Free Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever by Geoff Williams Page A

again in the Netherlands on the night of November 18, 1421. Millions of people around the world since the days of the Ice Age have come to a miserable end due to flooding.
    But in the United States, as early as 1726, French residents built a levee made of earth six feet high and a mile long near the opening of the Mississippi River for protection. * Israel Ludlow, the founder of Dayton, Ohio, which bore the worst that the Great Flood of 1913 had to offer, was—according to local legend—warned in 1796 by the few remaining Indians about the floods. But Ludlow ignored their warnings. Consequently, the city of Dayton had its first serious flood—on record—in March 1805. Thawing deep snows and heavy rains were to blame for the flood, which covered most of the town except for a part of the business center. Townspeople considered moving their downtownto higher ground but decided against it. The next big flood came in 1814, where it was deep enough that a horse could swim in the streets. Yet another tempest came on January 8, 1828, when a warehouse was washed away from the front of Wilkinson Street and the southern part of the city was submerged. And another arrived on January 2, 1847, in which the entire town was covered with water, although it wasn’t as deep as it had been back in 1805. September 17, 1866, brought a fairly deep flood—it was four inches deep on the floor of the Phillips Hotel, and there was $250,000 in damage, a pretty serious blow considering there were only fifteen thousand residents in the city and that $250,000 in today’s dollars would be $3.6 million.
    More flooding hit Dayton in 1883 and then in 1896, during the centennial anniversary of the city, historian Mary Davies Steele wrote about the flooding her community had seen. “Some of us can remember how certain aged pioneers used to upbraid the founders of the town for putting it down in a hollow, instead of on the hills to the southeast, and expatiate on the folly which the people were guilty of in voting against the removal, after the terrible freshet of 1805, to high ground,” Davies wrote. “‘Someday there will be a flood which will sweep Dayton out of existence,’ those ancient men and women used to prophesy to their grandchildren.”
    Steele, in her mid fifties, would not live to see the 1913 flood. She passed away in February 1897, a year of a big flood in Dayton, followed by a worse flood in 1898, which was especially grim. Six more inches, and it would have gone over the levee.
    But, of course, it didn’t overflow the levee, and that was the problem for the people of 1913. As communities grew and built businesses literally along the riverbank, every generation could look back to floods of the past, and as long as it only affected a minority of the people who lived or worked along the riverbanks, or was a close call, a flood could seem not all that threatening. It might even almost appear amusing and certainly interesting as a work of Mother Nature—especially if you lived far enough from the river.
    But for the unlucky soul who didn’t take floods seriously, or simply showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time, the power of water was fatally evident, and it certainly wasn’t only Dayton that repeatedly found itself threatened by flooding. In 1913, anyone eighty and overwho happened to live in Philadelphia would have remembered the serious flood the city had had in 1843. One paper during the time, after telling of bridges being destroyed, brick houses being knocked down, and pigs struggling in the current, reported that two young men, Russell Flounders and Josiah Benting, had been killed in the flood.
    â€œIt is supposed that they were crushed by the bridge, as a portion of its materials were seen to roll over onto them as they were engulfed in the flood,” reported the Adams Sentinel, of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “Their bodies were never found.”
    The paper went