Everyone on Their Own
March 25, Tuesday
Animals across the Midwest were doing their best to survive with mixed results. People, passing through Indiana in trains, reported seeing rats and cats on tree branches, taking refuge from the river; days later, passengers would see emaciated cats and rats still stuck in trees.
In West Middletown, a farmer had 276 pigs, waiting to be loaded onto a train. Most of the animals were washed away.
One of the more surreal sights in Logansport, Indiana was a very live cat on a very dead horse, floating downstream.
When they were able, people tried to help animals. One report in a Columbus newspaper surfaced of a blind horse and a pony, which shared several rooms with forty people trapped in a building. Two police officers in the same city reluctantly went back in a boat for a little girl’s dog, after she implored: “Please, Mr. Officer, won’t you go back and get Brownie? He made such good company for us when we were afraid.”
When they couldn’t be helped by their human counterparts, the animals were often just as creative at finding a way to survive as the humans. Mrs. C. M. Sipes, the woman who, with her husband, survived the Johnstown flood in 1889, returned to her house in Columbus after the flood to hear her tomcat weakly meowing. He was behind a picture hanging on the wall. He apparently had hung on to the back of the frame for five days.
Aron Dillon, the name of a horse in Columbus, was owned by a man named W. A. Grimes and was an extremely intelligent animal who knew a lot of tricks. His intellect must have saved his life, because when the flood invaded the barn, two colts were swept away, but Aron Dillon climbed up the stairs—possibly it was some kind of ladder—and reached the loft, which was stocked with hay. Five days after the flood began, a humane officer found the horse, alive and relatively happy.
In Dayton, two horses found a cement platform in the back of the Algonquin Hotel and remained there from the beginning of the flood until the end.
In Fort Wayne, Indiana, one man would return home after the flood to discover a cow and thirty-four chickens on the second floor of his house, although the cow admittedly had some help. The man later learned that seven men had led the cow upstairs.
And a terrier named Felix somehow became separated from his owner, a Mr. Rhodes, who was the manager of the Lyric Theater in Richmond, Indiana. Felix managed to stay away from the wrath of Whitewater River and traveled twenty-seven miles due south, dodging flooded waterways like Cedar Falls Creek, until he reached the college town of Oxford, Ohio, which managed to stay high and dry during the flood.
By now, Felix was half starved. Fortunately, some Beta Theta Pi fraternity boys found him, checked out his collar, and then wrote the mayor who passed on the news to Mr. Rhodes. Several days later, Mr. Rhodes and Felix had an emotional reunion in Oxford. Mr. Rhodes pulled up in his car and shouted for Felix. The excited dog ran from the college men and into the arms of his relieved master.
12 P.M., Dayton, Ohio
The rain had stopped, or was at least intermittently slowing down, but the bad news was that the bulk of the floodwater from the river was just getting started.
From the Delco plant, employees spotted two men trying to escape from the Egry Register Company, which made supplies for automatic registers, a relatively new machine that helped business owners make copies of bills of sale, receipts, and other paperwork. The Egry men’s boat clearly couldn’t withstand the current, so the Delco men threw ropes and were able to bring the men into their building. The executives and workers then heard that the Egry factory held approximately forty-five other people, including a five-year-old boy who the group had rescued from a log.
Before being brought into Egry, the boy rode the log down the wild and wooly streets of Dayton with his father, traveling through a nightmarish maze of debris.
Where was the father? Floating in the streets somewhere. As he was on the log with his son, two pieces of timber came crashing through the current, decapitating him.
About the time the Delco employees saved their Egry neighbors, a house was floating down the Great Miami River and toward a bridge. Panic-stricken people—many of them stranded on their roofs—watched as a door opened, and a man was seen looking outside, squinting in the sunlight and shading his eyes with his hand. His door wasn’t opened in the direction the house was floating, however, and he couldn’t see the bridge. Behind him stood a woman and, behind them, another woman with a baby in her arms.
People watching from their roofs shouted at him to jump into the water, but the man, apparently not hearing the cries of panic, shut the door as if it were just any normal day, and he was tending to his business inside. A moment later, the cottage crashed into one of the bridge’s concrete piers and was smashed into oblivion.
Charles and Viola waited out the flood at the home of their Uncle Ottie, or as the neighbors more formally knew him, the Reverend W. Otterbein Fries. He and his wife Fannie lived in a house with a large tree on the front lawn and, more importantly, with a front porch approximately seven feet above the street level, with a railing around the porch.
Charles and Viola thought that Ottie and Fannie’s place was a pretty shrewd one to come to, but at noon, the river was rushing west down Warder Street, marooning them. They had already moved to the second story and knew if they had to, they could wait out the flood in the attic. Charles and Viola discussed finding a new place, however. The cellar was flooded, wiping out their coal-burning stove and heat source. Ottie and Fannie had no drinking water available and little food. The adults weren’t worried for themselves, but Charles and Viola were anxious about their babies. Mary, meanwhile, worried about her husband Emerson, who hadn’t returned yet.
For the moment, Charles and Viola would stay put, but they kept talking about leaving since the water seemed as if it would be sticking around for a while. In fact, reports—and they would be later borne out to be true—were already spreading that in some parts of the city, the water was twenty feet deep. Two bridges were washed out. They were hearing a lot of things, although a lot of misinformation was getting out as well, although from a safety perspective it was probably better for communities to overhype the flood than undersell it.
“They’re dying like rats in their holes, bodies are washing around in the streets, and there is no relief in sight,” said Frank Purviance, a Dayton resident and an employee of the Terre Haute, Indianapolis and Eastern Traction Company, which managed railroad and streetcar tracks. He was correct in his assessment that people were dying, and the city was falling apart with few odds of it getting better any time soon, but for accuracy’s sake and the sake of not overly panicking the rest of the country, he could have stopped right there.
Instead, Purviance, when asked how many people he believed were dead, in his fear, he answered that it was probably around 8,000. He was off by about 7,000 people, and if one judges the figure by strictly Dayton, he was off by about 7,900.
But that was just the beginning of it. One headline in a Benton Harbor, Michigan, paper early on screamed:
Dayton’s Awful Story Lies
Beneath Seething Sea; Even 10,000
May Have Perished
Dayton Is Burning!
But the early newspaper accounts, while wildly off base, were still correct in one respect. Tens of thousands of people may have not drowned, but tens of thousands—really, hundreds of thousands—of lives were threatened by the flood. That more people didn’t drown was—take your pick, or perhaps it was a mix of all three—miraculous, a lot of random luck, or a testament to the will of human survival.
Half-truths and wild rumors abounded. A Dayton school building, with four hundred students, was underwater, and “as far as can be ascertained all of these little ones have gone to watery graves,” one widely circulated and absolutely inaccurate news report stated. One story that was repeated in the newspapers for a couple of weeks as a tiny item that was apparently used as filler, was an item stating that a commuter train from Loveland, Ohio, to Cincinnati, had gone through a bridge, and all two hundred passengers were killed. Not true, although the Loveland Bridge was wiped out. The entire town of Miamisburg, several miles away from Dayton, and its four thousand inhabitants were washed away, papers morbidly informed their readers. The number turned out to be closer to twenty-five.
People were often listed as dead when they weren’t, and at least one of the deceased was mistakenly linked to a prominent name of the era. Esther Jones, a fifteen-year-old girl in Delaware, Ohio, who was being ferried from her home to safety by the Delaware mayor, or would have been if the boat hadn’t capsized and she was swept away, was the daughter of Sam Jones, a foreman at a lumber company. However, some newspaper reporter or editor, thinking of the then-well known evangelist Sam Jones, assumed this was the daughter of that Sam Jones, never mind that the well known preacher, known for preaching against sin and hypocrisy, died seven years earlier and never had a daughter named Esther.
Newspapers were always hearing it from their readers when they misspelled a name or got a minor fact in the society pages wrong, but now editors and reporters were killing people off left and right.
Springfield, Ohio’s paper carried a report that Hamilton, Ohio Police Chief George Zellner came into his house after working tirelessly all day Tuesday and much of Wednesday. He had been assured that his home was out of the flood zone, but instead he discovered it underwater, and his wife’s drowned body in the kitchen. Insane with grief, he pulled out his gun and shot himself. None of this was true, however. He actually had come to his house at 2 A.M., on Wednesday, after spending virtually all of Tuesday directing the rescue efforts. He wanted to check on his house and his wife. Finding his house surrounded by water, Chief Zellner waded into it, the water coming up to his chest, and entered his home. His wife was there and doing as well as one could expect.
After a fitful night’s sleep, when Zellner woke up the next morning, the river had risen by another six feet, it was estimated, and he realized he and his wife weren’t going to be going anywhere. That’s when the gossip mill began churning. But Zellner was in good company. Six of his fellow police detectives and officers in Hamilton were, at one time or another during the flood, reported dead, only to turn up alive later.
But it’s understandable. The newspapers were only going with the information that they had, and often the people who one would think would know what was going on, didn’t. Edward Hazlett, of Columbus, saw his nineteen-year-old brother Claude drown on Wednesday morning after a boat he was in overturned.
A grieving Edward then reported Claude’s death to the police, and the local press dutifully reported it. But Claude was found later, very much alive, and lived for many more years to come.
When it was all over, Ohio’s Bureau of Statistics would count eighty-three deaths in Hamilton, but it’s difficult to know if that number is accurate. In October 1913, a time when one would think Hamiltonians would have a pretty good idea of how many citizens they had lost, the Hamilton Evening Journal pegged the number at approximately 250.
Given the destruction, one can hardly blame Purviance or anyone for overestimating the number of deaths in the flood. But Mother Nature was dealing with people, not rats. That there weren’t more deaths was due to peoples’ ingenuity and the will to use every strategy they could come up with to survive.
In Brookville, Indiana, John Bunz, a 45-year-old junk dealer, was wading through water on the first floor of his home when he lost his balance and found himself underwater. He scrambled to the surface for air and bolted for the stairs as the water chased him. If he didn’t quite realize what had happened—his house had been ripped off its foundation and was floating down the Whitewater River—he would figure it out soon enough.
That Bunz and his 78-year-old mother, Margaret, who lived with him, weren’t killed seconds or minutes later was because the house came to a sudden stop when it lodged itself into a tree. But after that fortunate break, everything they did was all about trying to outwit or at least outlast the flood. As the water entered the bedroom and began to fill it, Bunz then propped up his mother as high as possible, holding her in his arms, with the icy water eventually reaching his shoulders. He kept her that way for the next seven hours until he realized he had lost her. Bunz was rescued another two hours later.
Grover Brown, a 24-year-old railroad worker living in Cambridge City, Indiana, also floated down the Whitewater River on this day—for sixty miles. Twenty-three hours later, he wound up in Harrison, Ohio, where twelve people reportedly died, and the water was twelve feet deep on the well-trafficked State Street. He spent his time on the river, clinging to the floor of a building that was swept away, and he could have easily died, and by all rights, he should have.
Brown was stark naked for those sixty miles, having taken off some of his clothing to lighten his load when in the water, helping his family escape. Then he lost the rest of his wardrobe from the pull of the river. He came close to freezing to death, and he would have, except that he found some drowned chickens in the water, plucked their feathers, and covered himself as best he could. He was probably too frozen to be embarrassed when two men later pulled him off the roof and away from the water. He couldn’t have been too scarred by the experience, though, or at least he must have liked the looks of Harrison. After marrying a woman named Irene Delacroix later in the year, who probably did not see the chicken-feather incident, they moved to Harrison.
James Wrinkle, a wealthy manufacturer of washtubs, created a boat out of his washtubs and was credited with saving 125 of his neighbors. The river had chased him up to the second story of his office building, and as the water swirled around his ankles, Wrinkle found himself staring at a pile of about fifty washtubs. He hastily nailed together eight of them, creating a boat that allowed for seven passengers, and then he grabbed a long pole with a hook on the end, which he normally used for reaching high objects.
With it, he braved the mad waters, using the pole with the hook to grab onto tree branches, pushing him through the river-streets and allowing him to reach houses in his neighborhood. He ended up making thirty trips, taking anyone he saw to high ground.
“Well, I couldn’t leave those people to drown, could I?” he responded when a committee of city officials later showed up to thank him for his service. Then he waved them off.
Throughout Ohio, Indiana, and parts of Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, many homeowners were collectively preparing a clever flood-fighting tactic that undoubtedly saved many lives and homes. For those who didn’t want to leave their house or no longer could, due to the water surrounding them, many people started preparing their homes on the fly. It could be agonizing and against every homeowner’s instincts to welcome in the water, but that’s what many families did. While Charles Adams was concerned about currents moving through his house, many people willingly opened their front and back doors and windows of their home, and then—most painfully—some even cut a hole in the ceiling of the first floor.
The water was going to come into the house whether the doors and windows were shut or not. Boarding the house and making it watertight was not only extremely difficult and virtually impossible, it actually just increased the odds that the river would eventually push the house out of its way. By opening everything up, the river could come into the house and—with any luck—let it stay put. The hole in the ceiling meant that if the water rose higher than the first floor, it would continue to have somewhere to go, rather than pushing against the ceiling and eventually destroying the floorboards of the second floor.
That was the scenario at the Zang family in Hamilton, Ohio. Sixty years after the flood, Marie Zang Barnhorn recalled that her father first opened the cellar door so the water would run through the house and not push it off the foundation.
“When the water came up to the second floor, Pop punched a hole in the ceiling, and we climbed up and sat on the rafters,” said Zang. “He took the doors off and put them up there so we wouldn’t fall through.”
Marie and her family were quite comfortable at first. Her mother had already been cooking dinner that morning when they decided to retreat upstairs, and they brought up sauerkraut, potatoes, and pork. It was a feast, but it would be their only food for the next forty-eight hours.
Another strategy that Fred Zang employed was that he hung out the second-story window and kicked logs away from the house, so they wouldn’t build up and eventually knock the house off the foundation. One can’t argue with Zang’s strategy. His family lived through the flood; two neighbors on the same street drowned in their own homes.
Bill Thompson, then six years old, wrote about the experience of being in the flood in Hamilton, Ohio for his company’s newsletter in 1959. His family could see a suspension bridge washed away from their home and much more.
“We saw houses and sheds floating down the river,” Thompson wrote. “Neighboring houses were broken away as the water kept coming with added depth and speed. As the water began seeping through our second floor, we moved to the attic, using doors across rafters for beds.”
Eventually, a floating house leaned against the Thompson home, which turned out to be a good thing. It broke the current. “Folks from that dwelling and another broke through their roofs and climbed through a hole made in our roof,” wrote Thompson. “There were about thirty-five praying souls in the same attic by crest time. That crest found the water half way up to the second story windows.”
It took persistence and patience to thwart the flood. Another Hamilton resident, Clara Clements, wife of a police detective, would have been on the force herself if this had been another era. She was certainly innovative. Five people, including Mrs. Clements, were upstairs in her and her husband’s house, and everyone wanted to escape to the neighbor’s house. Eugene Mueller’s home seemed far sturdier.
Clara Clements came up with the idea of folding a large carpet into three thicknesses. Then she and her group inserted long poles and, with the Muellers on the other side helping, stretched the carpet bridge over the fifteen-foot gap. Everyone nailed the carpet to the roof on both sides, and Clara and the others safely crossed over.
George Timmerman, the Dayton moulder who was assured by his neighbors that a little ankle-deep water didn’t mean a thing, found himself on the second floor of a house when the flood wall came. He was in a neighbor’s house, a house he had never been in, seeking refuge with a mother and three children.* Within about an hour, as the water climbed higher, they retreated to the attic, shouting for help. Within about another hour, a rescuer came in a boat. It wasn’t easy, and escaping the flood took some initiative and a lot of luck, but a lot of people did it.
That was hardly the end of Timmerman and company’s ordeal; rather, it was just the beginning. The rescuer had trouble steering the boat in the current, which wasn’t just fast-moving water but a soup of wagons and buggies, dead horses, dead bodies, and driftwood. For a while, Timmerman was sure he, the family of four, and the rescuer would all capsize. But the rescuer steered Timmerman, the mother, and the kids near the top of a porch. They climbed onto that and bid farewell to the rescuer, who felt he could manage the boat, especially now that it was lighter.
Timmerman, the mother, and the children scurried into the attic of someone’s abandoned home in an apartment building. It seemed safe enough for the moment, and they even managed to find some food to eat, so they were at least in good company. All of the surrounding homes had people in them, including the building across the street, the one with the sign O. G. Saettel’s. For the moment, they decided they would sit put and wait out the flood. Not that they had much choice.
12:12 P.M., Hamilton, Ohio
The Black Street Bridge was the first bridge in the city to collapse. About three minutes later, the High Street Bridge, with high school student J. Walter Wack watching, buckled against the current and the pressing mountain of debris, which was now pinned against the bridge. Then the wires on the bridge began to snap.
“Everyone ran like hell,” recalled Wack, himself making tracks for his house.
Elizabeth Hensley Hand, in 1988, told her local paper, “I remember seeing houses floating down the river with people on the roofs waving white sheets for help. Some of the houses hit the bridges and shattered. Horses were floating downstream, trying to swim, but drowning, too.” Seventy-five years later, Mrs. Hand said, she would think about the flood and still cry.
As resident and jewelry store owner Raymond McComb would write his father: “The water came right through the business section of town, sweeping houses and barns, horses and cows right through High Street.”
The Great Miami River swamped McComb’s store in turn, knocking over his displays, invading his safe, and destroying the contents.
12:28 P.M., Hamilton, Ohio
A second bridge went down.
In the midst of the chaos, councilman, concerned citizen, and man with possible extrasensory perception J. Henry Welsh, still in the midst of warning people, hadn’t heeded his own advice. He found himself caught in the flood despite being quite a bit inland at Tenth and High Streets and had to swim to a place of safety.
Middletown, Ohio, afternoon
Middletown’s residents, hearing about what was happening up north and warily watching the river, anticipated what was to come.
Daniel Snider, the city’s local Ford dealer who proudly displayed his five new Model-T cars in West Middletown, carefully jacked up his five cars a foot off the ground and put the cars in a coal shed. The 36-year-old Snider tied the shed to a tree, fully believing that at the most, the shed might wind up being a few inches deep in water. He then went to join his wife, Mae, and their three-year-old daughter, at the house, which he also assumed was free and clear of the river.
The tree was destroyed, or perhaps the rope broke, but, some way or the other, the shed sailed down the river. Snider later retrieved his cars, but they were in no condition to drive.* Snider miscalculated on a number of things that day, but he was the only one in the area who had the foresight to own a boat. His parents always owned one and insisted their son did, too, “just in case,” they said. Daniel’s dad was in the business of making wagons but understood the value of a good boat when living near a river.
When the Great Miami River spilled into West Middletown, Snider made the rounds to houses in his canoe, passing by their second-story windows and taking families to dry land to a home owned by a family named Childs, who must have lived on a hill, for their residence was becoming something of a relief station. But Snider was so busy working to save his neighbors that he almost forgot or couldn’t reach his own wife and three-year-old daughter. By the time he arrived at his own house, he was able to paddle through the front door and up to the stairway, where Mae and his daughter were anxiously waiting.
1 P.M., Hornell, New York
Although Ohio and Indiana were suffering the most from the flood, parts of western New York were now seeing their waterways overflowing to dangerous levels. The Canisteo River overflowed its banks north of Hornell, and two hours later, Canacadea Creek, which flows through the city, also left its channel. The waters wouldn’t destroy the town or region to the level of what was happening along the Miami River, but one unlucky fellow by the name of Eugene Porter, a farmer on the aptly named Big Creek Road, was surprised by the current and lost his life.
Sometime in the afternoon, New Castle, Pennsylvania
Neshannock Creek, which connects up to the Shenango River in New Castle, remained in its bed. The hundred-mile-long Shenango River, however, began slowly making its way across the main streets of New Castle.
The police force fanned out across the city where they could, helping residents flee to higher ground. Still, the community functioned mostly as normal. School was in session all day. Most people retained power. There seemed to be no reason to fret yet.
Dayton, afternoon
Slowly but surely, John H. Patterson found himself running a rescue center instead of a cash register manufacturing business.
His company’s thirty-one cars were being utilized wherever possible throughout the city; and while seven square miles of Dayton was underwater, there were ample rolling hills where cars were able to carry passengers away from the flooding and to shelters. His boats were in high demand as well, and the NCR headquarters atop a hill on Wyoming Street were perfectly situated as a rescue hub. It was already a city landmark, and so word of mouth spread. If you were in trouble, come here.
Some people followed the telephone cables leading up to the campus of office buildings. As was the case around the city, there were often six, eight, or more telephone wires, strung out so that one could literally grab hold of a wire, plant their feet on another, and very carefully walk across the telephone wires. It wasn’t terribly dangerous, as long as you didn’t fall into the still-rushing current below, or happen to touch a damaged wire.
Realizing that this was going to be the mode of transportation du jour, some telephone linemen climbed up to the cables, carrying tow ropes that were attached to flat-bottomed boats. Their plan was that people could paddle their way up to dry land, knowing that they were securely tied to the telephone wires and wouldn’t be swept away. But the water kept getting rougher, and that idea was abandoned. But people who were athletic and daring, or had no choice, still used the cables to travel, clinging to them with their hands while carefully walking the wires up toward the office buildings.
The day wasn’t over, and the headquarters was turning into a shelter and rescue center that surpassed anything the actual city government had set up, which was nothing. By evening, the Dayton populace started referring to it as the Cash Register Hospital. For good reason. It was sheltering three thousand people by nightfall, and an emergency hospital had been set up to treat flood victims with hypothermia, broken bones, and burns from fires that were breaking out across the city, for a variety of reasons from electrical fires to broken gas lines, and collapsing buildings, and sheds with paint and other flammable materials.
That night, in the halls of NCR, three women gave birth. Actually, that last part wasn’t true but was a rumor that was circulated in newspapers around the country. It isn’t surprising that people thought that had been the case. If a pregnant woman in labor had come here and hadn’t been able to make it to one of the city’s hospitals, odds are, the baby would have been delivered just fine.
Having given up the idea of climbing into any more rowboats himself, Patterson was in the midst of the action, issuing orders and running the business like a command center.
His 21-year-old son, Frederick, however, was commandeering rescue boats and going out into the city, searching for people to help. Patterson’s nineteen-year-old daughter Dorothy dutifully stayed behind—whether she wanted to or not, women simply didn’t go out and rescue people if there were men around—although she chose a fairly uncomfortable job for herself. She stood outside the National Cash Register headquarters in the rain, greeting flood victims as they were brought over in automobiles.
NCR was one of the few bright spots in the city and state, as overall things were bleak. “I have received reports from my men all along the line that indicate an estimate of five hundred dead is a conservative one,” said Frank Brandon, vice president and general manager of the Dayton, Lebanon and Cincinnati Railroad. “At first my men reported deaths at sixty. Later the reports came in so fast, they quit counting. When we are finally able to get the details and the names of the dead, we will find the life loss to be appalling. My men place the property loss at Dayton at six to seven million. The two bridges that were swept away at Dayton were worth half a million dollars each.”
Excello, Ohio, afternoon
In a tiny village just south of Middletown and about thirty miles away from Dayton, the river, the canal, and Dick’s Creek all formed a united front, overwhelming the farmhouses and some of the residents. Christian Ramseyer, a 45-year-old farmer, had sent his wife, Pearl, and their four youngest children to higher ground east of their farm home.
He and his sons, Walter, eighteen, and Roy, nineteen, and a 39-year-old neighboring farmer, Edwin “Dock” Cassidy, were trying to save their livestock. In hindsight, it’s hard not to think that if it wasn’t safe for Pearl and the children to be on the grounds, perhaps it wasn’t safe for the Ramseyer men and Cassidy to be in the barn either. But in their defense, the water hadn’t reached their home yet, and the four men were simply trying to save the animals that kept their farm going. They probably would have been just fine if the nearby levee hadn’t broken.
But they made a mistake that many flood victims made—staying behind a little too long. The levee did break, and the rushing water first destroyed the Ramseyer house and then came for the barn where the men were. They didn’t have a chance. Cassidy had come on horseback, but even if he had mounted his steed, it wouldn’t have mattered. A tidal wave crashed through, and the men and animals were swept away.
Walter’s body was found that day in a cornfield. Christian Ramseyer, the father, was found in some brush later in the week. Nine weeks after the flood, Edwin Cassidy was located several miles away in the city of Hamilton.
The bones of Walter’s brother, Roy, weren’t discovered for another twenty years. He was identified by a Sunday school pin next to his bones, a pin that surviving family members remembered him wearing.
* He appears not to have met or known them. One would think he would have exchanged names with the mother and children throughout their ordeal, but later, when he recounted the story, he never mentioned their names.
* Henry Ford’s company sent him replacement parts, and Snider was apparently able to refurbish them enough to drive; but even as late as fifty years later, Snider would ruefully regret not driving each car up a nearby hill, where the river couldn’t possibly reach them.