Johnstown flood

It was May 1889, 24-year-old Butler resident Alice Christie Kenna and twin sister Anna Christie Bonner boarded a train to travel 75 miles to the small community of Woodvale located a short distance up the Conemaugh River from Johnstown.

The two daughters of Andrew Coulter Christie and his wife, Elizabeth, were on their way to visit their parents, grandmother and two sisters who had recently moved to Woodvale from Butler. The family was excited to meet Alice's 4-month-old daughter, Maggie, for the first time. The visit held the promise of a joyous family reunion, but soon four-generations of the Christie family would go missing in the waters of the Johnstown Flood.

The Johnstown flood would not be Andrew Coulter Christie's first epic national catastrophe with severe personal consequence. The dark eyed and dark haired 5-foot 8 inch Christie was born in 1833 in the tiny crossroads hamlet of Coultersville, renamed Hooker after Union Gen. Joseph Hooker during the Civil War.

In 1862, 19-year-old Andrew was a tailor by trade until the calling of war lured him to travel down the road to Slippery Rock on Aug. 4, 1862, to enlist in Company F of the 134th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

A month later, Sept. 2, 1862, the young Union private found himself in Alexandria, Va., at Fairfax Seminary helping to guard the school then being used as a hospital for 1,700 wounded federal troops.

As recounted in Christie's Civil War pension records, while returning with his regiment from picket duty that afternoon, "the men were ordered to ‘uncap’ their rifles." A fellow soldier's hand slipped off the hammer before he removed the percussion cap from the nipple of his Springfield rifle. The gun went off and the minie ball struck Christie in his left hip.

The bullet traveled downward into Christie's leg and fractured the top of his femur. The resulting surgery caused his right leg to be three inches shorter than his left. He was given a medical discharge after serving only two months of his nine-month enlistment.

Now partially disabled and most likely in constant pain, Christie moved to the Borough of Butler in 1867 and continued his trade as a tailor. In 1874, he purchased a home on the southeast corner of West Jefferson and Bluff Streets.

By April 1888, finding tailoring too difficult due to his disability, he made the fateful decision to move to the growing and prosperous Johnstown industrial suburb of Woodvale.

Leaving his twin married daughters and 19-year-old son Frank behind in Butler, Andrew was accompanied by his mother, wife, 17-year-old daughter Daisy and 9-year-old adopted daughter Mamie Lewis.

The family rented a home at 187 Maple Avenue in the company-built town of 1,247 boasting of wide streets, horse-drawn street cars and over 255 mostly tidy white homes that were the pride of the Cambria Iron Company.

Christie's new life had begun. He opened a grocery and confectionery store with his family members most likely assisting in its operation at 463 Railroad Street in the village of East Conemaugh. It was an easy 1.5-mile commute by streetcar the up the Conemaugh River Valley.

Another 8 miles up the valley and a world away sat the Southfork Hunting and Fishing Club at Lake Conemaugh.

Sixty-one families wishing to escape the heat and smoky air of Pittsburgh comprised this private summer community dubbed the "most exclusive millionaires club in America." Its members included wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon and many other members of the Steel City's industrial elite.

In late May 1889, Lake Conemaugh, located 14 miles above Johnstown, Pa., was a place where songbirds broke the quiet of sunrise, women boated wearing long white dresses and wealthy men fished along the shore. Sixteen private cottages and a 47-room clubhouse/hotel sat along the shore of the artificial lake created between 1838 and 853 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as part of the now defunct Pennsylvania Main Line Canal System.

Since the founding of the Southfork Club, the 72-foot high and 931-foot-long dam had periodically sprung leaks and were repaired with dirt and straw. Dangerous alterations had also been made years before with the removal of water release pipes at the bottom of the dam, the lowering of the dam by several feet and installing fish screens on the spillway which clogged with debris creating additional pressure on the dam.

The last two days in May 1889, the Johnstown area received a record of 9 to 10 inches of rain and the water in the dam was raising 1.5 feet per hour. With the previous alterations, there was no way to relieve the pressure on a dam that was about to burst.

Leaks appeared around noon and were patched, but just minutes before 2:50 p.m. May 31 water was going over the crest and soon the earthen dam was blown away by the force of the water. It was like Niagara Falls had suddenly appeared with an estimated 20 million tons of water flowing over the precipice for the next 45 minutes.

A wall of water traveling as fast as 40 miles per hour and 50 feet high descended down Conemaugh Valley toward Johnstown with the Christie home in Woodvale in its path.

The deluge destroyed or carried with it houses, trees, horses, railroad bridges, locomotives and people. It destroyed 30 homes in the little town of South Fork, left nothing but mud in Mineral Springs and leveled East Conemaugh including Christie's store on Railroad Street.

A mile and a half down the river in Woodvale, the barb wire producing Gaultier Wire Works had closed for the day. The 300 women working in the town's woolen mill had been sent home at noon due to the massive rainfall.

The population of Woodvale sat in their homes listening to the pounding rain. The town received no warning, except for violent winds that blew down a small building just moments before the thunderous rumble of the 40-foot-tall tidal wave could be heard.

In a few seconds, 314 of its 1,247-person population and 89 horses would be swept away in the powerful flood waters. All 255 frame houses were destroyed.

When the water hit Woodvale's Gaultier Wire Works, its boilers exploded, and mountains of barbed wire were swept into the water entangling countless victims struggling to reach the surface.

Woodvale suffered the highest per capita loss of life of any of Johnstown's boroughs. Only part of the ruined woolen mill and the pedestrian bridge over the Pennsylvania Railroad line remained after the powerful flood continued on its path of destruction. The town of Woodvale was leveled, and four generations of the Christie family were missing.

Elizabeth Singer was the mother of Christie's wife. Her husband had been the minister at the English Lutheran Church in West Sunbury in the middle part of the 1800s. Singer became very involved in the temperance movement as soon as she arrived in the Johnstown area. Probably the last letter she ever sent was written two days before the flood and detailed the work she was doing in Johnstown fighting against the use of alcohol. Singer's body was never found.

Elizabeth Christie, or Lizzie as she was called by her family, married Christie within a couple of years after his return from the Civil War. Although her body was initially reported as having been identified, her body was never found.

Anna Christie Bonner married oil driller John R. Bonner in Butler in 1885. The marriage was not a happy one; Andrew Christie had his son-in-law arrested for desertion in 1887. Her body was never found.

Josephine Daisy Christie lived with her parents in Woodvale and may have worked in the town's woolen mill which employed 300 women. Daisy, as she was called by her family, was never found.

Nine-year old Mamie (Lewis) Christie had been adopted by Andrew and Elizabeth Christie in 1885. The little girl's body was never found.

The body of 4-month-old Maggie Kenna, one of the youngest victims of the Johnstown Flood, was never found.

Frank Christie, 22, who had not traveled with his twin sisters for the family visit, went to Johnstown in the first few days of June to search for his lost family.

Numerous temporary morgues had been created to house the bodies of the flood victims. Frank went from morgue to morgue pulling back the white sheets covering the faces of the drowned until he found his sister Alice's body in the Millvale School House. He continued his dreadful task until identifying his father at the morgue set up at the railroad station.

Convinced his entire family had perished, he returned to Butler alone.

Andrew Coulter Christie and his daughter Alice Kenna, who had married machinist Michael Kenna in Butler at age 21 on April 19, 1887, were initially buried in the Prospect Hill Cemetery along with hundreds of other dead from the Johnstown Flood.

In July 1889, Frank Christie had his father's body exhumed and shipped back to Butler and buried next to his parents in the Concord Cemetery just outside of Hooker. The grave remained unmarked until 1936 when, for unknown reasons, Frank Twohey from Branchton applied for a government-issued Civil War service headstone that now marks the spot of the only known victim of the Johnstown Flood buried in Butler County.

Alice's body was also exhumed at the same time as her father's but is not buried in the Christie plot in Concord Cemetery. Possibly due to her husband having her buried elsewhere, the location of her final resting place remains unknown.

The torrent continued its path the 4 miles from Woodvale to Johnstown.

At 4:07 p.m. the frightening roar of the mountain of water was heard. Thousands of people desperately tried to escape, but many were swept up in the fast-moving oily, muddy, churning water.

It was over in 10 minutes, but for some the most horrific part was yet to be experienced. Daylight disappeared, thousands were huddled in attics or on rooftops, others were floating on the debris, while many more had been swept downstream to the old Stone Bridge at the junction of the Stone Creek and Conemaugh rivers. Large amounts of debris piled up against the bridge's arches catching fire and trapping and burning 80 people who had survived the initial flood waters to death.

Volunteers and material donations poured in from across the nation. Butler would do its part.

According to the June 1, 1914, Butler Citizen "a mass meeting was held in front of the (Butler) courthouse to raise money and provisions . . . in less than an hour $2,000 was subscribed." All the clothing, bedding and other provisions donated were loaded on a special train to Johnstown.

It would take the Johnstown community five years to fully recover from the worst flood of the 19th century.

After the water had receded and the tragic toll had been tallied, 99 whole families including the Christies were wiped out, 1,600 homes lost, 23,000 survivors left without a place to live and 2,208 people dead with bodies being found as far away as Cincinnati and as late as 1911.

The Southfork Hunting and Fishing Club and its members were exonerated of any responsibility for one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

Henry Clay Frick and some of the other wealthy members, however, donated thousands of dollars toward the cleanup. Andrew Carnegie gifted the building of a library to the town of Johnstown that is today the home of the Johnstown Flood Museum.

The "most exclusive millionaires club in the country" sat mostly vacant until the headline "Will Pass Out of History" appeared in the Feb. 5, 1904, Cambria Freeman newspaper and the story below reported all the buildings and contents of the former summer vacation spot for the wealthy were to be sold at auction.

Fortunately, The Great Flood" will remain part of our living history for future generations. The National Park Service in 1967 purchased part of the dry lakebed and the remains of the dam. The Southfork Hunting and Fishing Club's clubhouse and three of the nine surviving cottages were acquired in 2006 by the National Park Service. All the properties and visitor center are collectively known today as the "Johnstown Flood National Memorial."

Bill May is a local historian, speaker and tour guide.