THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD In the afternoon of the last day of May, 1889, occurred the Johnstown Flood, resulting in the loss of between 2000 and 3000 lives and the destruction in the Conemaugh Valley, in western Pennsylvania, of property valued at $12,000,000. The bursting of a dam released a body of water of about 700 acres, sixty or seventy feet deep, causing death and suffering unequalled even by the Chicago fire — although there have been several disasters in which the loss of material property was greater. The chairman of the Citizens' Relief Committee of Pittsburg uses the following language : " In the morning there stood hundreds of substantial and beautiful houses, streets of warehouses filled with mer chandise, hotels, churches, schools, and factories ; when night came there was but a plain of gravel and mud, splin tered fragments of houses, scattered piles of bricks, masses of massive machinery torn from their beds in the factories and lying in shapeless piles of ruin, scattered and broken household furnishings, costly merchandise, and thousands of corpses buried in mud and water. In one short and terrible hour more than 1600 houses, filled with men, women, and children, were wrecked and ruined." The city of Johnstown, situated miles east of Pittsburg, is the site of one of the most important iron and steel industries of Pennsylvania, and is described, even at the time of the flood, as one of the busiest towns of the busiest of states. From 5000 to 7000 men were employed, chiefly in iron and steel industries, with all William MeCreery : Report of Citizens Relief Committee of Pittsburg.
382 the indications of good wages, thrift, and regularity of work.
The bursting of the dam, although attributed at the time, by many, to carelessness, appears to have been due to the unprecedented and long-continued rains, which resulted not only in this disaster but also in the destruc tion of a heavy railroad bridge between Harrisburg and Altoona, and in floods in various other parts of Pennsyl vania and adjoining states, from which there was even greater loss of property than in Johnstown.
The flood destroyed the bridges and a large part of the city, depositing, where the houses had stood, a vast amount of wreckage of all sorts containing the bodies of human beings and animals. The survivors found refuge in the houses left standing upon the bluffs and higher ground on either side of the flood, thus being separated from each other. As soon as the waters had subsided, on Saturday, June 1, a meeting of survivors was held in a tavern which had escaped the flood, and committees were appointed on finance, on supplies, on police, on the care of the dead, and on other departments of work which appeared to require attention. The first effective step, however, in the relief of the stricken community was taken by the Johnstown Relief Corps, organized by the Pittsburg Relief Committee, under the personal direction of James B. Scott, one of the most capable business men of Pittsburg, who later became a member of the Flood Commission. This corps of volunteers, within twenty-four hours of the disaster, started for Johnstown with a railway train filled with provisions. Full dis cretion had been given to Mr. Scott and his associates, and every assurance that whatever requisitions were made on the relief committee would be honored. Mem bers of the relief corps, consisting largely of men unused to manual labor, carried these provisions over a rough and dangerous path of nearly a mile, as it was known that the flood had destroyed all food supplies in the valley, and neither wagons nor trains could reach a nearer point.
No previous calamity, with the exception of the Chicago fire, and incidental features of the great Civil War, had made greater demands upon the sympathy and charity of the nation. Subscriptions were immediately opened in all communities. Early on Saturday morning, June 1, the citizens of Pittsburg and Allegheny assembled to con sider what action should be taken, and upon the relief committee appointed at this meeting fell subsequently a large part of the responsibility for relief.