WHILE CARNEGIE, MAKING HIS UNTOLD MILLIONS IN RAIL, OIL, telegraph, iron, and steel, lived part of his mental life in poetry, literature, and rejuvenating contemplation of natural beauty, it was Benjamin Franklin Ruff, far less famous than some of the other members of the South Fork Club, who actually conceived of creating a mountain retreat at the crest of the Alleghenies above Johnstown, bought the land, started improving it, and sold shares in the enterprise to his mighty friends among the captains of industry. And it was Benjamin Ruff who dammed up the South Fork Creek.
Benjamin Ruff was no Andrew Carnegie, but that didn’t make him unusual among the big men of Pittsburgh: nobody but Carnegie was Carnegie, though everybody had to do business with him, and Ruff was no exception. An important figure in booming industrial Pennsylvania, intense-looking and peremptory to an extreme degree, with a black beard, he was the same age as Carnegie, having begun life in 1835, in Schenectady, New York, and like many others he’d risen to prominence in western Pennsylvania doing business with the railroad, in Ruff’s case as a tunnel contractor. He’d also made money selling coke and brokering real estate deals.
Now he envisioned a gorgeous summer retreat up on the mountains. Here the great men of the day, along with those who had enough money to style themselves great, would escape the cares of business and find peace and quiet at play, far from the prying eyes of the hoi polloi who worked for them below.
In addition to increased privacy, the new club’s most important improvement over Carnegie’s Cresson was to involve fishing and boating. Cresson had springs, of course; its full name was Cresson Springs. But it had no lake. How could it? Cresson was nearly at the top of the mountains, and the Allegheny crests don’t offer those rare craters where, in some other regions, mountaintop lakes may sometimes exist. The Alleghenies form a big part of the Appalachian divide: the runoff drains, via many rivers, east to the Atlantic Ocean, west to the Ohio, and then to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. That water doesn’t stay around. There are no lakes.
But the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club would have a lake, and a beautiful one at that. If nature couldn’t supply the Allegheny crest with such an important feature, then Benjamin Ruff would simply have to do it himself.
The Pittsburgh millionaires’ deep desire for a lake responded to certain recreational crazes just then taking off among the well-heeled, not only in Pittsburgh and environs but around the country. These sport crazes in one way aligned nicely with Carnegie’s ideas about the spiritually regenerative powers of recreation, natural beauty, and contemplation. Yet they also went well beyond such simple prescriptions. These sports called for a lot of gear.
Black-bass fishing, for one. While fishing had long been the consummate gentleman’s hobby—Izaak Walton’s classic The Compleat Angler was published in 1653—those traditions referred mainly to fly fishing for trout and salmon, the sport of Scottish lairds and those who wanted to feel like them. There was a certain elegance to fly fishing, and wealthy Americans had taken it up at least as early as the middle of the century. Fly rods were long and took expert handling in order to get the light “fly”—it might be one of many artistically tied creations masking a hook—looping back and forth through the air before landing with a gossamer touch on the water’s surface, to bring a trout eagerly seeking a bite onto the hook. That was dry-fly casting; wet-fly fishing, less impressive, involved submerging the fly and waiting for a bite. Either way, you might make a little campfire and roast one or more of these trout, or bring them home to fry for breakfast, but eating wasn’t the point of the exercise. That’s what made angling for trout a gentleman’s sport.
Black-bass fishing, by contrast, had generally been carried out for purposes of getting food. That meant it was done by poorer people, using not extra-long, whippet-thin rods or fancy, hand-tied artificial bait but short, sturdy poles and live bait, usually worms and minnows. And yet by the middle of the nineteenth century, American sportsmen, in a kind of Yank rebellion against the complicated pretensions of British fly fishermen, developed a new sport out of the hunt for the black bass. As the Gilded Age began, bass fishing competed with and sometimes complemented trout fishing in the pantheon of the manly pastimes of the upscale.
So bass fishing too now had its artificial lures, not flies but glittery tin or brass spoons for trolling from the stern of a slowly rowed boat, fake minnows for casting. And to the bass-fishing gearhead of the day, these lures took on some of the mystical properties that fly fishermen often ascribed to flies. Long debates about tackle and gear could while away many an hour over a post-angling drink or three. Nor were upscale bass fishermen allergic to the live-bait approach taken by the working-class originators of the game. Sportsmen too now baited their hooks with real minnows, grasshoppers, frogs, and saltwater shrimp tinned in brine.
Not worms, though. That would be taking things just a step too far.
Along with bass fishing, there was another water sport requiring a lake, when Benjamin Ruff was seeking out land for his hunting and fishing club: sailing. The New York Yacht Club, the first American organization devoted to sailing not as a means of conveyance but as a sport, had been founded in 1844, and while racing big boats on the ocean was an expeditionary adventure, small-boat sailing had come into vogue on the wide, windy lakes of the Adirondacks and the White Mountains where the wealthy decamped for the summer. Young people especially could be seen heeling their boats at extreme angles, running the big lakes in a thrill of sheer speed.
That wasn’t something you could do anywhere near Pittsburgh. Lakes were scarce not only in the mountains but everywhere in the state, and rivers throughout the region had long been dirtied, dammed, and beaten up by oil and mining projects. You just didn’t find clean lakes filled with fishermen and fast-flying sailors enjoying pure mountain air. But Pittsburgh’s elite wanted to relax and recreate as easterners did, and Benjamin Ruff was going to see that they could.
He knew just where the right land lay. Farther than Cresson from the railroad, with its hoi polloi, yet still plenty convenient to Pittsburgh, a big plot of land lay along the South Fork of the Conemaugh River. And on that land was a lake. Well, no, not a lake. The makings of one.
More than thirty years earlier, up there above Johnstown, the South Fork had been dammed up. Rocky and fast, the South Fork brought drainage from many other rivers down into the Little Conemaugh, the longer, bending river falling down the valley into Johnstown, where it joined the Stony Creek to become the Conemaugh proper, flowing northwest all the way into the Allegheny River above Pittsburgh. The South Fork had been dammed all those years before because the Little Conemaugh, of which it was a tributary, had once served as a water source for one of the most astonishing projects the state of Pennsylvania, or anyone else, had ever achieved: the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal. That canal system, in its heyday, had needed a feeder reservoir. But the heyday had been surprisingly brief.
Running all the way to and from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, in competition with New York’s Erie Canal, and facing the unique challenge of the Allegheny barrier dividing the eastern and western segments of the state, the Main Line Canal was completed in the spring of 1832. Amazingly, barges could suddenly make the trip between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in only three days of steady movement, not only pulled by mules on towpaths through canal water but actually hauled, where necessary, over the precipitous mountains by a series of steam lifts and rail lines and inclined planes with counterweights, then returned to the canals to be hauled again by the mules. Nobody had ever seen anything like it: the “portage system,” as it was known, combined steam, hemp cables, narrow-gauge rail, and weights, and the English novelist Charles Dickens, for one, took the ride just for the experience of looking down from a canal barge on rooftops and trees. This was a state-funded project, one of the wonders of the age, and incredibly expensive.
Then, in the 1850s, Andrew Carnegie’s friends at the Pennsylvania Railroad built the equally daring and justly famous Horseshoe Curve. That was a huge rail embankment project, hand built and hand blasted by Irish laborers. Taking in the vertiginous, panoramic view out over a deep valley, train passengers could see, ahead on the long curve, an oncoming train hugging the hillside or hanging over the air more than a mile away. That curve defeated the mountainous obstruction and got a steam engine from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh even faster than anything the canal system could achieve, and with far greater capacity.
So both the portage process and the whole canal system were abruptly made obsolete. They were sold off by the state to the railway company that had made them so, and as Carnegie and his friends were off and running with rail, the whole amazing canal project went into disuse forever, its parts sitting around doing nothing. The canal had moved fast, the train faster, but fastest of all was the pace of change itself, with the concomitant abrupt discard of systems that had seemed, for a moment, miraculous engines of the future, but quickly turned out to have been only technological byways, money sinkholes, relics whose crumbling infrastructure would hang around sadly while the real world raced on past.
In the meantime, however, the South Fork had been dammed. Back when the amazing canal system was still early in its short life, it became clear that the Conemaugh River, which normally fed the canal, could get too low in summer dry spells. The state therefore needed a feeder: a reservoir, higher up, with sluices to let supplementary water run down into the canal. In 1838, the canal’s head engineer explored the region of the South Fork and picked out a good site for a dam that would raise the creek and push it out, along with its many feeders, flooding a four-hundred-acre valley between hillsides into a broad reservoir.
Dam construction didn’t get going until 1840, and even then the state quickly ran out of money—the canal system, for one thing, was bankrupting it—and then there was a cholera epidemic. So work on the dam didn’t resume in earnest until 1850, and nobody working on it knew that within a few years, thanks to the railroad, all of this effort would be for nothing. The state’s contractors and builders therefore threw their hearts, souls, brains, and backs into building the South Fork dam.
Like all other effective dams of the time, the South Fork dam was made of earth: horizontal layers of clay. Each layer was pounded down tight under a standing layer of water: that way, the earthen layer would become waterproof; only then was the next layer added. At that painstaking pace, the structure eventually rose 62 feet high and 930 feet long, a curving form 270 feet wide at its base and only about 20 at its flat top. The nearly perpendicular outer surface was stuck with gigantic rocks, added to make it look like a big work of fieldstone masonry; the more sloping inner surface was similarly coated, but with smaller rocks.
On each of its ends, the dam was attached to the hillsides that rose high above the banks of the South Fork. And at the eastern end, a 72-foot-wide spillway was excavated a good 8 feet below the top of the dam, cut not through the earth core of the dam itself but through the solid hillside rock, using dynamite to blast a channel, dropping quickly to bring water cascading down a series of rock steps through the woods to enter the natural river channel below. This spillway’s purpose, like that of any passive drain, was to relieve the reservoir of its water whenever the level should reach the spillway’s height, well below the dam’s top. The water level, as relieved by the spillway, could thus never climb high enough to run over the top of the dam—“top it,” as they said. Water topping an earthen dam and spilling over its outer face will inevitably wear down the face, erode the earthwork, and bring the dam down.
The reservoir resulting from damming the South Fork in that manner was meant to supply the canal below, during drought season, not via the spillway—that was just to control water level—but through five iron pipes, each two feet in diameter, set in a stone culvert running through the dam at the center of its base: the canal would thus be fed from the bottom of the reservoir. A wooden tower, connected to the dam and set above the lake, near the inner face of the dam, held controls for opening and closing valves in each of the five sluice pipes, thus precisely regulating the discharge, holding water in the reservoir or letting it out, in a finely controlled manner, down into the canal.
In June 1852, the reservoir’s sluice pipes were closed up and the South Fork began flooding the whole clear-cut, four-hundred-acre area, in order to feed the soon-to-be-obsolete canal. It took about three months for the river, thus blocked, to rise and spread itself and flood the huge, broad area: a reservoir, ultimately about sixty feet deep, two miles long, behind the South Fork dam. In the fall, water from the reservoir began feeding the canal via the sluice pipes operated by the controls in the wooden tower. This was only about a year before the first steam engine was to run the rails from Philadelphia, round the stunning Horseshoe Curve, roll on to Pittsburgh, and make the whole canal project, along with the reservoir and the dam, irrelevant.
That was a very good dam. Had it been maintained, it would have held up for decades and survived extreme flood conditions.
But it wasn’t maintained. The Pennsylvania Railroad, having superseded the entire canal system, bought the whole canal system at a bargain price from the state, with a view to privatizing it. There wasn’t much percentage in that, though, and what the company really did is ignore the parts of the system that didn’t involve rail. The system’s many nonrail structures—tunnels with stone archways, inclined planes, pulleys—collapsed to ruin in the woods, more romantic and mysterious as the years went by. The company did post a watchman at the reservoir it had bought along with everything else. But otherwise it ignored the dam.
Posting a watchman was a good idea: in its state of neglect, the dam broke in 1862 during a record downpour. That’s because the culvert with the sluice pipes had degraded, and the dam sank and partly collapsed around that point at the center of the base. Happily, the watchman had opened the pipes during the storm, letting off a lot of water, and the abandoned reservoir was only half-full anyway when the breach and sinking occurred. While the sudden, uncontrolled spill did some damage to the railroad’s tracks, it did little harm to the towns below.
The dam itself, however, so lovingly and expertly constructed, had now partially collapsed. Even while it had remained in place, it had lost integrity; it sagged and leaked and after a while almost all of the water had leaked out. There was no reservoir any more, just a big, ten-foot-deep puddle and a wide grassy area where water had dried and vegetation revived. Sheep and cattle were sometimes left to graze there. At some point, the wooden control tower burned to the ground, and by the 1870s the whole thing was nothing but a weird, wet, woodland ruin.
Until, that is, the old collapsed dam and wetland, having served so briefly as the canal system’s reservoir, caught the eye of Benjamin Franklin Ruff.
The Adirondack lakes, on which the eastern establishment elites built their gigantic woodland “cottages,” lay 1,500 feet and more above sea level, where the air was fresh and cool. Lake Placid, for example, one of the most beautiful and popular of those Adirondack retreats, was built on a spot nearly 2,000 feet high. Yet around those lakes are mountain peaks: Whiteface rises nearly another 3,000 feet above Lake Placid, Mount Marcy looms 3,000 feet over Elk Lake. That vast New York wilderness is filled with high, broad, rolling valleys and bowls where glaciers left nice lakes.
The Alleghenies, lower than the Adirondacks, consist of a series of parallel, curving ridges, each rising with impressive steepness out of the valleys, not featuring any sweeping bowls or long alpine valleys. The beauty of the Alleghenies lies not in towering heights and peaks but in ruggedness: you’re either climbing or descending, hard; there are outcroppings and drop-offs and vertiginous views. The glaciers that left standing bodies of water behind moved across only a small portion of Pennsylvania, leaving the rest alone. Nature thus allows for no big lakes at all up in the Alleghenies. There’s nowhere there for spring and river water to collect and flush and refill.
But Benjamin Ruff had a vision, and the resort, he determined, could be built up high, not far from the crest, where the air was the nicest, just like Carnegie’s beloved Cresson, because there was already a big spread of timber-cut land, overgrown now but by no means reforested, and there was even a crumbling ruin of a dam that could be easily rebuilt, blocking up the South Fork and creating the kind of sparkling mountaintop lake that invites fishing, boating, recreation, and restoration. By the time Ruff was looking to buy the property, in 1879, this place with the ruin of a dam no longer belonged to the railroad company but to a one-term congressman, John Reilly, serving in the House on hiatus between long terms as an official of the railroad. He’d bought the property from his employers there for $2,500 in 1875. Reilly did nothing to develop the property, and when Ruff came along, the congressman was so happy to unload it that he took a $500 loss in the sale.
Now in possession, Ruff created twenty-one shares in the proposed venture, set aside four for himself, and offered the rest, at $200 per share, to fifteen other big men of Pittsburgh. When fourteen of them bought a share each, at $200, Ruff might have seemed to turn a profit, but there was money to be spent on transforming the property. Membership in the club was to cost $800, and to keep things exclusive, no more than one hundred members were to be admitted, along with their families, at any given time. There would be a clubhouse, with rooms to let, and where the members and their guests would be served meals, but in order to encourage the members to build lakeside cottages, no stay at the clubhouse could exceed two weeks.
The fifteenth shareholder bought three shares. This was Henry Clay Frick, only twenty-nine at the time, yet already the world’s most famous coal baron and a close friend of Benjamin Ruff. When the club formed, Andrew Carnegie wasn’t yet a member, and Henry Frick was the biggest name on the secret membership rolls. As a founder, and as a controlling member, Frick would have much to do with decisions made by the club and with what happened at the end of May 1889. But nobody would ever find out exactly what that was, because Henry Clay Frick kept everything to himself.
His mother, Elizabeth Overholt, was the child of wealthy Mennonites of West Overton, near Pittsburgh, immigrants from Germany, owners of much property around West Overton, including an entire village, as well as two big, commercial distilleries that made the rye whiskey later to be branded as Old Overholt. These weren’t artisanal whiskey producers like those who had become whiskey rebels, but commercial beneficiaries of the federal suppression of the rebellion. One of the Overholt plants could put out 860 gallons per day.
Yet Henry Frick’s father, John, was poor, a farmer barely making it. Henry grew up with a fervent desire to emulate his rich Overholt grandfather.
And by 1879, not yet thirty when he and Ruff took a controlling interest in the South Fork Club, Frick had well surpassed that goal. Relying more on charm and drive than good credit, in 1871 he got loans from the Pittsburgh banking family the Mellons—he was good friends with young Andrew Mellon—and went into business in the Connellsville, Pennsylvania, coal fields. He soon began supplying the iron business and then the steel boom with what its furnaces needed every hour of every day: coke. Having just begun that business, Frick saw that the financial panic of 1873, driving investment value down everywhere, could benefit him. Starting at 3:00 A.M., he would supervise his coke ovens in Connellsville, then look for deals on failing properties, then go to Pittsburgh to take orders for coke, then head back to Connellsville to do the daily books. In that way he began to corner the coke market. When a feeder railroad was about to go under, leaving Frick with no way to get his coke to market, he bought the controlling shares in the rail company at rock-bottom prices. That gave him ownership of his means of moving his coke. Risking heavy buying in a down market, and believing that coke must rebound, by 1878 Frick had one thousand ovens producing one hundred freight-car loads of coke every day, and he was right: coke had rebounded. He was a millionaire.
Still ahead of him: his famous union-busting, collaboration, and competition with Andrew Carnegie, and acquisition of European art on a mass scale. Yet Frick already wanted to get away from the smell of the coal his workers labored to mine and burn. He needed restoration in the mountain air in the company of his wealthy peers. Frick encouraged Ruff to buy the site of the old reservoir and form the club.
With seven shares of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club between them, Frick and Ruff formed a strong majority combination. Ruff wrote a corporate charter to form the club, registering it with the Allegheny County Court in Pittsburgh, where the organization’s offices were to be maintained, and not in Cambria County, where the property was located. That was illegal, but Judge Edwin H. Stowe of Pittsburgh, a veteran jurist beloved and endorsed for years by all parties and factions of influential men, had no problem overlooking the requirement that corporate charters be entered with the court of the county in which they operate. The people and officials of Cambria County thus had no warning of what was about to go on, up on the mountain above the industrial towns along the Conemaugh River.
The Ruff-Frick majority shareholder combination also took the lead in creating the club not only on paper but also physically. The big thing, of course, was making a lake. That meant redamming the South Fork Creek.
The question facing Ruff was how to get the old dam back, as inexpensively and quickly as possible. In the fall of 1879, the club had more than sixty members eager to hunt, fish, boat, and relax, out of the heat and stink of Pittsburgh. They wanted to get that going next summer. Ruff’s first idea was to rebuild the dam to a height of only forty feet—twenty feet shorter than the original—while compensating by cutting the spillway twenty feet deeper. That sounded cheaper and faster at first, but when a closer look suggested otherwise, Ruff bit the bullet. The dam had to be repaired and rebuilt, if not to its original height, then nearly so. He’d overseen the digging of railroad tunnels. He had no doubt he could engineer dam repair.
The first step was to disable and fill in the stone culvert in the center of the old dam’s base, where the discharge sluice pipes had run. That’s what the dam had collapsed around, when it broke in 1862. But to do that, Ruff needed labor, and that’s how the people of Johnstown and the surrounding towns first gained confirmation that a massive construction project was going on, nearly five hundred feet over their heads. On October 15, 1879, an ad ran in the Johnstown Tribune offering work to fifty men. The organization proposing this work wasn’t named, but of course the location had to be revealed to the workers, and rumors had already flown that some sort of club was building a summer resort up there. Now it was out in the open.
Membership in the club, however, was not. Nor was any club charter on file in the Cambria County courthouse.
Along with the workers, service people carting materials gained access, too, as well as the unavoidable bystanders. So as work began on stabilizing the old culvert at the base, with the purpose of shoring up the derelict dam, residents of the valley below, and of the little town of South Fork, not far from the club’s property, began to see just what Benjamin Ruff’s ideas about dam engineering really involved. Stories trickled down of what was going on up on the mountain.
These accounts conflicted. Some said the five rusted sluice pipes had already been removed: Reilly, the former owner, had sold them for scrap. Others were sure the pipes were still there, in degraded form: Ruff’s process involved encapsulating them with layers of hemlock boughs and other material. Everybody agreed on one thing: Ruff’s first big move in rebuilding the dam was to dump and pack anything and everything that could be found to fill up the old stone culvert at the bottom far below the steep hillsides. Workers brought rocks from the hillsides, hemlock from the woods, and hay and manure from the farms. That all got packed into the culvert. Whether the pipes were long gone or simply covered up and blocked, the culvert was clearly no longer operational. There was to be no water discharge, controllable by any mechanisms, via the dam itself. Only the passive spillway would relieve high water.
The main earthen structure, meanwhile, got no significant repair, despite the collapse’s having lowered it and let water get into it. The earth structure was raised, but in the end not quite to the old level.
And so the dam promptly failed. With work ongoing, on Christmas Day of 1879 a downpour washed away what had been completed. Nothing could resume until the summer of 1880, postponing sport and relaxation by a year. On Ruff’s engineering model the dam was more or less completed in January 1881. Then a February rain caused further damage. Repair work began.
Still, after all that, by the end of March 1881 there was an actual rebuilt dam, and it was an amazing and impressive thing to see. Viewed from below, the earthwork loomed above the valley of the Little Conemaugh like a work of the gods. Its flat top was more than twenty feet wide and more than seven hundred feet long, connecting the high hillsides. For the club members’ comfort, a carriage road traversed the chasm on the dam’s broad top, offering a commanding view out over the whole countryside that fell away far below. On the spillway end, two trestle bridges crossed above the cascade to connect the road on the hill to the road atop the dam, one bridge for each traffic direction. Also by March, the South Fork had swelled and risen behind the dam, flooding the whole area and becoming a clear, broad lake more than two miles long—in spring floods it could be three miles—and sixty feet deep.
That’s what they’d really been building, of course: not a dam but a lovely lake. It was time to get crews started building small steamboats, and to stock the lake with the fish sportsmen coveted. One thousand black bass, bought at one dollar per fish, traveled by rail from Lake Erie in their own tank car. Only one died along the way. Up the mountain they came, by horse-drawn wagon, to be released in the deep water of what truly now was a lake, filled not only with imported bass but also with the trout that came naturally with the South Fork Creek.
Just as naturally, the fish would want to leave the scene, via the spillway cascade, whenever the water rose high enough to usher them out that way. But Ruff had thought of that. To keep the prize bass in the lake, he ordered a complicated apparatus installed at the spillway. This fishguard, as it was called, involved hanging a row of iron rods from the trestle bridge nearer the dam’s inner wall. The rods plunged into the water of the lake before the spillway and formed, with wire netting attached, a barrier to exit. Further discouragement came from a boxlike structure made of logs bristling with nails, forming a V with the point facing into the lake, floating vertically on the water’s surface, rising and falling with the lake’s level to guard the spillway, and also secured to the trestle’s posts. The whole apparatus would have struck a more experienced dam engineer as more or less designed to defeat, or at least seriously compromise, the tendency of a spillway to spill. But the fish weren’t going anywhere.
Ruff, Frick, and the other members had put up with a lot of delay, thanks to washouts. Now they could look with satisfaction upon their wide, glistening mountain lake filled with fish leaping for the hook and little steamboats plying the waters: a lake ready for sailing and fishing and the building of lakeside homes. They named their new-made creation Lake Conemaugh, and in the summer of 1881, relaxation and recreation began in earnest at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, to the great dismay and disapproval of Daniel J. Morrell.