WHEN LOCAL CREWS BEGAN IMPLEMENTING BENJAMIN RUFF’S approach to dam engineering, in the fall of 1879, Daniel Morrell decided he didn’t like what Ruff was up to, didn’t trust Ruff’s engineering instincts, and was going to make Ruff alter the dam project to ensure the safety of the people and property—the Cambria Works, the Gautier wire factory, the whole city, and everything else Morrell owned and for which he took responsibility—down below.
The club membership was secret, of course. Yet ordinary people down in the valley and back in Pittsburgh could guess who might have joined, and from the time the club began operations in 1881, and then as the membership swelled toward its maximum enrollment throughout the decade, and right through the disastrous events of May 31, 1889, people did guess.
“The Bosses’ Club”: that’s what an article in a Pittsburgh paper called the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. And everyone knew who the biggest bosses were: Carnegie and Frick, of course, in steel, coal, and everything else; Andrew Mellon the banking scion; and Robert Pitcairn, head of the western section of the Pennsylvania Railroad. These were the first men of Pittsburgh, a status that placed some of them among the leading men of the nation.
The mystery of club membership only amplified anxiety. People living down in Johnstown and the other towns below the newly created mountaintop lake had obvious reason for concern. News from the mountain of Ruff’s engineering style in rebuilding the dam, the failure of the disused canal dam back in 1862, and the washouts even while reconstruction was going on made people nervous, and they wanted to know for sure who was behind the project. It was hard to find out anything much about the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. The club’s management, as deployed by Benjamin Ruff, made it as hard as possible for any ordinary person to wander onto the grounds and poke about. Still, as the grand, brightly painted Queen Anne cottages got built and landscaped, and the white sails flew across the lake under crisp blue skies, and the well-turned-out big-city families arrived by train to be taxied, along with their servants and trunks, up to the lake by horse-drawn spring wagons and buggies, the labor, skills, and services of plenty of local people from the Johnstown area were needed at the club—there were lawns to manicure and flower beds to tend, food to serve, and boats and a clubhouse to maintain—a lot of local people got a good sense of what the place was like, and of the sort of people who frolicked and rested up there.
So a fair number of people got a good, hard look at the dam. They weren’t blind. They could imagine—they thought they could, anyway—what might befall the towns below should the dam break and the water in the lake come down the mountain all at once.
What they didn’t have was any good way of expressing their discomfort and getting something done about it. There were no laws or regulations regarding damming up a property; there was no government charged with oversight; there was no collective clout that the worried citizens of the valley could bring to bear. Even if there had been, the city of Johnstown was divided into many separate boroughs, each with its own independent government, and no love was lost among them. There was simply no regular political process for expressing the people’s will, no law to which anybody could appeal. Conflicts like this came down to a matter of leading-citizen types undertaking responsibility for pressuring other leading-citizen types to do what was right.
In the matter of the South Fork dam, responsibility for addressing concerns about the project and doing something about it lay with the one man whose identification with both the Cambria company and the city of Johnstown was total: Daniel Morrell. Not only the head of the bank, the gas- and waterworks, and intermittently the city council, Morrell had by now also served two terms in Congress and had a lot of pull in the state’s Republican Party. These were his towns, these his people, and he liked to think that while he busted unions without compunction, he took care of his people. Morrell also had plenty of reason to suspect the glittering Pittsburgh crew of heedlessness, even flightiness, when it came to practical matters like dam construction. His interactions with Carnegie had underscored this feeling; recently he’d also had some conflicts with Robert Pitcairn, western head of the Pennsylvania Railroad and—though nobody outside the club knew it for sure—a member of the club.
Morrell was never against new development. He didn’t wish to prevent the club from making a lake. But he was opposed to anything carried out in a slipshod manner, and he’d weathered enough fires and other accidents at the Cambria Works and other job sites to know the degree of diligence required to prevent disaster. Nobody in Johnstown had a bigger foot, and Morrell was determined to put his down and get some satisfaction from the Pittsburgh sportsmen on the mountain.
When John Fulton, Morrell’s top mining engineer, arrived at the abandoned site of the old reservoir to observe what was going on, Benjamin Ruff’s hired crews were still in the process of working on the dam. John Fulton was probably the most qualified and experienced engineer in the Johnstown region and possibly well beyond: he was a geologist, too, and a Bible-shaking Presbyterian temperance activist, with no regard for rank or wealth. To the club officials, Fulton’s errand of inspection was far from welcome, but they couldn’t easily deny a polite request by Daniel J. Morrell of Johnstown and the Cambria Works for an inspection by his top engineer. So a delegation of the Pittsburgh sportsmen met Fulton at the site to give him the tour.
These men included the club’s president, E. J. Unger, a railroad man and, in partnership with Carnegie, an upmarket hotelier; and R. C. Carpenter, owner of Crawford Coke and Coal, like Henry Clay Frick an extractor in the coke fields of Connellsville. Also on hand for the clubmen was their own expert, N. M. McDowell, a civil engineer of Pittsburgh.
Escorted by these gentlemen, John Fulton turned his cold and practiced eye on their dam repair project. He saw right away what was wrong.
There was only about forty feet of water in the lake now; the projection was to get sixty, and that’s about how deep the old canal company reservoir had been, too. So the size and heft of the dam should be enough, Fulton figured, to hold back that immense tonnage of water. And at seventy feet wide the old spillway was ample.
But Fulton watched with amazement at the workers filling in the old culvert below the breach that had caused the partial collapse that had emptied the reservoir. That breach was being not repaired but only obscured by this process of filling in the culvert. The breach still existed within the dam. Once the lake had flooded in and risen behind the dam, finding the breach and fixing it would become impossible.
Which raised the most important problem. With the old sluice pipes gone, or made deliberately inoperable, there was no active way to lower the level of the lake. The spillway, cut eight feet below the height of the top of the dam, could lower water only passively: in the normal course of a rise of water, the level wouldn’t go higher than the spillway. But in a major rainstorm, with water rushing into the lake from the South Fork and all of its many tributaries, that method of release might be quickly overwhelmed. If water rushed in faster than it could be released by the spillway cut, the level would rise toward the top of the dam, slowed but not stopped by the spillway, and if it kept raining, eventually water would top the dam. If that happened, sooner or later the dam would go, and the whole lake—20 million tons—would fall down the valley on the towns below.
Even in the absence of a major storm’s swelling the South Fork, should even a minor leak occur, presaging future trouble, there would be no method to lower the lake in a controlled way, releasing water carefully into the Conemaugh below, make an inspection, and repair damage. There was no deliberate way to get water out of the lake.
So just as Daniel Morrell might have predicted, the rich Pittsburghers’ design violated in every imaginable way the most basic premises of engineering a dam for safety. It was literally only a matter of time, Fulton judged, before the breach caused flooding.
How much flooding? That was impossible to say: it would depend on the height of the water and the size of the breach. How disastrous a flood? Unknown. But disastrous enough, no doubt.
There was only one way to prevent this otherwise inevitable outcome. Along with fully overhauling the rocky outer coating on the upper part of the dam—that too had been neglected, Fulton judged—a discharge pipe system must be designed and installed to allow for deliberate reduction of the water level. And the breach around the old culvert must be fully repaired.
Fulton reported all this to Morrell. Pulling no punches, he underlined the phrase only a question of time. Morrell, disturbed but hardly surprised, forwarded Fulton’s report to Benjamin Ruff in the latter’s capacities as club founder and supervisor of the dam project. Morrell couldn’t have expected Ruff to express gratitude for this negative report. The necessary repairs would obviously be costly and time-consuming. But given the stakes involved, Morrell might have expected grudging compliance, at least.
Ruff wrote back, opening his letter with pro forma politeness, then dismissing out of hand each of Fulton’s criticisms. For the first time, Ruff revealed the name of the club—but only because Fulton’s report had gotten it wrong, calling it the Sportsmen’s Association of Western Pennsylvania, and Ruff made that error his first point of dispute. He was implying that if this man Fulton got the name of the club wrong, he couldn’t be very punctilious in general. That was just for starters.
“In the second place,” Ruff went on, “he is wrong in saying that the dam was originally built of stone.” That wasn’t what Fulton had meant, but Ruff also denied that the inner face had ever been lined with stone, and Ruff was wrong about that.
Fulton had in fact made a few minor errors. He didn’t know about the wooden operating tower, exactly how many pipes had been in the old culvert, or exactly the size of the old breach that Ruff had supposedly repaired. From those mistakes, Ruff drew the conclusion that Fulton’s proposals for repair had “no more value than his other assertions.” Ruff simply ignored the idea that the lake would need some means of being actively emptied or lowered, and signed off with a tone of not expecting to be bothered about the matter again. He attached a report from the club’s paid engineer, McDowell, asserting that the dam was safe.
Morrell, now deeply concerned, pushed back. In a letter to Ruff, he admitted that Fulton might of course have made some errors but noted that the main issue remained impossible to dismiss. Without some means of actively lowering the water, the dam couldn’t be properly secured.
“We must protest,” Morrell told Ruff, “against the erection of a dam at that place, that will be a perpetual menace to the lives and property of those residing in this upper valley of the Conemaugh, from its insecure construction.” He enclosed a further report from Fulton, stating that other independent engineers had since looked at both Fulton’s first report, and at the dam itself, and agreed with Fulton. And he politely sent back McDowell’s report, with the comment that the club’s engineer might want to rethink it, in light of these issues. Morrell went further. So seriously did he take the situation that he offered Ruff a contribution of Cambria Works money and expertise in a joint project to secure the dam.
Ruff must have scoffed in irritation: why would the club need help or money from Daniel Morrell? In any event, that offer was ignored, and the dam work kept going on as planned.
Morrell saw that he was being decisively locked out of the dam process. So he took the next step. He joined the South Fork Club. Buying two memberships in his own name, he got himself on the inside of the problem. This way, he could go personally to the lake more or less at will, keep an eye on the dam, and agitate and network within the membership for safety improvements over time.
As the summer resort began to come to life in the early 1880s, it started taking on just the mood of elegant relaxation Ruff and Frick had hoped for. Members built generously proportioned summer houses along the lakeshore, with gables and peaks and other impressive features. A system of boardwalks connected the cottages to one another and to the big Stick-style clubhouse with its deep porch. Some of the cottages had docks for swimming, fishing, and tying up boats.
Life at the club was leisurely and lively. The families slept in their cottages but dined together in the big clubhouse dining room, which featured a twelve-foot-high brick fireplace faced with decorative tile. They wore fashionable summer clothing, and bands were hired to come up and play for the guests. There were impromptu amateur musicales and theatricals, and elegant picnics by the spillway: cascading over rocky steps, it gave a romantic, wilderness-waterfall effect. And of course they hunted and fished, and sailed, steamboated, and paddleboated. The top of the dam with its amazing view and horse-and-carriage road was always an attraction.
As the 1880s went on, the leading club members also solidified and extended their positions as great men of business. It was just after getting the club going with Ruff that Henry Clay Frick’s enterprises really began taking off: Frick rose throughout that decade to become second only to Carnegie in the ranks of the Pittsburgh industrialists. Frick made key deals with Carnegie through which each man verticalized his enterprises via one another, guaranteeing Carnegie as much ready coal as he could use, at a good price, with no competition, and Frick a market for coal so stable that he was effectively already in the steel business with Carnegie. Soon not only did the H. C. Frick Coke Company employ eleven thousand men, with $5 million in capital and thirty-five thousand acres in coal mining and development, but Frick also became chairman of all of Carnegie’s world-dominating iron and steel efforts.
The club prospered along with its members. The secret membership roll grew quickly, studded with the biggest names in Pittsburgh high society. What those rolls would have revealed, if anyone had seen them, was the members’ almost endless interrelatedness, and in particular, their mutual connection to one man, Andrew Carnegie. Big Pittsburgh manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, and entrepreneurs who were among the club’s members included Robert Pitcairn, one of the most powerful men in the region. He’d replaced Carnegie in running the western section of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Like Carnegie, he was Scottish-born, and like Carnegie he’d worked his way up quickly in the railroad company. Now his rail yard along Turtle Creek near Pittsburgh was the largest in the world. Pitcairn and Carnegie were friends, and Carnegie of course always maintained the tightest kind of alliance with the railroad company.
The club member Henry Phipps, a financial wiz and long-standing money partner of Carnegie, was now chairman of the cluster of companies known as Carnegie Brothers & Company and Carnegie, Phipps & Company. John G. A. Leishman, a club member, was a Carnegie executive, and James Hay Reed and Philander Knox, partners in their firm Knox & Reed, gave Carnegie his two top lawyers for both corporate and personal matters; they were members. The member Elias Unger was a partner with Carnegie in Pittsburgh’s Seventh Avenue Hotel.
And then there was Andrew Mellon, the best-known member of the club, along with Carnegie and Frick. Mellon began in the family banking business and would one day have powerful interests in every kind of big industry. He had backed Frick financially in the early days, and now the two were close, traveling to Europe together to look at and snap up great works of art on an astonishing scale.
The club’s list, that is, distilled the simple fact that not only steel but all of large-scale American production in the region had become concentrated in the hands of a very few men. They were all related in one way or another to Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and Andrew Mellon, and to one another.
Meanwhile, down at the bottom, life went on, too. Over the years, people in Johnstown and the other towns got used to the presence of the fancy families up on the mountain. Things were always tense, but the friction of inequality too became part of life, going on, as it does.
On the bright side, the club meant employment, for some: press about the beautiful location in the Alleghenies suggested other resorts might be built, too, with yet more benefit to the people of Johnstown. Also on the bright side, boys and men alike could, at first, sneak easily onto the grounds, ignoring a multitude of no-trespassing signs, and catch trout in the streams and bass in the lake. But soon the club’s management fenced off the best trout streams. When locals removed the fences, the club officially announced an intention to shoot on sight any nonmember on the grounds at night. That didn’t make the bosses’ club any more popular with the locals. But when it came to the dam, while people didn’t exactly stop worrying, worry about the dam became just another part of life in Johnstown.
One factor in the city’s grudging acceptance of the dam was a false alarm. It occurred early in the life of the club’s lake. In June 1881, with the club just up and running, there was a flash flood of the Conemaugh, and suddenly Johnstown was alive with the idea—spread by word of mouth—that the dam up at the lake was on the verge of breaking.
From the little hillside town of South Fork, up near the club, down to the streets of Johnstown proper, word flew that the inevitable was about to occur, and Daniel Morrell, alerted to rumors of what he’d already predicted, sent two men from the Cambria Works up to the dam to get a look. By the time Morrell’s men got there, the water level had risen to nearly two feet below the top of the dam. The spillway was splashing and crashing, and just as Fulton had predicted, the fastest possible spill through that cut just wasn’t anywhere near fast enough to bring the water level down to the spillway’s height. Still, the rising had slowed; there was no leakage; the spillway was operating. Morrell’s men came back to Johnstown with that reassuring report. It didn’t help: people in town were in a state of intense anxiety, and at the western, lower end they stayed up all night in the pouring rain in sheer terror.
But then the rain stopped and the sun came out. The inspectors were right. The dam had done fine.
A false alarm like that can make any concern seem silly. Flooding came nearly every spring, and sometimes even in the fall. Now every time the streets flooded people would make comments and jokes about the dam breaking. Every time, the dam held. Over the years the jokes and remarks, reflecting collective anxiety, kept outright panic at bay.
For even as the urgency about repairing the bosses’ dam subsided, flooding itself was getting worse. The erosion of the stripped mountainsides was combining with the narrowing of the Little Conemaugh and the Stony Creek, by the industrial waste and the building and rail landfill, to limit drainage and make flooding common. Town ordinances had even taken note of the issue. The width of the Stony Creek had now been set by law at 175 feet, that of the Little Conemaugh at 110. And yet the Conemaugh proper, receiving water from those two rivers, with a total legal width of 285 feet, was itself now only 200 feet wide near the mills.
Anyone could do the math on that. And nature could do it for you. In a storm in 1875, the Conemaugh rose two feet in an hour. Eighteen eighty saw the breaking of a dam on the Conemaugh, built by the Cambria Works, though in a relatively safe location below town. Then, from 1885 to 1888, came three bad floods, with the Stony Creek rising three feet in forty-five minutes in 1885. In ’87, in the lower end of town, not only basements but ground floors were flooded, about a foot high.
By May 1889, some of the town’s leaders were talking about requiring the Cambria company to take cleanup and demolition measures to bring the rivers back to natural width and depth. Yet even as the flooding trend was clearly worsening, public anxiety about the dam up at the lake was not. James Quinn was in the minority: “too fearful” about the dam, as his sister-in-law Abbie said. The Johnstown Tribune took the doubly reassuring position that a) the club’s dam was clearly holding up fine; and b) even if the dam broke, water from the lake would have plenty of room to spread out and dissipate throughout the valley before it could do any significant damage to the Johnstown region below.
Only the big, gruff Daniel Morrell of the Cambria Works had directly challenged Benjamin Ruff’s engineering, as well as Ruff’s blithe certainty that the project exposed Johnstown to no danger. Having gotten nowhere, Morrell had then joined the South Fork Club for the express purpose of monitoring the dam and working from within to get something done about it.
Yet right after joining the club, Morrell suffered at first a slow and finally a total collapse of his own. Having lost business to Andrew Carnegie’s juggernaut, Morrell also lost his grip mentally. By 1884, he let go of all of his responsibilities, both at the Cambria Works and in the city of Johnstown, and went into seclusion in his big house on Main Street. He died there in August 1885. Two years later, Morrell’s opponent on behalf of the club, Benjamin Ruff, died too, of an infection.
So neither man would know the events of May 1889, which would prove beyond all doubt which of them had been right about the quality of the dam.
There was another man with clout in Johnstown who harbored suspicions that the dam was no good. Tom L. Johnson was thirty-five in 1889, and though he didn’t live in Johnstown, he had substantial business interests there. He also had vaulting ambition—he’d begun his career in hopes of becoming another Carnegie—accompanied by an unusually frank sense of humor about the ruthlessness of the business world. Where other men used terms like “capturing markets,” Tom Johnson unabashedly identified himself as a monopolist. He was equally clear-eyed about the kind of chicanery that went into a monopolist’s success.
Tom had started out poor, moving about the South with his family after his father was ruined in the cotton business. At the age of eleven, he saw his future. Hanging around the railroad station in Staunton, Virginia, where his family was then living, the boy became friendly with a conductor, who offered to bring newspapers on his train for Tom to sell at the station; Tom got the conductor to agree not to bring papers for anyone else, so Tom could set prices, with no competition. Young Tom made easy money selling papers and saw right away the incalculable value of private supply deals—and of being the only game in town.
Eventually the deal ended when the conductor was transferred. But Tom had decided what his business was to be. Not newspapers, not trains: monopoly.
Seeking out businesses in which there was little or no competition, in 1869 Johnson began working with the du Pont brothers, famous capitalists, in a streetcar business they’d acquired in Louisville, Kentucky. Tom patented some minor streetcar improvements, but more important, he learned how getting ahead in the burgeoning business of public conveniences like streetcars had more to do with political cronyism and influencing civic policy, and less with knowing anything special about transportation. This insight, he would later say with relish, made him a nationwide supposed expert in streetcars, and soon Tom owned controlling shares in the streetcar systems of Indianapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Brooklyn, and Detroit. He moved to Cleveland in 1883 and bought a mansion on Euclid Avenue, the stretch known as Millionaires’ Row.
Meanwhile, having invented—or, as he said later, pretending he’d invented—a peculiar kind of streetcar rail, and protecting it with what he later noted was a weak patent, in 1883 he and his partner Arthur Moxham made a deal with Daniel Morrell at the Cambria company to roll these special new rails in Johnstown. That’s what brought Tom Johnson to town.
Soon, with Cambria cooperation, Johnson and Moxham built their own rolling mill, in a town they immodestly named Moxham, just south and uphill from Johnstown. They built their own steam railroad to run from Moxham into Johnstown. With Daniel Morrell succumbing to dementia, and giving up his offices, Johnson naturally also hoped to get control of the city’s streetcar system. By late May 1889, Tom L. Johnson’s new, independent steel mill in Moxham was all set to start rolling steel rails.
Yet a few things had been happening lately to give Tom a new view of life. He was qualifying the only real interest he’d had for so long, the pursuit of monopoly.
He read two books. Both were by the political philosopher Henry George: Social Problems and Progress and Poverty. George argued that the horrors of poverty flowed directly from industrialists protecting their new wealth from taxation by keeping it locked up in land with rising value. George wanted a tax on land, not production. The idea was to level a certain amount of privilege by releasing some of the wealth of the privileged for the good of all.
Reading Henry George, something occurred to Johnson. So far, his interest in privilege had lain solely in getting it. But George’s description of what was happening to the poor as a result of wealth rang true to Johnson. He knew the system. It had made him rich. Maybe Henry George had figured the system out. Maybe everything Tom loved was destroying the lives of others.
Tom didn’t want to believe that. He took the George books to his lawyer in Cleveland. It was the lawyer who had made him a convinced free-marketer, Tom reminded the man, and he begged the lawyer to point out all of George’s errors. Otherwise Tom felt himself in terrible danger of starting to advocate for George’s tax plan. That would make him a traitor to his class. But the lawyer didn’t take the demand seriously.
So Tom had already begun questioning both the privilege and the philanthropy of the monopolists whose ranks he’d once been so proud to join, when in the summer of 1888 he too went up the mountain to the South Fork Club to look at the dam. He had admiration for the way Daniel Morrell did business, and he’d heard some bad things about the dam.
Standing there, observing the dam and the lake, Tom felt deep misgivings about the lake’s stability. He was no engineer. He thought instead about the privilege so entirely embodied here, a gorgeous mountain retreat that monopoly had built. He speculated on what might happen to himself, his friends, his business, and everybody else down the valley, should that dam ever give way.
Tom L. Johnson was having suspicions about monopoly and privilege. What happened in Johnstown on May 31, 1889, would change the purpose of his life.