Want to Have Nightmares for a Week? Read This Book about the Johnstown Flood

Last December, the big kid and I fulfilled her childhood Junior Ranger dream of stopping by the Johnstown Flood National Memorial on the way to pick her little sister up from college. The sun was setting as we walked around the site of the former Lake Conemaugh, just east of the former South Fork Dam. In the distance is the former Unger homestead, with the national park site's visitor center next to it.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Johnstown Flood was an absolute literal living nightmare OMG. This book was so scary that I actually had to put it down for the night a couple of different times, because reading about such abject terror and such mass destruction does not make for easy slumber.

McCullough really leans into the terror, too, with lots of retellings of harrowing first-person accounts--I just wish that he’d included footnotes, because I’d be interested in sourcing and reading some of these for myself as a way to honor the victims.

The Johnstown Flood National Memorial Visitor Center contains this terrifying display of what flood survivor Victor Heiser experienced. At just sixteen, his last memory of his father was him standing in their home's second-story window, gesturing for Victor to get back in the barn. Victor obeyed, and climbed through the barn's brand-new trapdoor to the roof, an innovation that his father had recently installed for no particular reason. From his viewpoint on the barn roof, he saw his family home crushed by the flood, and then the barn came unmoored and Victor had to stay on top of it while it raged down the river. He was his family's only survivor.

I love that McCullough especially highlighted the heroes of the story--the train engineer who essentially raced the flood, blowing his whistle to give the residents the only warning most of them were to get, the people who stopped in their flight to help others, the rescue and aid workers and private citizens who helped with the cleanup and recovery. I’m still thinking about six-year-old Gertrude Quinn, and the total stranger, Maxwell McAchren, who jumped into the flood not even because he had a way to rescue her, but literally just to be with her. They floated down the raging river until they got close to a house that was still standing at the edge of the water, with other total strangers hanging out the window trying to rescue people. One of the strangers shouted at McAchren to “throw them the baby,” he somehow did so, and a guy named Henry Koch managed to catch her by lunging so far out the window that another guy, George Skinner, had to hold him by the legs. McAchren continued floating down the flooded river alone, but happily he, too, survived.

The sign in the foreground states that we're at the approximate level of Lake Conemaugh before the flood that broke the dam, and to the left is the top of the former South Fork Dam just a few feet higher than the lake level. The dam was also allowed to wear down and sag in the center to make a weak point, and a former owner had disassembled, removed, and sold off the pipes that were previously used to lower the water level. Add to that the fact that the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club blocked the spillway by installing both a bridge and fish guards to keep the fish they'd stocked in the lake from escaping, and the break seems completely inevitable.

Okay, I just discovered that Gertrude Quinn Slater wrote her own book about the Johnstown Flood! I am currently trying to get Internet Archive to generate an epub of it as I write, but I’m sorry to tell you that it’s not going well.

There were a lot fewer flood artifacts than I thought there would be, but this was one of them.

At first, shortly after finishing the book, I was irritated that McCullough didn’t write more about the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club and the consequences the members faced, etc., but I finally got it through my head that this is because… there weren’t really any? They just kind of all… got away with criminal negligence? So much for Eat the Rich, I guess!

Here’s the thing that I REALLY do not understand, though--why does everyone not know about this? Why didn’t we study it in school? It would have been a terrific addition to the unit on American Industrialization and the development of factories and classism in the 1800s, etc. I only knew about the flood because my older kid was flat-out obsessed with earning Junior Ranger badges when she was little, and the Johnstown Flood National Memorial was a badge she could earn by mail, so we did our own DIY unit study of it (including a trip to visit our own local dam and spillway--they look sturdy and sound, thank goodness!), and what we learned during that study was so ghastly and shocking and downright bonkers that we’ve never stopped talking about it. And I do not understand why EVERYBODY is not constantly talking about it! It was so famous at the time, and now it’s just… not? In 2137, if we’re not in our full on zombie apocalypse Mad Max era, are people no longer going to remember anything about 9/11? Crazy how the memory of human suffering can just dissipate like that.

We're looking across the former Lake Conemaugh, with the former South Fork Dam to the left. You can also see the creek that was dammed there in the middle.

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