The Johnstown Flood was one of the worst disasters in US history. On May 31, 1889, a dam collapse allowed 20 million tons of water to flood the area killing over 2200 people, then the mountains of debris caught fire. 1700 houses were lost and entire trains and factories disappeared, including a barbed wire plant whose product trapped many people in the wire and drowned. The dam failure was the result of inept dam management by industrial millionaire owners who never contributed to the relief.
Life was good in 1889 for the more than fifty wealthy industrialists who belonged to Pennsylvaniaâs South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Most of the men had made their fortunes in nearby Pittsburgh in the heady years after the Civil War. New national markets and a new national financial system made business boom across the country. Factories grew and railroads hammered across the country, moving grain east and manufactured products south and west.
Pittsburgh produced the iron and steel that fed the railroad industry and the growing cities. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick ran the steel mills, while there was also money to be made in real estate, storekeeping, lawyering, and accounting in the booming city. Bankers like Andrew Mellon, who would become the U.S. secretary of the treasury during the boom years of the 1920s, made enough money to reshape the country.
In 1880, Frickâs friend Benjamin Franklin Ruff, who sold coke (the high-heat fuel necessary to make steel), contracted to make railroad tunnels, and bought and sold real estate, proposed to Frick and other wealthy friends that they establish a secret and exclusive club in the mountains, where members could spend their summers away from the heat and dirt of bustling Pittsburgh.
Ruff owned an abandoned reservoir on Pennsylvaniaâs Little Conemaugh River in southwestern Pennsylvania. The reservoir had been created in 1852, when Pennsylvania finished damming the river to create a canal system. But railroads soon replaced canals, and the reservoir became obsolete. The state sold it, along with the South Fork Dam, to private interests. By 1880 it was in Ruffâs hands.
Ruff and his friends organized the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which took control of the reservoirârenaming it Lake Conemaughâand established a club on about 160 acres of land. The main building on the site was a 47-room clubhouse with a dining room that could seat 150. Sixteen members built large âcottagesâ along the lakeshore and spent their evenings at plays or musical performances.
At two and a half miles long and a mile wide, the lake was big enough to run the clubâs two steam yachts or to enjoy on sailboats or canoes. It covered about 450 acres and was 70 feet deep. It held about 20 million tons of water. The clubâs wealthy industrialists and financiers centered their summer relaxation around the artificial lake.
Private owners had already changed the lake and the dam significantly. The man who had bought the property from the state removed from the dam the five sluice pipes that allowed the removal of excess water, selling them for scrap. This meant there was no way to drain the reservoir either for repairs, or to lower water levels during periods of heavy rain.
As they prepared for summer recreation, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club stocked the lake with black bass sport fish. Then, worried that the expensive bass might get washed downstream, they put screens over the damâs spillway. To enable carriages to cross the dam, the club lowered it. There was no way to lower water levels in their Lake Conemaugh, but in what must have been an idyllic existence in the summers of the early 1880s, they ignored warnings that the changes they had made to the dam had weakened it dangerously.
There were 30,000 people, mostly Welsh and German immigrants, living in Johnstown, a factory town in the valley below Lake Conemaugh, about fourteen miles downstream from the South Fork Dam. The economy that had made fortunes for the men of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was built on the labor of workers like the people in Johnstown. The men there worked in the blast furnaces, converters, rolling mills, or coal mines of Cambria Iron or worked for the Gautier plant making barbed wire. The steep hills of the region meant the drop in elevation from the lake to Johnstown was about 450 feet, more than 40 stories in a modern-day building. But there was little reason for members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to think about the people who lived downstream.
Until May 30, 1889, Decoration Day, when a torrent of rain began to fall.
On the morning of May 31, the president of the club, Elias Unger, observed from his farmhouse above the lake that â...the valley below me seemed to be all under water, and I couldnât understand what all that meant.â Unger was at the farmhouse to oversee the construction of a sewage system for the club, and when he ran down to the dam, he immediately ordered the Italian workers from the sewage project to dig an emergency spillway to relieve pressure on the dam. But the workers hit rock and made little headway. Then Unger ordered workers to tear out the fish screens that had become blocked with debris, but it was too late. By 1:30 in the afternoon, after Unger had tried unsuccessfully to warn the people below, it was clear there was nothing to do but wait for the dam to fail.
A little before 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday, May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam on Pennsylvaniaâs Little Conemaugh River broke. Unger said the dam failed âlittle by little until it got a head way, and when it got cut through it just went like a flash.â
As 20 million tons of water spilled downstream, it picked up houses, trees, bridges, railroad cars, animals, and people. The water measured at least 35 feet high and traveled at 40 miles an hour. As it traveled, it became a wall of debris, grinding through more than $4.4 billion of property in todayâs dollars. It swept locomotives from their tracks, discarding some nearly a mile away.
The water consumed victims. And when the wave smashed into a stone bridge in Johnstown, the trapped debris caught fire, trapping more. Two thousand, two hundred and eight people died in the Johnstown Flood, the largest loss of civilian lives in the U.S. at that time. Ninety-nine entire families died. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, four hundred miles away, and as late as 1911.
Gertrude Quinn Slattery later recalled that her father had been terribly worried about the heavy rains, warning that not a house would be left standing if the dam burst. Hearing the roar of the coming water, he grabbed one of his children and ordered the rest to âRun for your livesâ to a nearby hill.
Slattery later recalled: âI can never forget what I saw! It was like the Day of Judgement I have since seen pictured in books. Pandemonium had broken loose, screams, cries and people were running; their white faces like death masks; parents dragging children, whose heads bobbed up and down in the water; a boat filled to capacity with eager, anxious passengers; household pets of all descriptions dangling from living arms; a wagon loaded to the breaking point lost a wheel and the despairing mortals riding therein were dumped down in a heap in the filthy water. They scrambled to their feet in less time than it takes to tell it, as the on-rushing mob moved rapidly forward, bent on self-preservation at any costâŠand now a moving mass, black with houses, trees, boulders, logs and rafters was coming down like an avalanche.â
From around the world, people rushed to help the survivors. One of the first to arrive was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who stayed for five months. She brought with her fifty doctors and nurses, and together they learned how to respond to a natural disaster.
But those survivors who hoped to hold the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club accountable were disappointed. Blaming the club members for the disaster, newspapers built the story into one of the biggest in American history. Even the pro-business New York Times reported that âjustice is inevitable even though the horror is attributable to men of wealth and station, and the majority of the victims the most downtrodden workers in any industry in the country.â
But the club men denied responsibility for the disaster, and all four lawsuits launched against the club failed. Club members and law partners James Hay Reed and Philander Knox defended the club in court, claiming the flood was an act of God for which the members could not be held responsible. Reed went on to become a federal judge. Knox went on to become a U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, and U.S. attorney general.
