Remember the Promises in the Attic
Denver, March 30
Sarah Bernhardt, the 67-year-old legendary French stage actress known around the world, gave a benefit performance for the flood sufferers in Ohio and Indiana with John Drew, Jr., an American stage actor known for his Shakespeare performances. He was also the uncle of the famed actors John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore and thus the great-great uncle of future film actress Drew Barrymore. Together, they raised $5,000, which would be added to a $41,000 fund already raised by Colorado residents.
Everyone seemed to want to send either money or some sort of show of support. In Sacramento, California, at Folson Penitentiary, E. C. McCarty, a forger, drew up a resolution that prisoners there felt bad about the flood sufferers, and the resolution was somehow passed on to the media and published in papers on this day. The convicts said they wanted the public to know how they felt “to show the outside world that the prisoners are not heartless nor heedless of the suffering of others.”
Farmers organized a bear hunt to try to bring down what was believed to be one of the escaped circus animals from the Wallace circus in Peru—after he appeared on the farm of one George Enoch. Unfortunately for the farmers at least, the bear managed to escape a hail of bullets.
April 1, Louisville, Kentucky
A large warehouse owned by the Rugby Distillery Company in the western part of the city, weakened by floodwaters, collapsed late in the night, and so into the river went five thousand barrels of whiskey valued at a quarter of a million dollars. Several employees hastily constructed a dam and saved a number of barrels. Presumably, at least a few Kentucky men went looking for these rogue barrels and saved some for themselves.
April 1, Fort Wayne
A full week after the flood began for most people, a poorly dressed and tired-looking man came to the house of one Mrs. Josephine Pfadt, asking for food and explaining that he was a refugee from the flood. She permitted him to come into the house and prepared him a meal. She then left her home for a few minutes to go to the home of a neighbor and when she returned, she learned that he had tried to embrace her little girl. The police were called in but failed to find any trace of him. It’s an interesting story, if only to recognize that even in the good old days, there were some really bad people, and for the language that newspapers used when covering a troubled topic such as pedophile (the headline: ALLEGED INSULTER SOUGHT).
April 2, Bird’s Point, Missouri
Forty-eight soldiers from the Missouri National Guard became stuck on a 200-foot-wide and 400-foot-long stretch of an earthen levee after the Mississippi River destroyed most of it. The soldiers had boats, but they were all swept away except for a two-man skiff. The two officers in charge boarded the skiff to make a four-mile trip—against the current—to Cairo, Illinois, where they knew they could get help.
For the remaining soldiers, it was a long rest of the day—and night.
“We could feel the dirt crumbling away beneath our feet,” one of the men told a reporter later, “and we were kept on the move nearly all of the time. The section of levee on which we were marooned was under water as deep as three feet in many places, and time after time, we dragged some of the men away from the water as the earth crumbled away. We made it a point to stand as near the up-stream edge of our island as possible, so if caught in a cave-in, we would not be washed away by the current.”
The Chicago naval reserves immediately went after the soldiers, rescuing them the next morning. Incredibly, all forty-eight men survived the night.
April 2, Missouri and Hickman, Kentucky
For George Shaver, a Missouri farmer, it was tragedy plain and simple, the flood still reaping victims even after the waters receded in Dayton. He and his two young children saw their house destroyed and his wife and their mother killed by falling timbers in their home. Shavers then put his wife’s body in his boat, and with his two young children, who were clinging to her body, somehow steered them through the Mississippi River to Hickman, Kentucky, which Shaver deemed a much safer place to be. And it was. Soon after, they buried her in a little cemetery on a hillside.
April 2, New Madrid, Missouri
A resident, William Smith, and his wife, were reported to have attempted to cross the Mississippi River from New Madrid. They didn’t make it.
April 2, Washington, D.C. and Catlettsburg, Kentucky
Senator Ollie James of Kentucky appeared at both the Red Cross and War Department to appeal for aid for the three thousand residents of Catlettsburg, Kentucky, who had to flee their homes. He said that conditions were worse there than Dayton or Columbus, now that the levees had broken and everything had been swept away. That hopefully got their attention.
April 2, 7 P.M., Paducah, Kentucky
The river had risen a foot and a half throughout the day and by evening the floors of every wholesale house and many retail stores were flooded. The forecast assumed the river would rise another four feet, flooding almost the rest of Paducah, except for five blocks that seemed high enough to be out of danger. But people weren’t so sure. Paducah was on high ground, in general, but the community had never built any levees. Flooding was completely new to this generation. There hadn’t been a serious flood since 1884.
Still, as bad as things were in Paducah, it was much worse in nearby Cairo, Illinois, which is why Paducah, a southern Kentucky town, was quickly becoming a rescue center. Situated on the Ohio River just a stone’s throw away from Illinois and adjacent to Missouri and Tennessee, Paducah had enough resources that the U.S. military ordered a lieutenant and two non-commissioned officers to take every power boat they could find and three barges and make haste for Cairo.
The military’s instincts were apparently spot-on. The remaining canoes, rafts, and the like were enough to save everyone in town, except for one inebriated man who fell out of a boat and into the current. There’s a good lesson here for everyone. Floods and drinking heavily do not mix.
April 2, Dayton, Ohio
Despite the waters finally disappearing, the city was still taking stock of what was ahead of them, and authorities were doing everything, from trying to reunite families, to ensuring looting didn’t become a problem, to avoiding an epidemic breaking out. People were on edge. C. J. Becker, a prominent real estate agent, had been using his car to help ferry people in and out of the city, and overall was just being a good citizen when a friend of his joked and asked, “How much are you getting for wearing out your tires and machine?”
“Thirty-five dollars a day,” Becker said good-naturedly. He should have added: “Don’t I wish.”
A little later, Becker was stopped by a soldier who took him to a Major Hubler of the Ohio National Guard. The major wanted Becker to explain why he was running a sightseeing service, charging people thirty-five dollars a day to take them to see the hardest-hit areas of the flood.
It took several hours and signatures of people who knew Becker, before the real estate agent could convince the military that he was joking and wasn’t some sort of sleazebag making a buck off the flood.
The city gradually was coming to life, however. Historian Judith Sealander, who wrote the book Grand Plans: Business Progressivism and Social Change in Ohio’s Miami Valley tells of how in the aftermath of the flood, Dayton sent out committee volunteers and soldiers to conduct house-to-house inspections, an operation that reached every home and business in the city, with the goal of taking anyone with a communicable disease to a hospital.
“Groceries, bakeries, restaurants and schools were only allowed to reopen after passing a rigorous inspection and disinfection,” writes Sealander, who then refers to a project Patterson created once it was apparent that his factory couldn’t keep flood victims there forever. “The tent city refugee camp built on donated NCR property included electric lights, sewer lines, showers and flush toilets. Ten cleaning stations dotted around the flooded regions of the city offered homeowners free lime, chloride of lime, and cresol, along with instructions explaining how to use these chemicals to whitewash basements and disinfect floors, walls, and furniture.”
April 4, Dayton, Ohio
A ten-hour downpour in Dayton did nothing to create a new flood, but it also did nothing for people’s nerves, nor did it help alleviate the problem of further damage to people’s homes, businesses, and health in the already-waterlogged city.
April 5, throughout the nation
Naturally, and not for the first time, the national conversation started toward the idea of flood prevention. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, who discussed flood prevention in his book Progressive Principles, released just the year before when he unsuccessfully tried to wrest the nomination from President Taft, got the ball rolling, writing an article that appeared in an early April 1913 issue of The Outlook: “The Ohio Floods: Can Such Calamities be Prevented?”
After citing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the Great Baltimore fire of 1904, Roosevelt noted that the country was excellent when it came to spending money to help flood victims, but not so excellent at spending money on flood prevention. He brought up the flood of the previous year, noting, ““During the spring and summer of 1912, hundreds of farms along the Mississippi River, from Cairo to the Gulf, were flooded because of the inadequacy of a levee system, unsupplemented by source-stream control, to keep great floods within the channel of the river. More than one hundred thousand persons were driven from their homes, and some were drowned. Homes, buildings, agricultural implements, corn, forage, crops, cattle, horses, and hogs were destroyed in large numbers, and the wild animal life taken by the floods cannot be computed. Health problems of dangerous importance were created, and the injury to business and commerce aggregated hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Then Roosevelt went in for the kill: “In order that the suffering by human beings might be reduced, the Federal Government promptly appropriated $6 million for the purchase of food and for the repair of broken levees. But not one cent was appropriated for the solution of the monster economic problem involved, or for the correction of the fundamental evil that has been created through changes wrought by man in the watershed of the Nation’s greatest drainage system.”
Technology might help matters, at least one expert posited. The head of the physics department at the University of Iowa, Dr. G. W. Stewart, challenged the nation to think about building more wireless stations and in a sense forecasting radio. Just as the Titanic had demonstrated how wireless communication could be invaluable in bringing help and sending out warnings during an emergency, the Great Flood of 1913 certainly offered another example of how much it was needed.
“Suppose Omaha and Council Bluffs had been cut off from the outside world and a great fire had started Easter night,” speculated Stewart to the press, thinking how Morse code could be adopted for the modern world. “A wireless message, ‘C.Q.D.,’ flashed to Sioux City or Lincoln would have started special trains carrying fire engines to the stricken cities hours before they otherwise would have started. If Dayton and other cities in the flood region had been equipped with wireless, the great loss of life might have been averted.”
Editorials in newspapers across the country obviously had made their opinions known as well. Some used the flood to remind critics of coastal cities that we’re all in this together (“No section of the country can claim immunity from storms or from danger of storm damage,” noted the Galveston News). The editors at the San Francisco Call probably just wanted to point out that they were grateful for their own weather but ultimately seemed to suggest the rest of the nation come out to the Sunshine State (“In California of the kindly skies on the same day, fleeting sunshine or warm, gentle rains for coast, valley and foothill; in the higher mountains more snow to guarantee full streams and crops for the summer to come”).
Some papers championed self-reliance. The Chicago Inter Ocean pointed out that Omaha had refused outside financial aid, and that “St. Louis took care of her tornado losses alone,” and that “San Francisco disposed with outside help at the first possible moment. So did Chicago in 1871. So do all American towns when ‘trouble’ comes to them.”
Other papers urged that this was the time for everyone to come and help each other, like the Detroit Free Press, which put out an editorial right after the tornado and before the floods: “The President speaks for the nation when he asks the stricken city of Omaha, ‘Can we help in any way?’ The disaster that has overtaken our fellow citizens is one that might come to any of our cities. What is in the power of Americans at this time will be gladly given.”
The Middletown Daily Times Press, of Middletown, New York, saw the problem as one that was much of our own making. “Just as the recent tornado losses have been at least aggravated by the tendency to erect unsubstantial buildings, so the awful floods of the Ohio Valley may be largely traced to the work of man,” declared an editorial. “Wherever the balance of forces is upset, Nature sooner or later takes revenge.”
The Middletown Daily Times Press then made its larger point: “The ruthless sacrifice of forest growth, turning vast acres of soil sponge into hard runways, is a familiar cause of flood damage. But even if the losses at Dayton and other cities were not due to any large extent to this reason, other consequences of man’s acts do increase hazard. Men build factories and railroad tracks and bridges and dams along a stream, tending to restrict the natural outlet of the water. Their mills let loose debris and silt that fill up the river beds. A still greater factor is the erosion from the cultivated fields, which is far greater than that from the original uncultivated soil.”
April 6, Equality, Illinois
The Gallatin Coal and Coke Company’s two mines were completely flooded. Anyone around the mine fervently hoping that it might not be ruined had their ambitions dashed with the first explosion, sending water shooting two hundred feet, for the next three minutes, sending coal, cars, mine props, and timber spraying into the air.
Silence followed, but for only a few more minutes, until another explosion that finished off a building, the engine house, and the tipples, the part of the mine where the coal cars were tipped and emptied of their coal.
Anyone who thought, “Well, at least the east mine may still be okay,” also had their hopes stripped away. An explosion soon took down that mine as well.
April 7, Frankfort, Indiana
Bodies were still turning up. Roy Rothenberger, who was one of the first victims of the flood, was finally discovered on the creek bottom near where his boat was overturned. Searchers were still looking for his brother, Roscoe.
April 10, Wilson, Arkansas
The flood was still showing its formidable power further and further away from its original epicenter. At a levee near Wilson, about a hundred African-American laborers were doing their best to keep the dam from bursting. They couldn’t; and in one Associated Press article, there was a catty aside, typical of the times, of course, that suggested that it was all the fault of the men:
“The levee near Wilson, Ark., went out late this evening said to be due to the desertion of about 100 negro laborers today.”
If desertion means running for your life, so you aren’t drowned as a dam comes crashing down on you, then, sure, guilty as charged. Residents in the area may have felt the men deserted their post, or perhaps the anonymous reporter simply felt he was reporting exactly what had happened and not attempting any snark since he does, in fact, observe in the next sentence that the laborers “kept up the fight to the last minute.”
The men were all able to reach land high enough to escape the rushing waters, but the cabins they lived in were not so lucky. The men watched their homes and all the trees in the valley disappear into the swirl.
April 11, New Castle, Pennsylvania
For weeks, there had been murmurs of police officers demanding money before ferrying flood victims to dry land. On a Friday afternoon, in Mayor Walter Tyler’s office, a hearing was held to determine just what had happened. Many witnesses were brought in, as was the coroner. There had been murmurs, a whisper campaign if you will, that perhaps Thomas Thomas was the police officer taking money from rescue victims. He had, after all, been out there a lot, saving lives.
But the coroner threw cold water on the idea when he reported the money found in Thomas’s pockets after his body was retrieved. He had $2.01 on him. Several witnesses fingered William Kerr as one of the men who had taken money, but it apparently wasn’t enough evidence for the mayor. Or maybe Mayor Walter Tyler gave Kerr the benefit of the doubt since he had tried to save Thomas Thomas’s life.
Kerr hung on to his job, but two other police officers were sacked, and a fireman was suspended.
April 14, New Orleans, Louisiana
A bloated corpse was discovered in the Mississippi River at a plantation. The body was five feet and six inches tall and the man estimated to be thirty-five years old, and while nobody knew who he was, they believed he was a flood victim and that they could identify where he was from. Inside was a card from where the man apparently got his dry cleaning, well over eight hundred miles away. It read: Williams and Brown, cleaners. Walnut Street. Cincinnati.
April 16, Dayton
While NCR initially told the rest of the country to send food and clothes and not money, they had now changed their message. The papers were now quoting John Patterson who said that money “is urgently required for putting our city in a condition to prevent the outbreak of serious disease and to rehabilitate the thousands, many of whom lost their homes entirely and all of whom lost their household and personal effects.”
April 21, Mayersville, Mississippi
Just north of the town, there was a break in yet another levee, and soon four very populated counties, Sharkey, Isaquena, Washington, and Warren, full of cotton farms and farmers and work-hands, were inundated. Before the day was up, another fifteen thousand people were rendered homeless.
April 28, Louisiana
As the flood made its way toward New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, some 222 miles upriver many residents were stuck on roofs and second floors, and the property damage was high. A dike gave way, and the Mississippi River came pouring out, swamping the Tensas and Concord parishes, forming a lake nine hundred square miles and driving two hundred thousand people out of their homes. It was twenty feet deep in some places, and the force of the water literally knocked some railroad trains off their tracks.
April 29, Louisiana
Odds are, when a 900-square-mile lake forms out of nowhere, thousands of people are going to die, but incredibly, twenty-four hours later, officials in communities like Vidalia and Ferriday were stunned and pleased that the death toll was so far light. Two people—African-American, but that’s all that’s known—died in the flooding. Plenty of people were at risk of drowning or catching a disease or starving, however, which is why a relief camp had been set up, and every available steamer had been called for duty to take flood victims to the doctors, nurses, and American Red Cross officials waiting for them in Natchez, Mississippi. Meanwhile, other communities down the river were eyeing the Mississippi and other rivers warily. In Clayton, Louisiana, located on the Tensas River, the water was already in the city, ten feet deep and rising.
April 30, Natchez, Mississippi
Rescue parties saved many people on this day, but they couldn’t save two mothers and nine young children on the roof, all of them screaming and begging for someone to come and get them. Two oarsmen in boats nearby wanted to desperately, but their boats were full of passengers already, and to bring anyone else on board would threaten to tip them over and risk everyone’s lives.
All they could do was row away and watch and hope that they could return or send more boats.
But it was not to be. The inside of the house was full of water, and the force was just too great. Suddenly, the incomprehensible happened. While the oarsmen and their terrified passengers looked on, the home toppled over, and the screaming mothers and crying children all plunged into the river and to their deaths.
May 1, Poydras, Louisiana
Approximately sixteen miles south of New Orleans, the levee began to cave away a few minutes after five in the morning. Something had to be done quickly, or risk losing the community. The solution staggers the imagination.
Within twenty minutes, a farmer and about twelve African-American men arrived to find about two inches of water spilling over the levee.
Sandbags—two thousand of them—were on their way, but within minutes it wouldn’t matter. The water was coming.
One newspaper article described the black men as willing, and the Atlanta Constitution-Journal called them “heroic,” but given that they had come with their white boss, and no white men stepped up to do what these men were about to do, you have to assume the worst, that these men were either forced or told that their jobs depended on stopping the water. But it’s also easy to assume the best, that these men simply did what they knew had to be done and that nobody else was brave enough to try, in order to save their families, friends, and townspeople.
In any case, two twelve-inch wooden boards were laid on the dirt levee, right where the water was dribbling over, and then the twelve men climbed onto them, effectively becoming part of the levee. They were “human sandbags,” as the papers put it, and the twelve men were at risk that any of them might be, at any moment, sucked into the river to meet a grisly end. Their bodies packed tightly into the part of the levee that was breaking away, the men kept the water in the Mississippi River where it belonged. Meanwhile, about a hundred black and white men filled sacks and carried them to the twelve human sandbags, so they could fortify the weakest part of the levee. The idea was that once it was secure, they could begin leaving their posts and replacing themselves with actual sandbags. It took an hour, but eventually all of the men were able to leave safely, and two thousand bags of dirt were in place. The levee held.
May 2, Clayton, Louisiana
The steamer Concordia, 156 feet long and 850 tons, was making its way down the Tenas River and taking flood refugees to safety when irony reared its tragic head. The captain lost control and the vessel’s right bow was slammed into the north pier of the iron railroad’s drawbridge, just two feet above the river. Captain Sam Pennywitt, an experienced river pilot, was evidently trying to go around the drawbridge when he lost control and crashed into it.
Two men on the deck, 73-year-old Ambrose Denton Geoghegan, a veteran riverboat captain along for the ride, and William Grimes, in his mid-thirties and the chief clerk of the steamer, were instantly thrown off the boat and never seen alive again. A black man whose name has been lost to history was also on the deck, as was a planter named Maurice Block. Both made a valiant leap from the steamer’s deck to the drawbridge. The African-American landed in the water between the bridge and the boat, which was hurled back into the bridge by the current. The extremely unfortunate man was then crushed to death as a piece of flying timber from the steamer flew into the air, hitting Block, breaking his arm and injuring a shoulder.
As the boat began to sink, there was a mass exodus as crew and passengers leapt for the bridge, and others, tossed off the boat and into the water by the waves, attempted to swim to shore. Incredibly, when it was all over and after the steamer was carried away by the current and eventually sank, 107 survivors remained to tell the tale. But twenty-two people, twenty of them African-Americans, and most of them women and children, did not. They were among the last, and may have been the last, victims of the Great Flood of 1913, a misnomer if there ever was one. The Great Flood of 1913 was heartbreaking, horrifying, and horrible. It was unfair, often tragic, dangerous, and deadly. It was anything but great.
May, 1913, Dayton
Almost a year after the passing of his brother Wilbur, on a Thursday afternoon on May 1, Orville Wright flew in an airplane for the first time. It wasn’t simply any typical flight, either. He was piloting a new hydroplane, seven miles north of Dayton on the Great Miami River. Wright told reporters that he hoped the machine would be useful in future floods, such as the one that had driven him out of his home.
Indeed, there seemed to be promise. Wright’s plane, piloted by Orville and an assistant, William Jacobs, took off on the waters of the Miami River and then soared in the sky, gracefully curving around the edge of Dayton, and returned, skimming above the water until it came to a safe landing. He had already flown it about four hundred feet above the river, with hundreds of curious spectators watching below, but this was a more ambitious flight.
Orville Wright wasn’t the only one soaring. It was a lift to the beleaguered city of Dayton, which was naturally still cleaning up and rebuilding. Wright flew approximately a hundred flights throughout May, June, and July.
Things were happening on the ground, too, though. The next day, on May 2, the Dayton’s Flood Prevention Committee formed. Poor Mayor Phillips was nowhere to be found; John H. Patterson was designated the Flood Prevention Committee Chairman, and he appointed local business leaders to join the organization and share in the heavy lifting. The idea that Patterson might spend a year in jail, very real just a couple months before, seemed more improbable than ever.
In the aftermath of the flood, water-weary government officials and their constituents across the nation, even in states that hadn’t been affected, demanded change.
In Pennsylvania, the state legislature passed an act allowing a dam in the northeastern quadrant of the state to be built, and creating a sixteen-mile lake, protecting towns from the Shenango and Beaver rivers. Indiana christened a flood protection commission, and throughout the state, new laws were passed, and dams and levees were built and rebuilt. Legislation involving flood control that had been stalled in states like Texas and California suddenly passed as the nation read about the ongoing difficulties in the Midwest.
But no community moved as fast to prepare for another flood as Dayton. The flood prevention committee quickly offered a job to Arthur Ernest Morgan, who was recognized as a brilliant water control engineer. He was hired by Dayton to prepare a flood plan to fight the flood plains, once and for all.
Morgan was born in 1878 in Cincinnati, grew up in Minnesota, lived in Washington, D.C., and was now based out of Tennessee. Morgan was an ambitious go-getter that stemmed from growing up in Minnesota as a sickly kid. As a teenager, he vowed to become healthier. He got a job outside and started pushing himself harder than most able-bodied people ever do. He slept in a tent in northern Minnesota when it was 30 below, and after his high school graduation, he traveled thirty miles down the Mississippi River on a three-foot wide log with just a buck fifty in his pocket.
Then he began making his way to Colorado, doing odd jobs like picking fruit and mining coal. According to his biographer Mark Bernstein, who wrote the book, American Biography: Arthur Ernest Morgan, Morgan bought fifty 30-cent editions of authors like Emerson and Kipling and attempted to sell these works he so loved to miners.
Morgan ultimately lived in Colorado for a time and completed his college education at the University of Colorado. After he finished, though, not having money or a job, he returned home and ended up joining forces with his father’s surveying firm. They named it Morgan & Morgan, instead of Morgan & Son, at Arthur’s insistence, feeling he was his own man, and after what he had been through, he had arguably earned that. He soon married and started a family.
It was during this period that Arthur Ernest Morgan realized he had an aptitude and personal affinity for water control and decided to become a water control engineer. There weren’t many water control engineers in the country, as there were not many competitors, he liked his odds of getting work somewhere and continuing his very basic training in the field. Minnesota didn’t have any statewide standards for drainage control, and so in 1904, Morgan, twenty-six years old, volunteered to create them for the state engineering society. Morgan threw himself into the task, and the following year, the society embraced his ideas, which were then written into state law. The governor then offered Morgan the job of state engineer.
Morgan actually declined, having set his eyes on a job opening as an engineer on a federal level, working for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Drainage Investigation. His biographer posits that Morgan also may have wanted to move away from Minnesota. His wife, Urania, died four months after the birth of their son, Ernest, and he may have wanted some distance from the tragedy. Understandable, but as his son was left in the care of relatives after his mother’s death, he was also distancing himself from his young son, Ernest, Jr. Still, it was a different time, and a father’s role in rearing children was not given the same gravitas it is today.
Morgan developed a reputation for being a supremely ethical and dedicated water control engineer, and by 1910, he left Washington and went to Memphis, starting the Morgan Engineering Company. He also married again. He was just shy of thirty-six years of age when Dayton found him.
Of course, hiring Morgan—and his staff of engineers—to canvass the land and draw up plans and build a flood control system would cost money, a lot of it, and so the city of Dayton devoted the weekend of May 24 and 25 to the sole goal of raising two million dollars to hire them. This was no small feat, considering that the city had lost an estimated $128 million in property. The neighboring city of Xenia’s newspaper reported that “men and women, led by five bands, paraded the streets and stood in lines before subscription booths.” Everyone from business owners to home owners, some who reportedly took out a second mortgage, pledged or gave money to the fund. Every church in the city on Sunday morning collected money for the rebuilding cause.
“Flags and banners floated from every house and store, and when the whistles announced the completion of the fund, the streets were thronged with thousands who sang religious hymns and danced and shouted in a great thanksgiving service,” reported Xenia’s Daily Gazette. The banners and the words on everyone’s lips were the slogan of the flood prevention committee: Remember the promises you made in the attic.
In other words, the slogan was saying, in its own way, remember how you hoped, prayed and vowed this would never happen to you, to your city, again? Dayton as a whole was determined to make good on its promise.
But by the end of the weekend, the committee still hadn’t raised enough, and late that afternoon (or perhaps in the evening, according to Bicknell’s recollection), John H. Patterson wound up running a meeting in the large assembly hall in his factory, a meeting that every important businessman in Dayton was urged to attend.
Ernest Bicknell—finally in Dayton—later wrote about the meeting, saying that the big hall was full, and that the men in the meeting were “filled with uncertainty, not to say apprehension. They had been very hard hit by the flood and had given liberally to relief.”
All weekend, in fact. “But they literally dared not stay away from the meeting. They could not afford to disregard the moral pressure of their neighbors and their powerful business associates,” wrote Bicknell. “Mr. Patterson took charge of the meeting and ran it virtually single-handed. I was fortunate to be present that evening and witnessed a demonstration of moral and mental power which made an ineffaceable picture in my memory. As the hour of eight o’clock struck, Mr. Patterson rose and looked searchingly over the faces of the audience. Apparently satisfied that the people expected were present, he walked to the entrance of the hall, closed the double doors, locked them and without a word put the key into his pocket. Then returning to the front of the room, he began to speak. He spoke of the pride which those present had taken in the beauty and prosperity of Dayton and of the tragedy which had now laid her in ruins and had taken the lives of many of her people. With deep feeling but with infinite skill he brought that doubting and apprehensive crowd of hard-headed men into a malleable and sympathetic mood. Then he spoke briefly, touching on the plans under consideration that would forever prevent a repetition of the calamity.”
According to Bicknell, Patterson said: “Before we can go forward with these plans, we must have at our absolute command $2,000,000.”
It isn’t clear how much the city had already raised that day, but they were well short of two million. “An audible groan rose from that crowd,” recalled Bicknell. “Murmurs of dissent were heard. Men turned to each other and shook their heads muttering. Mr. Patterson paid no attention to these signs of protest but went right on with his appeal. Then, doubtless by prearrangement, he turned to a leading citizen, called him familiarly by his Christian name and asked him what he would give. This man made a fervent little speech and named an amount that made the others gasp by its generosity. This started the business in the right direction.”
Everyone began pledging, including Patterson’s son, Frederick, who upped his donation by $12,000, but still when it was past nine o’clock, the city was short a quarter of a million dollars. Patterson, whose company already had given a quarter of a million dollars, announced that NCR would double that amount and give half a million instead, and although Bicknell, who wrote about the event twenty-one years after the fact, remembered it as a somber occasion, contemporary accounts note that the crowd went wild. Men ripped off their coats and waved them around the air. The bands present began playing, “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” Grown men were openly weeping. The total pledged, from NCR and from 22,000 individuals, was now a healthy $2.125 million. Morgan could now begin.
The summer and fall of 1913
Arthur E. Morgan hopped in and out of Dayton and surrounding cities like Piqua, Troy, Hamilton and Middletown, meeting with engineers, speaking at chamber of commerce events and going to gatherings like the Dayton Flood Preventing Conference in November. But what became more than patently obvious in all of this planning and winning hearts and minds was that laws would have to be passed to get this flood control system up and running. Morgan envisioned a conservancy with a board of governors that could have the power to condemn lands, issue bonds, and exercise police powers, all under court review. The conservancy act that he wanted and ultimately got would be able to regulate, widen, and deepen stream channels, reclaim wet and overflowed land wherever possible, and improve drainage.
1914
It took the help of Governor James Cox (who needed no convincing) and a Dayton attorney, John McMahon, who wrote the language for what would become the Conservancy Act, allowing the creation of conservancy districts in the state of Ohio. From here on out, the district’s electors, like the mayor and councilmen, could tax their district and create an organization that would have the authority to plot out, develop, and even operate the water supply.
The conservancy districts, if officials set them up, would be allowed to do whatever they needed to do, to ensure that the waterways in their own district wouldn’t flood, and that the water would remain clean for drinking, bathing, and swimming, and that the rivers, creeks, and streams in general would remain free and clear of garbage. As one U.S. government engineer would tell a crowd of Ohioans after the flood, the flood didn’t occur in the rivers as God made them, but in rivers obstructed by debris, by buildings in the channel, and by bridge piers. Conservancies, it was hoped, would prevent that.
The Ohio General Assembly passed the Conservancy Act in February of 1914.
1915
John H. Patterson didn’t want a pardon, and thus, he didn’t get it. It took a while, but in 1915, the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the lower court and sent Patterson’s case back for a new trial. Eventually, the matter was dropped entirely.
It was also this year that the Miami Conservancy District was formed, devoted to protecting the Miami Valley, where Dayton lives and portions of nine Ohio counties, from flooding. Morgan, however, was just getting started. Ultimately, he was spearheading a plan that required twenty-one draglines (a piece of heavy equipment used in engineering), twenty-nine trains, and two hundred dump cars, sixty-three automobiles, many miles of railroad track, over a hundred pumps, over a hundred transformers and, was the largest public works project of its time, employing two thousand people.
There were five camp villages with 230 major buildings, 200 sheds and various buildings. Bunkhouses were put up with running water, and each camp had a mess hall and a store. Each camp village existed to build an earthen dam, dams made up of impervious clay and silt, sand, gravel, and boulders, all which would protect Dayton, Hamilton, Middletown, Piqua, Troy, and a slew of communities in the area that had all been besieged by the 1913 flood. These weren’t any ordinary dams Morgan’s crew ultimately made. For instance, the dam near Englewood, Ohio, is said to have enough dirt to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza. It can hold 6,350 acres of water. The area in the Miami Valley that was flooded took up 3,285 acres. There would have to be a flood twice the size of the Great Flood of 1913 for Morgan’s work to be diminished.
When the rivers through the Miami Valley flow normally, the water passes through the dams without any trouble, and behind the dams is no water whatsoever. If the Englewood dam were to reach its maximum capacity, it would take twenty-three days for the water to drain and evaporate.
But when there are heavy rains, and the water starts to overflow its banks, the extra water travels through special conduits in the dams and collects in a space called the retarding basin, which is upstream of the dam. If it sounds confusing, it is the stuff engineers live for, and Morgan was clearly in his element. He would oversee the dams until they were all finished in 1922.
1920
Mrs. Ida Overmeyer gave her resignation to the orphanage after a quarter of a century of service and would live out her final years in St. Louis with her son, his wife, and their two daughters. Around this time, Theresa Hammond was married according to her niece, Sara Houk. Miss Hammond ended up marrying Dr. James Francis Dinnen, who everyone called Frank. He was the doctor who had cared for the orphans that fateful week more than eight years before.
He was married when he and Miss Hammond met, and the romance came well after the flood and his divorce, as far as the family knows, and that may be true. The doctor continued caring for the orphans and Miss Hammond remained teaching there for years to come, and so it may be that it took some time before love blossomed.
Because Dr. Dinnen was married in the Catholic Church, and he didn’t want to scandalize his ex-wife, he and Theresa married in secret, in a civil ceremony, and eventually moved to Cleveland. They both lived into their seventies and passed away during the 1950s.
Charles Gebhart, Hammond’s boatmate during the terrible tragedy at the orphanage, was accused several days after the incident of being drunk when he was rowing. At the time, he was a saloon owner—he also had been a gardener for many years—and the charge that he was inebriated during the rescues could have stuck, except that he had about thirty people, including Miss Hammond, sign a petition stating emphatically that he hadn’t touched a drop that day. Gebhart claimed he hadn’t had a drink for at least three months.
Gebhart himself, however, seems to have lived otherwise a fairly sedate and normal life free of tragedy and disasters. He gave up his saloon about a year after the flood, and during the 1920s, he was a truck farmer, the term used for a local farmer who sells directly to consumers and restaurants. On March 17, 1932, he passed away quietly, hopefully with his wife Tracy and their three sons and daughter at his side.
1921
The dams were meant to save communities, but one community was something of a casualty of Morgan’s vision. In February of this year, the town of Osborn was moved to a new site. The land was purchased as part of the conservancy reservoir, with the idea being that it would store up flood water and pass it down to Dayton in reasonable amounts. The state was going to wreck Osborn’s buildings but decided to sell them to be moved to the new site and gave the old owners the first chance to buy them. A company was formed to manage the moving, and bids were requested.
It was a major undertaking, as described in a December 1925 issue of Popular Mechanics that told the story of E. W. LaPlant, who had made moving large buildings his specialty. One of his finest moments was when he engineered the transport of a 4,800-ton department store in Montreal, Canada.
But with the town of Osborn, LaPlant designed a move that required 552 buildings to be hauled out of a valley to a hilltop a mile and a half away. The town is still on that hill, at least in part. Never able to regain its former self-sufficiency, Osborn and the neighboring town of Fairfield merged to become Fairborn in 1950.
1922
The year that Arthur E. Morgan wrapped up his work on saving Dayton from any future flooding, it was almost as if fate decided that John H. Patterson would be called for duty in the next world. He died a little over nine years after the flood, passing away on May 7, 1922. He was seventy-seven and busy to the end, dying two days after working on plans with General Billy Mitchell, a U.S. Army general who is considered the father of the Air Force. They intended to build an aviation research center in Dayton, Patterson’s beloved city. He was as generous with his time and his money as he was during the flood until the end of his days.
1927
Christian Dane Hagerty, the intrepid Associated Press reporter, died far too young. His life ended in Chicago at the age of fifty-one. It was a sad end, an ill-fitting one considering all of the adventure he appears to have crammed into his life. The hard liquor and hard living caught up with him, and in his last few years in life, he was, as one paper described him, “an invalid.”
It was a fate worse than death for such an active and curious man, and on July 26, 1927, he sent a last telegram to his brother, went to his hotel room, picked up a gun, aimed it near his heart, and became the depressing subject of at least one short article in the newspaper.
1928
Hagerty’s one-time nemesis and friend Ben Hecht fared much better. This was the year his stage play The Front Page, a comedy, which he wrote with Charles MacArthur, another former Chicago journalist, made its Broadway debut.
Hecht left journalism to become one of America’s most successful screenwriters as well as a director, producer, playwright, and novelist. He was the first writer to get an Oscar for a screenplay, for the 1927 silent crime film Underworld, and he either wrote or worked on numerous movies including Scarface, Nothing Sacred, Gone with the Wind, Some Like It Hot, and the original comedy spy film Casino Royale, which was released in 1967, three years after his death at the age of seventy.
But Hecht never quite forgot what it meant to be a newspaperman. His well-received stage play, about newspaper men covering the crime beat, was adapted by another screenwriter and became the 1934 film of the same name starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien, and then later, Hecht rewrote the film The Front Page into a new adaptation, which became a much more famous and beloved film classic, His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
After being presented with a gold medal by the Ohio governor, life went on for telephone operator and Dayton flood hero Arthur John Bell. He remained at his post in Dayton into World War I, briefly working at his company’s branch in nearby Middletown, and then being sent to the center of the state in Chillicothe, where he was in charge of the electrical installation at Camp Sherman. From there, he was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, where he oversaw a crew of a thousand men loading munitions for the war effort overseas.
After the war, Bell decided to leave the telephone industry and with his wife moved to Detroit, and he got involved with construction work. He was given the position of overseeing a crew working on the Cadillac Building, which was completed in 1920 and is now part of Wayne State University. A few years later, he started working for a sewer contractor. It was at that job that he came to a noble and yet such an ignoble end.
On August 6, 1928, Bell, now forty-six, was leading his men in installing a new road sewer in Detroit. Bell noticed that one of the workers was missing and, according to conflicting accounts, saw him fall down in the sewer and went down after him or couldn’t find him and then descended the ladder into the sewer.
Once again, Bell was heralded as a hero, but there would be no happy ending followed by a medal and a meeting with the governor. Like his coworker, Bell was overcome by fumes and passed out. After spending nights and days doing everything he could to help his fellow citizens avoid drowning, Bell once again tried to save another fellow human being but would meet his end drowning in a sewer.
1933
Twenty years after the Great Flood of 1913, three flood survivors made their annual trek up to the attic where they had spent three days with six other people, with nothing but crackers to eat. Edward Wagner, a manufacturer, and Clark and Edwin Stoner, grocers and brothers, gathered in the attic of the Stoner home and dined on cheese and crackers. It was the last such reunion, however. Edwin, fifty-eight, was in poor health and low spirits. He would commit suicide in his store before the year was up.
That same year, Arthur E. Morgan was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who selected him from 150 suggested names—to be the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which involved construction that was twelve times the size of the Egyptian pyramids. Morgan, who, in the midst of overseeing the dam work in Dayton, became the president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, a charming village in Greater Dayton, in 1920. When Roosevelt offered him the job to create a flood control system in the same vein as the successful work in the Ohio Valley for the neighboring Tennessee Valley, which includes parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia as well as the state it’s named for, Morgan, forty-eight, jumped at the chance.
Roosevelt received some criticism as the cost of the construction mounted, but he defended his selection of Morgan, saying simply, “He builds good dams.”
Roosevelt was correct; and that same year, Dayton was reminded of what Morgan had done for them. After a tornado invaded the nearby city of Xenia and crushed a house, killing its sixty-year-old dweller, George Gibbs, rivers and creeks left their banks, sweeping poor William Voelpel, forty-five, to his death in a drainage tunnel, and an emergency dam north of Dayton broke, sending waters through the villages of Miami Villa and Eldorado.
But the main dams of the Miami Conservancy District? Those held fast. In fact, the Miami Conservancy District would be a model that was imitated across the country, including in Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, and Florida. American engineers and international delegations still make pilgrimages to Dayton to probe for lessons on how they have resolved their own flooding problems.
1937
This was the year when Morgan’s magic truly came to light, and Roosevelt’s wisdom in hiring the man was borne out. A flood swamped the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, affecting cities from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, and killing, most accounts say, 250 people. In Ohio, which got off relatively lucky with ten deaths, Kentucky, and Indiana, it was estimated that one of every eight people were left homeless. Almost one-fifth of Cincinnati, Ohio, which had managed to mitigate much of the damage in 1913, was now only accessible by boat. The city had no power, although fortunately they were able to bring in some emergency power—from Dayton.
The streets of downtown Dayton didn’t have a drop of water on them.
1961
On January 11, the little baby that miraculously survived the ravaging current, Lois Adams, died suddenly at the age of forty-eight. She was, in a sense, the last victim of the 1913 flood.
It sounds far-fetched, but it was always the theory of her twin brother, and there may be some rationale behind it. Two days after Charles Adams and Grandpa Adams began cleaning their house, both Lois and Charles Jr. developed pneumonia. It wasn’t due to being in their flood-ravaged house. Viola’s brother, Nelson Hicks, had come down, posing as a doctor since the National Guard wasn’t yet allowing visitors to Dayton. Hicks—who at least was a pharmacist, if not a physician—convinced Viola and Charles to bring the babies up to his house in Fostoria, Ohio. A few hours before boarding the train, Charles, Jr. became very sick, and they called in an actual physician.
The doctor did what he could and apparently cleared them for travel. In any case, the Adams family traveled north, but before they reached Fostoria, Lois was ill, too. Both babies had the aforementioned pneumonia, and once again, Charles and Viola feared for their children’s lives. For several weeks, in Charles’s words, the two parents “nursed them back to life,” and during the moments that the babies seemed like they might live, Charles would think about their house back home and wonder how moldy and dilapidated it was becoming. But after three weeks, Charles finally felt comfortable enough to leave Fostoria and return to the task of rehabilitating their house. Not that there was all that much to do. Grandpa Adams, who always seems to have put his family first, had been cleaning it for the last three weeks, largely ignoring his own home in the process.
So the kids grew up, and became quite famous in Dayton, being known locally as “the flood twins.” They married and had kids, and the flood twins’ parents lived good long lives as well. Charles Adams died in 1950 at the age of sixty-three. Viola passed away in 1973. She was eighty-seven. Then in 1961, Lois, who evidently had been healthy throughout her life, simply passed away. Her heart just stopped. Charles, Jr. would always feel her heart and lungs were permanently weakened as a result of the exposure and pneumonia from their near-drowning experience and suffering through weeks of pneumonia. It’s hard to argue that.
1963
Sam Bundy, the American Indian, who it’s believed saved as many as 160 lives and possibly more, lived a long life, and deservedly so, although his later years weren’t his finest. When he was in his middle-aged years, he was hit by a car crossing the street in Fort Wayne, and his injuries were severe. In his later years, he was walking with two canes. He needed a walker, but he wasn’t able to afford one, nor, apparently, could his family, and he became house-bound. In 1963, when the Plain Dealer, the paper for Wabash, Indiana, did a story on the octogenarian, Bundy’s granddaughter’s husband told the reporter: “He would appreciate hearing from any old friends. He’s dying from loneliness.”
Bundy passed away the following year.
1975
Arthur Ernest Morgan, the architect of the Miami Valley Conservancy, the man who built dams that protect much of Ohio as well as Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, preventing an incalculable number of flood deaths in later years, appears to have been rewarded with his own life. He was around for a long time, writing books, consulting in Finland on postwar reconstruction and in India as a member of a national universities commission and on a hydroelectric concept in West Africa.
Morgan was active up until the end when he finally breathed his last. He was ninety-seven years old.
1983
In April of this year, Charles Adams, Jr., Dayton’s iconic living symbol of the 1913 flood, asked Jim Rozelle, then the Chief Engineer of the Miami Conservancy District, “How many times would water have been at Third and Main Streets in Dayton, if the five dams had not been built?”
Rozelle checked his records and concluded that without Morgan’s dams, there would have been seven more floods, on some sort of par with the flood of 1913: 1924, 1929, 1933, 1937, 1952, 1959, and 1963. He added that if the dams hadn’t existed, there would have been minor flood damage 1,200 times.
2005
On August 23, 2005, Hurricane Katrina lumbered ashore and made landfall in southeast Louisiana, becoming one of the deadliest storms in history, and the deadliest hurricane since 1928 when 4,078 people were killed. That hurricane had devastated the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas, but it really put a stiletto into the heart of Florida, after a storm surge from Lake Okeechobee flooded the dike surrounding the lake. Just as a lake was created on April 28, 1913, in the Tensas and Concord parishes of Louisiana, Lake Okeechobee flooded an area covering hundreds of square miles. That incident alone was responsible for 2,500 of the 4,078 deaths.
Hurricane Katrina’s death toll was fewer, but still brutal (at least 1,833), and at first glance it seemed as if Louisiana and Mississippi had come out of the destruction without too much difficulty. But 238 people in Mississippi were soon known to be dead, and 67 more people were never found and thus officially listed as missing, and vast amounts of property from buildings to bridges were destroyed. Louisiana was in similar straits, but it was the state’s largest city, New Orleans, that memorably played out like a disaster movie turned real-life. The surge from the storm caused water to spill over the levees in fifty-three different places, ultimately putting eighty percent of the city underwater.
Just as in 1913, and countless other floods throughout time, families and individuals were fleeing for their second floors and roofs. Thousands of people who had taken refuge from Hurricane Katrina at the Louisiana Superdome, a sports and exhibition arena, found themselves stuck on what had become an island.
But what was particularly galling and surprising for the victims, the nation, and the world that watched the catastrophe unfold on cable news networks was how powerless city, state, and federal officials appeared during the rescue efforts. For instance, at the Superdome, which had been designated as a shelter, there were enough MREs (meals, ready to eat) to feed 15,000 people for three days—but 26,000 people had shown up. Nobody had thought to have any water purification equipment on hand, or antibiotics or doctors to prescribe them. The toilet situation was less than ideal. All of that said, the mayor of New Orleans had warned people that they should consider the Superdome as a shelter of last resort and that they should bring their own supplies.
Still, people expected better. Fair or not, it seemed unreal that in 2005, with all of modern technology at one’s disposal and after everything everyone should have learned about dealing with disasters, that a hurricane and its resulting flooding could make the government appear so spavined, to borrow newsman Ben Hecht’s phrasing.
Entire books have been written about Hurricane Katrina and the federal, state, and local mismanagement of the disaster, and so it’s probably not worth rehashing at length here, but in a nutshell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was verbally eviscerated for moving far too slowly in getting supplies to the flood victims. President George W. Bush was roundly criticized for his role in Hurricane Katrina, from remaining on his vacation after it was clear New Orleans was facing a dire and unusual threat to its existence to him standing in front of news cameras and telling FEMA’s director, Michael Brown, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
Brown wasn’t considered by many to be doing a heck of a job, and when it came out that he had almost no experience in emergency management, Bush, who had appointed him, received even more criticism.
In many ways, what the hurricane victims went through was similar to what happened in so many disasters before it, particularly with the Great Flood of 1913. For a long stretch of time, everyone was on his or her own. Three million people in New Orleans were without electricity, and like thousands and possibly millions of Americans in 1913, many of those people were without food or clean drinking water. Scores of people who had remained in New Orleans began looting, some of them because they wanted to steal TVs, jewelry, and whatnot, but many people simply wanted to avoid starving to death. As with the floods in 1913 and the floods of 2005, if you were poor and black, odds were, you were at a disadvantage. In 1913, you may have lived on some cheap property in a flood plain; in New Orleans, many of the flood victims were impoverished African-Americans, too. They ignored warnings to flee the city not because they wanted to stay but because they couldn’t afford to go. It takes money to gas up the car or pay for bus fare and find a hotel. That help was slow to arrive brought charges of racism or at least a slam on a social class—people were quick to suggest that if it had been a city full of white rich people, aid would have been much faster to arrive. The flood victims in New Orleans suffered many indignities, although at least nobody was asked to spend some time being a human sandbag.
Then and now, misinformation abounded. While there were many instances of violence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many of the reports of carjackings, murder, thievery and rape turned out to be wild, completely untrue stories undoubtedly born of panic.
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson considered traveling to Ohio to see the damage and destruction firsthand, but he ultimately didn’t, and it’s unlikely anyone thought less of him for not traveling from Washington, D.C. to Ohio. Air travel for the president was out of the question—Franklin Roosevelt would be the first president in office to fly, although Theodore Roosevelt had, after his term, flown in 1910—and train travel, even for a president, took some serious time. But by the time 2005 had rolled around, it would have been unthinkable for President Bush, or any president, not to visit the flood-besieged region. As technology, travel, and life have modernized, so have the public’s expectations of what kind of help they should receive. That may be a reasonable assessment, but human nature, no matter what the year, doesn’t change.
Looking at a flood through that prism, it doesn’t really matter what age or era you live in. Unless mankind ever learns to harness and control nature, if you’re stranded on your rooftop, staring down at water that truly looks as if it wants to come up and get you, you will never be in a good place.
2011
As the centennial of the 1913 flood approached, Charles Otterbein Adams, Jr., who was ultimately saved by someone shouting out a window that there was a baby in the river, almost lived to see it.
He was ninety-nine years old when he passed on. The retired electrical engineer died of what he believed killed his sister and almost killed him shortly after the flood: pneumonia. If at some point in his last remaining hours, he realized pneumonia was going to bring him down, he wasn’t surprised. He had had trouble with his bronchial tubes his entire life.
Adams obviously remembered none of his adventures in 1913, but always had a keen interest in history and must have felt supreme gratitude toward his parents, neighbors, and strangers for keeping him and his sister alive. Throughout his years, especially after he retired, he frequently gave lectures about the flood, sharing his and his family’s stories not because, he said, that it was all that important people knew about him, but because he felt it was important people remembered the flood and its place in history.
It is worth remembering. The Great Flood of 1913 was a devastating correction, a rap on society’s collective knuckles that we underestimate and ignore mother nature at our own peril, possibly a useful lesson going forward for civilizations concerned about melting ice caps and global warming stirring up extreme storms such as those that have hit the East Coast in recent years, including Hurricane Irene in 2011 and what became known as Superstorm Sandy in 2012. But if the Great Flood of 1913 caused a lot of hopelessness, it also offers much hope, too. That tens of thousands of people didn’t die in the floods is because families stuck together, neighbors helped neighbors, and strangers instinctively risked their own lives to help strangers. People looked out for each other when it mattered most. Human nature tends not to change over the years, which is why it’s nice to think that if another flood comparable to 1913’s occurred again, people would rally and rise to the occasion, even if it might be hard to imagine such camaraderie with our community when so many of us now hang out with friends and neighbors on Facebook instead of drinking lemonade with them on our front porches.
But Charles Adams, Jr., would probably tell anyone today that it doesn’t matter how you stay connected with your community as long as you are connected, because for a guy who thought a lot about the past, the 99-year-old flood survivor embraced the future. When Charles Adams was admitted into the hospital for his final visit, he asked the nurses for a computer.