Water Retreating
Friday, March 28, 1913
Midnight, Columbus
Ernest Bicknell’s train pulled into Columbus. After five days of being on a train, first heading to Omaha and then back toward Dayton, the Red Cross’s national director was at last getting closer to his destination.
Morning, Hagerstown, Maryland
The Potomac climbed its banks and hit the streets. The residents were bracing for it and most of them, well acquainted with what was happening in the states to the west of them, were ready. As the local paper put it, using their city’s nickname: “Harrystown soon knew what it was to be—Omahahawed and Daytonized. This morning early, the people in Liberty Street were awakened by the lapping of gentle waves at their door steps. They hastily arose, as did people on Jefferson and Valentine, all those streets being in the midst of the flooded district and found their cellars abrim with yellow wavelets and their gardens flooded and no escape except by waiting.”
But Hagerstown was quite lucky compared to Omaha, Fort Wayne, and Dayton. While there were thousands of acres submerged and a lot of damage, there were no deaths in the city from the flood, and after about noon, when the Potomac River reached a high of eighteen feet, the water levels began to slowly recede.
Hagerstown wasn’t the only community in Maryland affected by the flood. Cumberland, sixty-seven miles to the west, had considerable damage to its farm lands thanks to Evitts Creek, rising to higher levels than anyone could remember. The Hampshire Southern Railroad, which ran forty miles from Romney to Petersburg, was expected to close for several days due to a bridge being knocked into oblivion. Another railroad based out of Maryland, the Baltimore and Ohio, had to close all of its tracks after a mudslide near Connellsville, Pennsylvania.
And while almost everyone in Maryland came through the flood unscathed, one man did not: John Hoke of Emmitsburg. Exactly what happened will never be known, but it’s safe to say he wouldn’t have been a casualty of the flood if, the evening before, he hadn’t been drinking.
The night of March 27, Hoke, the head carpenter at Mt. St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, had to cross Tom’s Creek at Hartman’s Bridge to reach his house. He probably would have made it, had he not stopped after work for a drink or two … or maybe five.
A friend of his walked with him through the town most of the way, but then Hoke must have felt that he was sober enough to get home on his own.
The friend never saw Hoke again.
The next day, Hoke didn’t turn up for work, and his wife was frantic. If she was able to call their older daughter living in Hagerstown, or John’s brother or sister, they, too, were panicked. All day, everyone wondered. Where was John Hoke?
Late in the day, a little boy in the town provided the answer. He revealed to presumably his parents that earlier that morning, he saw a man in waist-deep water, clinging to a bush and shouting for help. Probably frightened by what he saw, the little boy said nothing to anyone all day. Or maybe he was on the fast track to becoming a future demented serial killer.
Once people learned that Hoke had been alive in the morning, they started hazarding the guess that the inebriated carpenter had decided not to go home but to sleep near the creek. When he woke up, he was surrounded by water and, either frightened or still hung over, wasn’t able to get out of his predicament before the current swept him away.
Morning in New Castle, Pennsylvania and surrounding areas
The worst may have been over for Dayton, but other communities were still in a pitched battle against their rivers and creeks. Residents in Cairo, Illinois were preparing for trouble with the Mississippi River, and down south along the Mississippi in Memphis, Tennessee, the city was warning everyone to prepare for a flood. This was, of course, the big difference between the start of the flood and the end. People had enough warning to get out of harm’s way.
Yet not everyone could. Samuel Whitlatch, rowing a boat on Main Street in Parkersburg, West Virginia, capsized and drowned. Parkersburg in general was having its share of problems on this day: the county jail was flooding, and the prisoners, hopefully none of them too dangerous, were being released.
In New Castle, everyone woke up to read in the morning papers that their state still appeared to be falling apart. People in the lowlands of Pittsburgh were fleeing for higher ground as the Allegheny River climbed and at least one man probably died. The streets of Bridgewater, Pennsylvania were five feet underwater. The Beaver River was climbing five inches every hour, and there was now a chasm where the Sharon Bridge, which connected New Brighton and Fallston, used to be. But what must have sent everyone reeling was the news that a beloved police officer, husband, and father of three had drowned. Thomas Thomas and a five-year-old boy who had fallen into Neshannock Creek were New Castle’s only casualties. That there hadn’t been more was arguably due to Thomas Thomas’s efforts, who essentially gave his own life for the cause.
As for the alderman, John H. Gross, he woke up in his own bed, a physician at his side. The doctor had been there all night, tending to him. Gross soon learned that Fred Moore had been taken to the Shenango Valley Hospital and would live. He learned that William Kerr had a bad gash on his head and was suffering from a severe cold. And then doctors confirmed what he already knew, that Thomas Thomas was no more.
His body would be retrieved in a few hours, at noon, lodged underneath a beam under Box Car Number 7140. A grim congregation of seven police officials was on hand to assist with pulling out the body, including Lew Thomas, the man who had initially learned that Thomas and Gross were recuperating in a home and had passed the news on to the mayor, who apparently was the well-meaning one who had initiated organizing the ill-fated rescue party.
Throughout the day, Omaha, Nebraska
In every age and era, there is always someone out there who is happy to exploit a tragedy. Police officers and bystanders started noticing that several attractive young women and teenage girls, who were homeless and penniless in the wake of the tornado, were being approached by some well-dressed men who were offering the ladies some well-paid jobs in Chicago and St. Louis.
Their motives were purely humanitarian, the men said.
F. E. Eilleck, one of the men working at the relief station, didn’t think this was the case. The working theory soon became that these were men who were part of the white slave trade. Police intervened, as far as anyone knew; these shady-looking men left the city—without any young women in tow.
Rescuers were still finding citizens in dire need of help. The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette tells the story of one unidentified mother who left her house after the tornado. It was apparently not too badly damaged, but the wind had come close enough and terrified her, and the woman was afraid her house might catch on fire. Leaving behind her ill, bed-ridden husband, she ran outside with her baby and sat all of Sunday night in a creek, covering herself and her baby with a wet blanket, hoping to protect herself from fire. Of course, this made matters worse. By the time she was found, apparently several days later, the baby was barely breathing. A doctor was called in, and one can only hope that everything worked out for this family.
Noon, Parkersburg, West Virginia
More than half of Parkersburg’s business district was underwater, as were a large number of houses, and the Ohio River was still rising—and widening. The Ohio River is often a quarter-mile to a mile wide, depending on the area of the river; during this flood, the Ohio River, in some places, was as wide as twelve miles.
The gas, electric, and water plants would be shutting down in a matter of minutes, and streetcars would sputter to a stop.
The newspaper plants were all flooded out as well, save for the Parkersburg Sentinel, which was too close for comfort to the river and had its first floor flooded, but the printers were evidently able to bring some equipment upstairs. The editors and reporters were brought to the building in boats, coming through the front door. Then they took the stairs up to the second floor, where they worked on putting out a newspaper with as many updates on the flood in their town as possible. It was slow going with the printing of the paper—they were only managing to produce two papers a minute—which meant they had to raise their prices—but they got the paper out to their newsboys, who sold their papers from boats.
Afternoon, Columbus, Ohio
After a lengthy conference in the statehouse, Ernest Bicknell and Governor Cox left for Dayton.
“There will be harmony between the state and the Red Cross,” a weary Bicknell told reporters. “That is positive. All relief channels must be brought together.”
Throughout the day, northwestern New York
In Rochester, and throughout the western part of the state, the water was higher than it had been since 1865. The Genesee River flooded Plymouth Avenue and Front Street in Rochester, capped off by a three-inch snowfall. In Lyons, the Clyde River climbed eleven feet, forcing families out of their homes into the freezing wind. In Troy, there were fires and many families fleeing their houses. The villages of Marcellus, Camillus, and Marietta were described in the papers as “threatened with being wiped out.”
Throughout the day, Dayton, Ohio
The water came to Dayton fast and furious. It left it the same way.
It seemed like it would never end, but once the water began evaporating and draining, it was a relatively speedy exit. Jennie Parsons, a resident of New York, who became stuck with her family at a relative’s house, told the story of waiting out the flood to McClure’s Magazine and recalled that Friday morning, she could see the iron fence surrounding the house, and by noon, the lawns were showing. Soon after, neighbors were dropping by, mucking through the mud to come visit.
“Hello, up there,” was the most common refrain Parsons remembered hearing. “Everybody all right?”
Parsons added that “the funniest thing was that everybody had forgotten what day of the week it was. It seemed months. And you could hear people saying, ‘What day is it, anyhow?’ We had to get a calendar to find out.”
About 11:30 A.M., right around the time the Beckel House guests were freed, the owner of the hotel, Clarence E. Bennett, still dying, still in the Callahan Building, breathed his last. He was free of his pain, and so were his guests, who fanned out across the city, perhaps in a daze, but also, at least some of them, in a hurry.
At least two of the actors from the comedy Officer 666 wasted no time trying to communicate with the outside world. Lorenza Wellen, an actress with the play, sent a telegram to her theatrical managers reading: “Am stranded. Love from company ‘Officer 666.’” But that’s all she wrote, and so while the managers were glad she was alive, they were still just about as perplexed and anxious as they had been before.
Another actor in the play, Jeffrey French, bought a ticket for the first train out of Dayton that he could get, but the ordeal evidently had been too much for him. While he was at the station, running for his train, he collapsed and died.
Everyone was in a state of assessing what they had been through. “It was the worst experience, more so than the one I had in the Galveston storm,” declared a Dayton resident who gave his name to the papers as B. Traynor. He added that “in the Galveston disaster, I lost everything I had,” emphasizing that the infamous 1900 hurricane was no picnic.
This flood was one for the ages.
Evening, Dayton
Charles Adams waded through several yards with Grandpa Adams, and they returned to their house to see what they were in for.
It was as wretched as they feared, but at least the house was still standing. What was left of the furniture on the first floor was piled in corners. Viola’s piano, which Charles and his father and neighbors had so carefully placed on the table, had fallen over backward, “where it lay in a hopeless ruin,” wrote Charles several years later. “We waded through to the dining room where we saw one thing at least, inviting, compared to the mud and grime surrounding it. Over in one corner of the room we found the dinner table right side up and the top of it practically as clean and white as when we left it early Tuesday morning, save for the lapping of the water up around the edges. The cracker jar and a dish of salted peanuts on the table were perfectly clean.”
It was a similar surreal sight that Orville Wright and his sister Katharine would find at their home, and at the homes of undoubtedly numerous Dayton residents. Charles came to the same conclusion that Orville had.
“The only way we could account for this freak was that the table had risen with the water, missed the lighting fixtures and had floated to the top near the ceiling, coming down again with the water, right side up. The high-water mark was just three inches from the ceiling, which was enough to allow the dishes to float clear without forcing the top surface of the table under water.”
But otherwise, the floor covering was mud, the walls were filthy, and Charles and his father were staring at a veritable domestic disaster. There was nothing to do but start cleaning.