Letters from an American - The Johnstown Flood

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

May 30, 2026The members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were wealthy and influential, The Club took control of a Pennsylvania reservoir created by damming a river, and enjoyed it for sport, but it had no drainage system, Perched high above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a factory town, members of the club gave little thought to the people living there, On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam failed in a torrential storm, 2,208 people died in the Johnstown Flood, the largest loss of civilian lives in the US to that time, The survivors who hoped to hold the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club accountable were disappointed, The four lawsuits that were launched against the club failed. Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

May 30th, 2026. Life was good in 1889 for the more than 50 wealthy industrialists who belonged to Pennsylvania's South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Most of the men had made their fortunes in nearby Pittsburgh in the heady years after the Civil War. New national markets and a new national financial system made business boom. Factories grew and railroads hammered across the country, moving grain, east, and manufactured products south and west.

Pittsburgh produced the iron and steel that fed the railroad industry and the growing cities. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick ran the steel mills, while there was also money to be made in real estate, storekeeping, lawyering, and accounting in the booming city. Bankers like Andrew Mellon, who would become the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the boom years of the 1920s, made enough money to reshape the country. In 1880, Frick's friend Benjamin Franklin Ruff, who sold coke, the high-heat fuel necessary to make steel,

contracted to make railroad tunnels, and bought and sold real estate, proposed to Frick and other wealthy friends that they establish a secret and exclusive club in the mountains where members could spend their summers away from the heat and dirt of bustling Pittsburgh. Ruff owned an abandoned reservoir on Pennsylvania's Little Connemah River in southwestern Pennsylvania. The reservoir had been created in 1852, when Pennsylvania finished damming the river to create a canal system. But railroads soon replaced canals, and the reservoir became obsolete.

The state sold it, along with the South Fork Dam, to private interests. By 1880, it was in Ruff's hands. Ruff and his friends organized the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which took control of the reservoir, renaming it Lake Connemah, and established a club on about 160 acres of land. The main building on the site was a 47-room clubhouse with a dining room that could seat 150. Sixteen members built large cottages along the lakeshore and spent their evenings at plays or musical performances. At two and a half miles long and a mile wide, the lake was big enough to run the club's two steam yachts or to enjoy on sailboats or canoes.

It covered about 450 acres and was 70 feet deep. It held about 20 million tons of water. The club's wealthy industrialists and financiers centered their summer relaxation around the artificial lake. Private owners had already changed the lake and the dam significantly. The man who had bought the property from the state removed from the dam the five sluice pipes that allowed the removal of excess water, selling them for scrap.

This meant there was no way to drain the reservoir, either for repairs or to lower, water levels during periods of heavy rain. As they prepared for summer recreation, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club stocked the lake with black bass sportfish. Then, worried that the expensive bass might get washed downstream, they put screens over the dam spillway. To enable carriages to cross the dam, the club lowered it. There was no way to lower water levels in their Lake Connemah, but in what must have been an idyllic existence in the summers of the early 1880s, they ignored warnings that the changes they had made to the dam had weakened it dangerously.

There were 30,000 people, mostly Welsh and German immigrants, living in Johnstown, a factory town in the valley below Lake Connemah, about 14 miles downstream from the South Fork Dam. The economy that had made fortunes for the men of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was built on the labor of workers like the men in Johnstown. The men there worked in the blast furnaces, converters, rolling mills, or coal mines of Cambria iron, or worked for the goutier plant making barbed wire. The steep hills of the region meant the drop in elevation from the lake to Johnstown was about 450 feet, more than 40 stories in a modern day.

day building, but there was little reason for members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club to think about the people who lived downstream. Until May 30th, 1889, Decoration Day, when a torrent of rain began to fall. On the morning of May 31st, the president of the club, Elias Unger, observed from his farmhouse above the lake that, the valley below me seemed to be all under water, and I couldn't understand what all that meant. Unger was at the farmhouse to oversee the construction of a sewage system for the club, and when he ran down to the dam, he immediately ordered the Italian workers from the sewage project

to dig an emergency spillway to relieve pressure on the dam. But the workers hit rock and made little headway. Then Unger ordered workers to tear out the fish screens that had become blocked with debris, but it was too late. By 1.30 in the afternoon, after Unger had tried unsuccessfully to warn the people below, it was clear there was nothing to do but wait for the dam to fail. A little before 3 o'clock in the afternoon, on Friday, May 31st, 1889, the South Fork Dam on Pennsylvania's Little Connemah River broke.

Unger said the dam failed little by little until it got a headway, and when it got cut through, it just went like a flash. As 20 million tons of water spilled downstream, it picked up houses, trees, bridges, railroad cars, animals, and people. The water measured at least 35 feet high and traveled at 40 miles an hour. As it traveled, it became a wall of debris grinding through more than $4.4 billion of property in today's dollars. It swept locomotives from their tracks, discarding some nearly a mile away. The water consumed victims, and when the wave smashed into a stone bridge in Johnstown, the trapped debris caught fire, trapping more.

2,208 people died in the Johnstown flood, the largest loss of civilian lives in the U.S. at that time. 99 entire families died. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, 400 miles away, and as late as 1911. Gertrude Sladery recalled that her father had been terribly worried about the heavy rains, warning that not a house would be left standing if the dam burst. Hearing the roar of the coming water, he grabbed one of his children and ordered the rest to run for your lives to a nearby hill. Slatery later recalled, I can never forget what I saw.

It was like the day of judgment I have since seen pictured in books. Pandemonium had broken loose, screamed, cries and people were running. Their white faces like death masks. Parents dragging children whose heads bobbed up and down in the water. A boat filled to capacity with eager, anxious passengers. Household pets of all descriptions dangling from living arms. A wagon loaded to the breaking point lost a wheel and the despairing mortals riding therein were dumped down in a heap in the filthy water. They scrambled to their feet in less time than it takes to tell it, as the on rushing mob moved rapidly forward, bent on self-preservation at any cost. And now a moving mass,

black with houses, trees, boulders, logs, and rafters, was coming down like an avalanche. From around the world, people rushed to help the survivors. One of the first to arrive was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who stayed for five months. She brought with her 50 doctors and nurses, and together they learned how to respond to a natural disaster. But those survivors who hoped to hold the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club accountable were disappointed. Blaming the club members for the disaster, newspapers built the story into one of the biggest in American history. Even the pro-business New York Times reported that justice is inevitable, even though the horror is attributable to men of wealth and station,

and the majority of the victims the most downtrodden workers in any industry in the country. But the clubmen denied responsibility for the disaster, and all four lawsuits launched against the club, failed. Club members and law partners,

James Hayreed and Philander Knox, defended the club in court, claiming the flood was an act of God for which the members could not be held responsible. Reed went on to become a federal judge. Knox went on to become a U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of State, and U.S. Attorney General.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at SoundScape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.