For the citizens of Johnstown, Pa., a thriving company town for the Carnegie Coal & Iron Works about 75 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, it must have seemed like the undoing of God's promise to the survivors of Noah's Ark.
Around 5 in the afternoon of May 31, 1889, about 20 million tons of water -- a virtual wall of water, as high as 70 feet in places, and moving at 40 miles an hour -- came rushing down the Conemaugh Valley. It swept through Johnstown, a progressive and thriving industrial community of 30,000 nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, at the confluence of the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek rivers.
The flood had been unleashed at about 3:10 that same afternoon when the long-neglected South Fork Dam, 14 miles up the Conemaugh Valley, gave way after several days of torrential rain.
Johnstown, a city in the Laurel Highlands that prided itself not only on its industry but on its 27 churches, 123 saloons and three newspapers, was all but washed away within a few minutes. (Seven smaller towns along the river virtually were also wiped off the map.) Ninety-nine families perished, and the death toll reached 2,209. Many drowned, and many others were crushed or burned when a vast mountain of debris, including entire houses, was swept up by the flood and caught fire after lodging against a stone railroad bridge near the center of town.
Of the total dead, 750 -- nearly one in three -- were never identified. The damage inflicted on the town was in excess of $12 million.
The Johnstown Flood was not only one of the most devastating natural calamities of the 19th century, but one of the most disastrous floods in U.S. history. Ironically, rather than an act of God, it was largely the result of man's own negligence: the consequence of a crumbling earthen dam on Conemaugh River that had not been properly maintained for years.
The South Fork Dam stood at the base of the once grand, but now vanished, South Fork Reservoir. This beautiful, tree-lined, man-made mountain lake was the centerpiece of the elegant South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club. It was a private summertime retreat owned and maintained by some of the wealthiest industrialist families of Pittsburgh, including the Carnegies, the Mellons, the Fricks, the Pitcairns and the Knoxes. They were the very same barons of laissez-faire capitalism who owned the mills and railworks of Johnstown, and thus largely controlled the lives of the thousands of laborers -- many of them Hungarian and Italian immigrants -- who worked there.
In the 102 years since the South Fork Dam gave way, enveloping the lower Conemaugh Valley in a watery hell, the legend of the Johnstown Flood has lingered and even grown in the popular American imagination. It has inspired a dozen books, at least one Hollywood film, and has been the topic of any number of widely circulated folk ballads.
Today, in Johnstown itself, the specter of the watery holocaust of 1889 is very much alive.
Just walk the quiet streets of this pleasant city. Pause for a moment and gaze down the surprisingly shallow and diminutive Conemaugh River (now flanked by concrete embankments and modern flood barriers) near the bend where the debris piled up at the stone railroad bridge and became a human pyre. When you do, it becomes clear that it is from the legacy of this late 19th century disaster that the town has forged its modern sense of identity.
In 1989, in a yearlong gala of festivals, memorial ceremonies and historic exhibitions, Johnstown lavishly celebrated the centennial of the flood. The occasion was marked by everything from commemorative religious services to extensive sales of souvenir hats, badges and T-shirts.
The Johnstown Flood is, after all, not just the story of a terrible -- and clearly avoidable -- national tragedy; it also is a reminder of man's seemingly bottomless capacity for survival and rejuvenation. Amazingly, within a few days after the flood, almost before all the dead were recovered and buried, the fires in Johnstown's mills once again were burning and the rebuilding of the city had begun.
A present-day visitor to Johnstown is afforded -- thanks in large part to the diligent efforts of various historic and civic organizations -- a palpable, dramatic sense of the vast dimensions of the ruin and devastation wreaked by the Memorial Day deluge.
A tour of the various Johnstown Flood historic sites (most are on the National Register of Historic Places) should begin at the impressive Johnstown Flood Museum at 304 Washington St.
Here, the story of the flood is told powerfully and evocatively in a magnificent half-hour documentary film, "The Johnstown Flood," directed by Charles Guggenheim, an Academy Award nominee and noted Washington filmmaker. No less moving and illustrative is the museum's 24-foot illuminated and animated relief map of the Conemaugh Valley. Audio and fiber-optic effects lend an unsettlingly eerie reality as this exhibit precisely and dramatically re-creates the disastrous events leading up to the South Fork Dam's collapse.
The flood museum also displays an extensive collection of artifacts, photographs, documents and other exhibits that depict both the economic and human cost of the catastrophe. From the museum there are guided walking tours of flood-related points of interest in the surrounding downtown area. Telephone: (814) 539-1889; museum hours vary seasonally.
The ruins of the South Fork Dam already had become a popular tourist attraction by the late 19th century, and a popular lover's lane earlier in the present one. More recently the site was taken over by the National Park Service. Today, the park service maintains a small visitor center/museum there (take U.S. 219 north from Johnstown, then Route 869 east to the dam site), which shows another worthwhile film. From the visitor center it is only a short walk to the remnants of the dam's ruined and collapsed earthworks, which today are spanned by a small pedestrian bridge. There are striking views of the wide valley that once was the bed of the South Fork Reservoir.
The tiny but charming community of St. Michaels, just down Route 869, is the former site of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club. Of the club's 16 original cottages (actually imposing, near-palatial-sized Victorian houses), eight, including the original clubhouse, remain. A massive restoration project is under way by the 1889 South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club Preservation Society, in conjunction with the National Park Service and other organizations. Eventually, the clubhouse and several other cottages will be renovated and will house an extensive museum.
The massive loss of life and property at Johnstown occurred, of course, long before the era of federal flood- and disaster-relief programs, and long before redress for such catastrophes could be effectively sought in the court system. (As it turned out, all the lawyers in Johnstown were employed in one fashion or another by the giant industrial companies, whose owners also held title to the South Fork Dam, and thus were not inclined to bite the hands that fed them.) No lawsuits were brought against the club or its owners; nor was a dime in direct compensation paid by them.
One cannot measure the full impact of the flood without a visit to the stately memorial to the unidentified dead in Grandview Cemetery, on Millcreek Road, in Johnstown. The flood victims repose under identical, geometrically arranged faded white marble slabs that speak of the dignity and honor usually %J reserved for fallen military heroes.
But these memorials to the Johnstown Flood are more than just a commemoration of a national tragedy. The story of the Johnstown Flood, as recalled in modern-day Johnstown museums and historic sites, also is the story of man's compassion and his boundless capacity for survival, endurance and renascence, even in the face of abject tragedy. As Charles Guggenheim observes in "The Johnstown Flood":
"For weeks [the Johnstown survivors] would live in mud and under a pall of burning debris. But no one now questioned that out of this would rise a new city. Only how long it would take, and -- always -- why did it happen."
Johnstown can be reached from Baltimore by taking the Pennsylvania Turnpike west to Route 56 North, at the Bedford exit.
The Cambria County Tourist Council maintains an office at 915 Menoher Blvd., Suite B, Johnstown, Pa.; telephone (814) 536-7993 or (814) 536-1930. Maps, brochures and extensive information on the Johnstown Flood sites are available.