The Johnstown Flood (7 page)

Others came forth at the same time, that is,
after
May 31, 1889, claiming to have long held doubts about the engineering of the dam, and premonitions of doom for the whole valley of the Conemaugh. Assuredly most of them spoke from deep conviction; but exactly how much widespread, serious, public concern there was, and particularly in the years of the late ’80’s, is very hard to say.

Certainly there was every reason to have been concerned. The valley from the lake down to Johnstown had sides as steep as a sluice, and there was only one way the water could go if the dam failed. Floods hit the area almost as regularly as spring itself. Johnstown rarely got through a year without water in the streets at least once, and often for several days at a time.

Floods had been a problem from the time of the very earliest settlements in the valley. Lately, for the past ten years or so, they had been getting worse.

The very first flood anyone had bothered to make a record of in Johnstown destroyed a dam. That was in 1808, and it had been only a small dam across the Stony Creek which had been put in as a millrace for one of the first forges. Then there were the so-called Pumpkin Floods of a dozen years later. They hit in the fall and had swept what looked like every pumpkin in Cambria County down into town. In 1847 another little dam on the Stony Creek broke. During the flood of 1875 the Conemaugh rose two feet in a single hour. In 1880 again another dam broke; it had been built by Cambria Iron as a feeder for the mills and was about sixteen feet high, but it was located below town, so no damage was caused. During the next eight years there were seven floods, including three bad ones in 1885, ‘87, and ‘88.

The reasons were obvious enough to anyone who took the time to think about the problem, which quite a few were doing by 1889. With the valley crowding up the way it was, the need for lumber and land was growing apace. As a result more and more timber was being stripped off the mountains and near hills, and in Johnstown the river channels were being narrowed to make room for new buildings and, in several places, to make it easier to put bridges across.

Forests not only retain enormous amounts of water in the soil (about 800 tons per acre), but in mountainous country especially, they hold the soil itself, and in winter they hold snow. Where the forests were destroyed, spring thaws and summer thunderstorms would send torrents racing down the mountainsides; and each year the torrents grew worse as the water itself tore away at the soil and what little ground cover there was left. Then, in the valley, where the water was being dumped ever more suddenly, the size of rivers which had to carry it all was being steadily whittled away at by industry and the growing population. So there was always a little less river to handle more runoff, and flash floods were the inevitable result.

Some men in Johnstown, curiously enough, thought that encroaching on the river channels would simply force the water to dig deeper channels. But this was impossible because the river beds were nearly all rock. When the volume of water increased, the rivers only came up, and often very fast. In the 1885 flood the Stony Creek rose three feet in forty-five minutes.

The dam was going to break that year, too, and every year, except one or two, up until 1889. At George Heiser’s store, people would come in out of the rain to buy something or just to pass the time in a dry, warm place and nearly always someone said, “Well, this is the day the old dam is going to break.” It was becoming something of a local joke. Many years later Victor Heiser would recall, “The townspeople, like those who live in the shadow of Vesuvius, grew calloused to the possibility of danger. ‘Sometime,’ they thought, ‘that dam will give way, but it won’t ever happen to us!’”

When there were warnings of trouble up the mountain, very few took them to heart. The dam always held despite the warnings. People got tired of hearing about a disaster that never happened. And after all, was not the dam owned by some of the most awesome men in the country? If there was anything to worry about certainly they would know about it.

The
Tribune
continued to imply that there was no cause for alarm. In 1887 the editors again allowed that a break at South Fork would not greatly affect Johnstown, unless it “occurred in conjunction with a great flood in the Conemaugh Valley which is one of the possibilities not worth worrying about.” Readers all through town nodded in agreement. On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, shortly before four, one leading citizen was asked how much higher he thought the water would rise in the valley if the dam let go. His answer was “About two feet.”

3

It would appear, in fact, that Johnstown’s leading citizens had taken little or no intelligent account of the threat the dam posed, were it not for some highly interesting letters that changed hands during the year 1880.

When Benjamin Ruff first began his restoration of the old dam in the fall of ’79, the management of the Cambria Iron Company, in the words of its solicitor, Cyrus Elder, became “extremely exercised” over the news. The management at that time was a man by the name of Daniel Johnson Morrell.

Morrell was one of the foremost ironmasters of the age, a ruddy-faced Quaker with gray eyes, who wore his whiskers beneath his jowls, so it appeared he was forever sporting a hair scarf. He looked upon the likes of Carnegie as parvenus in the business, brash, unprincipled upstarts who were not real ironmen at all, but harum-scarum drummers who had jumped into something they knew nothing about just to make a quick fortune. Beside the almost elflike Carnegie or Frick, he looked as though he were of another species. He was under six feet tall, but with his massive, thick shoulders and ample girth (he weighed well over 200 pounds), coming along Main Street he looked every bit the most powerful man in town.

But according to one of his contemporaries, “With all the responsibilities of his position, with all the care and concern of the great works on his hands, he never seemed worried or out of humor. When he left his desk at the close of the day he seemed to be able to shut off all thought of work; and in the midst of other persons’ worry and nervousness in the most distressing times, he would lie down and sleep as contentedly as a child.”

Aside from running the Iron Company, Morrell presided at most town meetings and was President of the Savings Bank and the First National Bank, the water company and the gas company. He had served two terms in Congress and was still a powerful voice in the Republican Party. For many years he was the President of the American Iron and Steel Association, an organization which did as much as any to protect the protective tariff.

He lived on Main Street in the finest house in Johnstown, a tall brick house with a mansard roof, painted white and set among gardens and shade trees on a lawn that took up a full city block. He had the only greenhouses in town, a full-time gardener, and all his property was enclosed with an ornamental iron fence. Children used to gather by the fence after school, hoping for a chance to look at him. “Whatever Mr. Morrell wants, well that’s it,” they heard at home. He was the king of Johnstown.

Morrell had been born in Maine, in 1821 (which made him fourteen years senior to Carnegie), but grew up in Philadelphia and started out clerking in a mercantile store. He had moved to Johnstown in the 1850’s when the Philadelphia financial backers of the then floundering Cambria Iron Company sent him to see what might be done to keep the works from going bankrupt.

Backwoods iron forges had been in operation in Cambria County for fifty years and more. With plenty of ore, limestone, and coal in the locale, the prospects for turning the Conemaugh Valley into an iron center of some real consequence looked extremely bright. But until Morrell came to town the industry had been beset by repeated failures. Morrell, however, succeeded handsomely. Knowing nothing about the iron business, he reorganized the company, and despite fires and financial panic, he kept his nerve, maintaining to the Philadelphia money men that the works would one day prosper.

By the start of the Civil War the Cambria Iron Company was the biggest iron-producing center in the country. In addition, Morrell had encouraged some rather primitive and haphazard research into a new pneumatic process for making steel which contributed substantially to dramatic changes in the iron business and, for that matter, in the whole character and growth of the country.

In 1856 a man named William Kelly, a Pittsburgher by birth, moved from Eddyville, Kentucky, to Johnstown to set up in one corner of the Cambria yard some experimental apparatus which he assembled from scrap-heap parts and pieces. Kelly was in Johnstown off and on for the next three years. He became known among the millworkers as “The Irish Crank,” and not without justification. His attempts to “refine” molten iron for the rolling mill by blowing air into it had resulted in repeated failures and at least one serious fire, which became known as “Kelly’s Fireworks.” But later on, in 1862, he came back to try again, this time with an egg-shaped “converter” made abroad, and the accepted story is that he had better luck. Kelly would later be credited with having built the converter himself and with developing at Johnstown something very close to what became known as the Bessemer process, a technique for converting iron into steel at far less cost and in considerably larger quantities than had been possible before.

Henry Bessemer, a brilliant English chemist, had devised just such a process at about the time Kelly first arrived at the Cambria works, and, deservedly enough, got nearly all of the credit. The Bessemer converter used a blast of air directed through molten iron to oxidize, or burn off, most of the carbon impurities in the metal to make steel. Previous steelmaking techniques required weeks, even months. The Bessemer process could produce good-quality steel in less than one hour.

It was one of the important technological innovations of all time, and Morrell was among the first to recognize just what its impact might be. He financed Kelly’s erratic pioneering in the technique for close to five years and after the war invested heavily in new Bessemer equipment. In the late ’60’s and ’70’s Johnstown was the liveliest steel center in the country, with the most inventive minds in the industry gathering there—the Fritz brothers, George and John, Bill Jones, and the brilliant and energetic Alexander Holley.

Moreover, Morrell had Cambria Iron do something no other steel company experimenting with the Bessemer process dared try, and something that was to prove immensely beneficial to Andrew Carnegie. He used only American workers, training Pennsylvania farm boys to understand and master the new technology, while everyone else in the business was importing English workers already familiar with it. At first there were months of costly setbacks and disappointments in Johnstown, but the results in the long run proved Morrell right.

In 1867, from ingots made at Steelton, the first Bessemer rails to be rolled on order in the United States came out of the Cambria mill. By 1871 Morrell had one of the first really big Bessemer plants in operation, and for the next five years Cambria would be the largest producer in the country, if not the world.

The war had brought flush times and dazzling increases in iron production capacities. But now the age of cheap steel was on. By the time of the late 1880’s, Cambria Iron had some 7,000 men on the payroll. The works consisted of the Johnstown furnaces Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 in one plant, with stacks seventy-five feet high and sixteen feet in diameter at the base. Blast furnaces Numbers 5 and 6 were in a second plant. The hulking Bessemer plant was the main building. Then there was a huge open-hearth building, a rolling mill that was nearly 2,000 feet long, a bolt-and-nut works, and an axle shop.

Added to that the company owned and operated its own coal mines, coke ovens, and railroads. It was the largest landowner by far in the county, having bought up thousands of acres around Johnstown, coal holdings primarily, which were, in many places, used as tremendous farms where nothing but hay was grown to feed the animals used in the mills and mines. The company also owned some 700 frame houses which it rented to its workers, a big department store, and the Gautier Steel Company, a subsidiary, where Cambria Link Barbed Wire was made.

To all intents and purposes, Johnstown, in other words, was a company town and an important one at that. And appropriately enough the company ran the place with an iron hand. Labor unions were not to be tolerated, nor were employees who dared even to talk such treason.

For example, Rule Number 9 of the plant regulations published in 1874 stated: “Any person or persons known to belong to any secret association or open combination whose aim is to control wages or stop the works or any part thereof shall be promptly and finally discharged. Persons not satisfied with their work or their wages can leave honorably by giving the required notice…”

The Cambria Iron Company, which meant Mr. Daniel J. Morrell, left no doubts as to where it stood on such matters. So there were no unions in the mill, and inside the high, green fence that surrounded it, work went on around the clock, around the calendar, without any trouble from the help.

It would be mistaken, however, to imagine Cambria Iron as an entirely overbearing or inhuman organization, grinding down its employees. By the standards of the day, it was quite progressive and looked out for the welfare of its people and the town with uncommon paternalism.

In his first speech in Congress, Morrell had said, “The American must live in a house, not a hut; he must wear decent clothes and eat wholesome and nourishing food. He is an integral part of the municipality, the State, and the Nation; subject to no fetters of class or caste; neither pauper, nor peasant, nor serf, but a free American citizen.” Judged by the standards of his time, he was almost as good as his word.

In one of its plants the Iron Company maintained the eight-hour day, a practice that had been tried and abandoned by every other steel company, which meant, as one of the trade-union newspapers pointed out, that the only eight-hour mill left in the country was a nonunion mill.