Chapter One

“The morning was delightful, the city was in its gayest mood with flags, banners, and flowers everywhere… . We could see almost everything of interest from our porch. The streets were more crowded than we had ever seen before.”

~Reverend H.L. Chapman, Johnstown Methodist Church

JOHNSTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA MEMORIAL DAY, THURSDAY, MAY 30, 1889

Fog suspended from hemlock and spruce in a ghostly blanket that whispered along the peaks of decorated headstones, and the mourners gathered round. Boots sinking in the spongy earth, Pastor Montgomery Childs stood on the hillside and offered words of comfort and scriptures of hope to mothers who’d lost sons, to wives who’d lost husbands, and to veterans who’d lost comrades, limbs, and pieces of their hearts in the War of the Union. Would that this united land never consume such a number of souls so hastily again.

The Grand Army Veterans and Sons of Veterans stood erect on each side of Monty as darkening clouds moved overhead. The fire department stood at the back of the crowd as well as the Hornerstown Drum Corps. Visitors joined them from towns as far as Somerset and Altoona.

A drop of rain hit the end of Monty’s nose as a trumpet’s doleful tone sliced the air. Would the rain never cease for more than a few hours? Though his residence in Johnstown was a meager two years, the native populace declared this the wettest spring in decades. Happy little creeks that bubbled and foamed through the Alleghenies were now rushing torrents emptying into the swollen Little Conemaugh River. The pickerel and bass needn’t exhaust any effort since the current carried them along. The ground was so saturated, even the violets and geraniums that crowned the forest floor bent in merciful prayer.

Monty rather enjoyed a rainy day. It cleansed, it healed, it sustained life. But this much rain was preposterous.

The American flag, held erect by Benedict Covington, hung limp as the sky unleashed. As Colonel Elwood’s last trumpet note faded away, Monty said, “That concludes our ceremony.”

He’d planned to say much more about the men who’d sacrificed their lives to give others freedom, but no words, no matter how eloquently spoken, meant anything when water puddled ankle high. Some attendees had traveled a long way to pay their respects and needed to board their trains before they floated away.

As the crowd dispersed down the curving path that led back to Johnstown, Monty opened his umbrella, tucked his Bible inside his coat, and followed behind the mass of spectators. At two thirty, the parade had started at the end of Main Street, marched through town, taken a right on Bedford, and then turned south to Sandyvale where Grandview Cemetery was spread out on the highest, flattest ground in the area.

It was beautiful property, stretching green in every direction. A wall of trees hindered any view of Johnstown lying in the bowl-like valley below, protecting visitors from the loud noises of the mills and the acrid stench of the smokestacks. The air here was the purest for miles around.

Complaints ensued from members of the Austrian Music Society about the rain bathing their instruments. By the time the attendees reached their destination, they’d all suffer a good drenching. Yesterday’s Tribune predicted more rainstorms this evening and into tomorrow. What they needed was sunshine after the long, dreary winter.

In town, Monty picked up his pace toward home. He passed several businesses, closed until six so the proprietors and their families could join the festivities. With school out for the holiday, children scrambled about, playing in puddles and helping with chores. The town was in a cheerful mood, shouts of celebration and music replacing the clank and rumble of the mills. Men and women dashed about, undeterred by the weather. Residents were used to spring rain and spring floods, and little hindered them from their activities.

The Hulbert House brimmed with guests flowing in and out of the hotel, the first in Johnstown with an elevator. Drops of rain pinged off the No VACANCY shingle. Business everywhere was booming, especially this week with all the out-of-town guests exchanging currency.

Unfortunately, that meant the forty saloons open today benefited as well. There were a hundred and twenty-three across the valley, including establishments like Lizzie Thompson’s Place at the end of Locust Street, offering soiled doves at a fair price. Monty’s stomach turned each time he thought of it. He was the one those folks came to when they needed help or a way out of their debauchery. Some situations were just too complicated to repair.

He ducked under the opera house’s overhang that announced Zozo the Magic Queen and Uncle Tom’s Cabin playing at five and seven thirty. Once the streetcar passed, he dashed across the road and alongside dwellings and businesses to his home on Macedonia Street, east of the Stonycreek River. He was fortunate to live by the church a short distance from downtown and not nearer one of the mills where the homes were shacks or tenements sloppily built to house immigrant workers.

Johnstown was rough and bustling and growing. And yet, Monty felt more at home here among these people than he ever had with his family in the luxury of Pittsburgh’s East End.

As he stepped onto his front porch, he gazed up the mountain where the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club roosted on the bank of Lake Conemaugh. He couldn’t see the exorbitant clubhouse from fourteen miles away, of course, but the landscape materialized in his mind’s eye. Trees reflecting off the glassy surface of the water, sailboats slicing across the lake, couples strolling arm in arm down the boardwalk. The perfumed women dressed in white, with pink in their cheeks from the sunlight. The scent of brandy and imported cigars that clung to the finely tailored suits of the male guests after dinner.

Members, like his uncle, were rough and worldly in a different way from the Johnstown immigrants—and ten times greedier. Most folks in Johnstown were poor, while the men who owned the mills and factories where they worked ate lavish dinners in their servant-filled homes in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and enjoyed extended weekends of pleasure at the lake.

After laboring sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for wages which would never come close to providing for their families, the millworkers’ reward was the stench of the foundries clinging to their hair, clothes, and skin no matter how much soap they used or how many times they washed. Monty was honored to call such hardworking folks his brothers and sisters in Christ. They certainly had more integrity than most of the men who ran in his uncle’s social circle. Still, he prayed fervently for the souls of those men who were too wealthy to see their need for God—even if a camel walking through the eye of a needle was more likely than their humbling themselves to pray for salvation.

For the rest of the afternoon, Monty sat at his kitchen table studying the Bible for his Sunday sermon, eating the leftover trout he’d caught in Stonycreek yesterday, and writing a letter to his friend from seminary who’d recently taken a church near the Adirondack Mountains.

The rain stopped at five, just in time for the streetlamps to light up the town. Johnstown was low in the valley with the Alleghenies brushing the surrounding sky, and residents were lucky to see seven hours of sunlight per day.

During evening prayers, Monty asked the Lord for this to be the end of the rain.

Long after he’d fallen asleep, he awoke to a deluge beating on his roof. Monty rolled over, afraid the force with which it fell from the sky would send the downpour crashing through the shingles. He lay, drowsy in the dark, and waited. For what he didn’t know, but an ominous weight settled over him. After a while, the downpour lessened, and the pattering rhythm lulled him back to sleep.