'Flood's over!'

By STEPHANIE SHAPIRO
BALTIMORE SUN
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. -- "Flood's over!"
That's the hook for Johnstown's current campaign to lure visitors to the site of the notorious disaster that struck the town more than a century ago.
After torrential rain, the neglected South Fork dam burst May 31, 1889, unleashing a crushing wall of water that claimed 2,209 lives and leveled the bustling Conemaugh Valley steel town, tucked deep within southwestern Pennsylvania's Allegheny mountains.
Because of its biblical scope and the stature of those held responsible, the deluge instantly took its place in American mythology.
Johnstown has embraced its epic story as a commodity.
In a place where steel once ruled, heritage-based tourism is now a key industry. The town of about 24,000 has become a popular destination for those who like their history up close and personal.
For many of Johnstown's citizens, whether or not they're banking on tourism dollars, the flood continues to play a vital role in daily life.
Sally Lou Taylor, a retired schoolteacher who volunteers at the Johnstown Flood Museum, remembers stories told by her grandmother, who not only survived the flood but proceeded with her plans to marry even though her home and trousseau had vanished in the cataclysm.
The newlyweds "went ahead and started a family, and I'm very glad they did," Taylor says, eliciting a chuckle from a group of out-of-town visitors.
But Taylor also speaks of the flood as "an accident that didn't have to happen." For her and others, it remains an emotional issue.
When I arrived in Johnstown on a stifling Saturday afternoon in late June, the town was already shut down. Emerging from the Holiday Inn, I glumly noted the empty streets and closed shops.
Object lesson
There was little indication that, during the next two days, the economically depressed town would yield an eloquent object lesson in the American experience.
During my stay, I would visit numerous sites, including the Johnstown Heritage Discovery Center, the exuberant Back Door Cafe and the Inclined Plane, a steep railway built in 1891 for transporting blue-collar and upper-class citizens to their homes in Westmont, a shady community on a bluff above Johnstown proper.
I would also tour Grandview Cemetery, where hundreds of unidentified flood victims are buried. Each stop, in its own way, enriched my sense of Johnstown and why the flood remains an indelible part of its psyche.
In preparation for the trip, I read David McCullough's "The Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating 'Natural' Disasters America Has Ever Known." It was an invaluable primer.
When the dam gave way, survivors and the press minced no words accusing Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie and other wealthy members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club of class warfare. The club had allowed the dam to deteriorate.
I began my history lesson Saturday evening, map in hand, touring the town's flood landmarks on foot. On Main Street stands Alma Hall, in 1889 the tallest structure in Johnstown and a refuge for 264 people escaping the flood.
Around the corner is the Tribune building where George Swank, editor of the local newspaper, watched from the second floor as the water swiftly rose. He lived to write about it.
Within walking distance is the First Methodist Episcopal Church, which held against the flood, splitting it into two waves, perhaps sparing other buildings.
Morley's Dog, a cast-iron statue recovered from the flood, is surrounded by petunias and a chain-link fence, a monument to the flood's terrible caprice.
Here was the scene
I tried to imagine the landscape that confronted reporters after the flood, as described by McCullough:
"Upturned houses, gangs of laborers carrying shovels and axes and threading their way through huge dunes of rubbish, like a drab, derby-hatted army moving through the remains of a fallen city, the jerry-built shelters on the hillsides, farm women in poke bonnets working at the commissaries, they all made splendid subjects."
Later that night, I found my way to the Back Door Cafe, a rehabilitated tavern in Cambria City, a Johnstown historical district where Eastern European immigrants built homes, churches and ethnic clubs.
The next day I drove to the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which overlooks the dam site and incorporates the home of Elias Unger, manager of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Unger is remembered as the man who did too little too late to hold the dam.
Inside, the memorial is dominated by the replication of a famous, much-photographed flood scene: that of a colossal tree trunk rammed through an upturned house.
Nearby is the hair-raising sculpted figure of Victor Heiser, shown clinging to a barn roof and riding it to safety. Heiser, who later became a well-known public health physician, spoke to McCullough in the 1960s, and his astonishing oral history, on a tape loop, brings the exhibit to life.
An impressionistic and downright creepy film that gets to the heart of the flood's horror adds a haunting note to the memorial. Like other Johnstown history sites, neither the film nor the memorial's exhibits soft-pedal the complicity of club members, who as a group ignored requests to repair the dam. All were later acquitted of wrongdoing in court.
After the film, a slide show of life at the lake, drawn from photos discovered in a New England attic in 1889, reinforces the contrast between gritty Johnstown and idyllic South Fork.
Outside the memorial, I surveyed the site of Lake Conemaugh and the grassy abutments that are all that remain of the dam. Then I joined a group for a guided tour in a van.
Our first stop was the rural hamlet of St. Michael, to visit the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club's clubhouse, now in severe disrepair.
The preservation group that manages the site hopes it will eventually be acquired by the National Park Service.
South Fork club
From the clubhouse, it was easy to picture the former lake's boardwalk and boat houses. Nearby, the defunct club's Victorian cottages have become permanent residences. Though some of the cottages have been restored to their previous rustic grandeur, others, covered in siding and missing porches, are unrecognizable.
Our guide, Duquesne University student Libby Peterman, grew up in Johnstown where, in school, flood history was "drilled into our heads."
There are residents who still speak of the "horrible people at the clubhouse," she said. "They get pretty angry and hostile about it." Peterman thinks the club members were too removed from the club's operations to understand the gravity of the situation.
We drove to the dam's south abutment. In one of the alterations that led to its demise, the dam's breast had been lowered to accommodate carriages coming from the train station where club members from Pittsburgh alighted.
Peterman's tour included the Heritage Discovery Center, back in Johnstown, where visitors assume the identity of immigrants to get a sense of what life was like for women, miners, millworkers and children.
Though not specifically flood-oriented, the center's interactive exhibits add rich context through depictions of class struggle, labor strife and the pecking order that pitted an older generation of immigrants against those newly arrived from Eastern and Southern Europe.
In the van, we climbed to Westmont and from Yoder Hill beheld a panorama of Johnstown, where we could envision the seething, 30- to 40-foot-high debris-clogged deluge crashing through the valley below.
As it passed the Gautier wireworks, the flood took with it miles of barbed wire, which bound victims, furniture, machinery, homes and trees into a ghastly mass.
The view from Westmont includes the original Pennsylvania Railroad stone bridge, where 30 acres of the trapped debris caught fire. Eighty people died in the inferno.
We continued to Grandview Cemetery, where 777 plain marble stones mark the graves of unidentified flood victims. Other, more elaborate monuments speak of entire families that perished.
Some Johnstown families later acquired plots in proximity to the buried unidentified, hoping that after death, they would be close to loved ones whose bodies they never found, Peterman said.
Rest of tour
I returned to Cambria City that afternoon with a map provided by the Johnstown Area Heritage Association. Within a cluster of 15 blocks, Johnstown immigrants built a thriving community of churches, homes, businesses and schools that served Eastern Europeans shunned by others who had also sought their living in the sooty industrial town.
The community is now a rich source of architectural and social history, as well as the venue for the annual Johnstown FolkFest, a free Labor Day weekend event that in the past has attracted as many as 120,000 music lovers.
That evening, I rode the Inclined Plane, recorded as the steepest of its kind in the Guinness Book of Records, back to Westmont. On top, there is an ice cream stand and a souvenir shop.
The next day, I was the first visitor to the Johnstown Flood Museum, in the former library built by Andrew Carnegie after the flood.
I watched Charles Guggenheim's Academy Award-winning documentary, which eloquently describes the town built by the Cambria Iron Co., the flood's path and Johnstown's staggering losses.
After the flood, the film's narrator notes, "No one questioned that a new city would rise."
And, indeed, it has.