant each year. It was a curious paradox; the more the city prospered, the more uncomfortable it became living there. Progress could be downright repressive. But fortunately for the Pittsburgh people, it was very much within their power to create and maintain a place so blessed with all of nature’s virtues.

This water was pure and teeming with fish, and the air tasted like wine after Pittsburgh. The woods were full of songbirds and deer that came down to drink from the mist-hung lake at dawn. There were wild strawberries everywhere, and even on the very hottest days it was comfortable under the big trees.

In fact, with its bracing air, its lovely lake, and the intense quiet of its cool nights, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club must have seemed like paradise after Pittsburgh. Under such a spell even a Presbyterian steel master might wish to unbend a little.

The summer resort idea was something new for that part of the country. And only the favored few had the time or the money to experiment with it. But so far every indication was that the club was a great success. There had been problems from time to time. Poachers had been a continuing nuisance. The summer of 1888 had been cut short when a scarlet-fever scare sent everyone packing off home to Pittsburgh. Still, everything considered, in 1889 it looked as though the men who had bought the old dam ten years earlier knew what they were doing.

2

The first member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to take an interest in the regenerative powers of the Alleghenies was Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie had been going to what he called “The Glorious Mountain” long before the South Fork organization was put together. He had his own modest frame house at Cresson, which was one of the first summer resorts in Pennsylvania and the only one of any consequence in the western part of the state. It was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad and was located fourteen miles up the line from South Fork at the crest of the Allegheny range.

Cresson, or Cresson Springs as it was also known, had been started before the Civil War by a doctor named Robert Montgomery Smith Jackson. The main attractions at Cresson, aside from the mountain air and scenery, were the “iron springs,” the best-known of which was the Ignatius Spring, named after “the venerable huntsman” Ignatius Adams, who first discovered its life-preserving powers and whose ghost was said still to haunt the place. According to Jackson, “by drinking this water, dwelling in the woods and eating venison,” Ignatius had “lived near the good old age of one hundred years.” Jackson was against whiskey, slavery, and what he called the “present tendency to agglomerate in swarms, or accumulate in masses and mobs.” Those “gregarious instincts [which] now impel this race to fix its hopes of earthly happiness on city life alone” would, he was convinced, be the undoing of the race. Life in the country was the answer to practically every one of man’s ills, and particularly life on the Allegheny Mountain.

Jackson’s ambition (“a mission, solemn as a command from Heaven,” he called it) was to make Cresson “the place of restoration for all forms of human suffering.” He got his friend J. Edgar Thomson, president of the Pennsylvania, interested, and the railroad built a hotel and developed the place, though, as things turned out, along rather different lines. Carnegie, B. F. Jones, and a few other Pittsburgh businessmen, none of whom seems to have been suffering very much, built cottages and the summer trade flourished. Every passenger train bound east or west stopped there. Well-to-do families from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia arrived for summer stays of several weeks.

Jackson meanwhile had set down the fundamentals of his philosophy along with a detailed natural history of the Allegheny highlands in a book called The
Mountain.
He borrowed heavily from Wordsworth and Thoreau, and, in his own way, did about as much as anyone to sum up the wild beauty of the area. Also, in his spare time, he tended bar at the hotel and would be remembered for years after for the two jars he kept prominently displayed on one shelf, flanked on either side by whiskey bottles. In each jar, preserved in alcohol, was a human stomach. One had belonged to a man who had died a natural death, and was, according to all who saw it, an exceedingly unappetizing sight. But it was, nonetheless, an improvement over its companion piece, which, according to its label, had belonged to a man who had died of delirium tremens. When setting out drinks, the doctor seldom failed to call attention to his display. The result was that his bar became the best patronized of any for miles about. Regular customers grew quite attached to the jars; word of them spread far, and along with the iron springs, they appear to have been a major attraction at Cresson for several years.