After a year of commemorative
films, books, museum exhibits, memorial services, keynote talks, historical
markers, reenactments, and newspaper articles, so what?
“I never heard of this huge natural disaster until this
talk. Amazing! How could something like this be forgotten?”
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| Logo from Dayton Art Institute brochure |
“My grandparents told me about suffering through a bad 1913
flood in their town, but I had no idea their experience was part of something
so huge!”
“I had heard of the Omaha tornado and the Dayton flood, but
had no idea they were connected!”
“Just think how awful such an enormous disaster would be if
it happened now… Could it happen
again?”
Time and again throughout 2013, audience members would flock
around speakers, panelists, or exhibitors and offer comments such as these, as
well as exclaiming, “Thank you!” and repeatedly asking, “Where can I find out
more?” Judging simply from such overwhelming response, the big winner from all
the centennial commemorations in Indiana, Nebraska, and Ohio was the general
public. Not only did thousands of people learn about our nation’s nearly-forgotten
most widespread natural disaster in 1913 centered on the industrial north; they
also learned that such powerful tornadoes and devastating flooding could happen again, and protective steps
they could take so as not to be caught unawares—as so many victims were a
century earlier.
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| Memorial service April 2013 for Tiffin, OH 1913 victims |
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| Exhibit Culver Academies, Indiana |
Original research does not stop with the closing of a centennial
year. In the New Year, some 1913 centennial programs are being rebroadcast, new
talks given, and articles published on fresh research—thus, so will this blog
“’Our National Calamity’” continue in 2014 and beyond.
New documentaries
In my March 26 installment “Book Report! 21 Books and Films on the Great Easter 1913 Flood and Tornadoes,” I gave links to two 1-hour documentary films by PBS affiliates. Several additional
documentary features and shorts were also issued, most of which also can be
viewed on line:
The Omaha Easter Tornado
is a 4:45-minute short that brings to light a tragic song written by Hans B.
Parkinson in 1913 after the fatal twister—still Nebraska’s deadliest—had killed
so many. Two talented Nebraska Wesleyan University music students—pianist Zach Weir (junior) and soloist Cadie Jochum (senior)—perform
the piece. The short is a web extra to the 1-hour Nebraska NET public television
documentary Devil Clouds: Tornadoes Strike Nebraska, which originally aired in March. Devil Clouds will next be aired in
Nebraska on January 13, 2014 at 9:00 PM and January 29, 2014 at 11:00
PM, both on NET1/HD.
When Every River
Turned Against Us: Lessons from the Great 1913 Flood
is a 30-minute documentary film about the 1913 flood in Indiana. It features
actual 1913 moving picture footage of the flood itself around Indiana, as well
as modern interviews both about the historic disaster and about current flood
mitigation and preparedness. It first screened before a live audience on
November 8, 2013, and premiered on WFYI Public TV on Thursday, November 21. Produced by Emmy Award-winning TV producer
Gary Harrison at WFYI Public TV in Indianapolis, it was created in partnership with the
Indiana Silver Jackets emergency readiness coalition and the Polis Center at
IUPUI, with assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazard
Mitigation Grant Program, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, the U.S.
Geological Survey, NOAA, National Weather Service, and the Indiana Department
of Resources. A 3-minute trailer for the film
appears here. A review of the film appears on page 2A of the November 19, 2013 issue of the Berne Shopping News.
The 1913 Flood:
Shadow Over the Miami Valley features
more than 500 flood photos from half a dozen towns around the Miami River
watershed in southwestern Ohio, along with moving picture clips of the flood in
progress from local historical societies and quotations from letters written at
the time. Produced by Middletown, Ohio, filmmaker and historian Sam Ashworth, the
30-minute documentary premiered April 26, 2013 as part of the Michael J.Colligan 1913 flood history project in Hamilton, Ohio. Background about it appears at “New video tells the story of the Great Flood.” The documentary itself does not appear to be available online, but a DVD isavailable from the Dayton Metro Library.
The 1913 Flood in Morgan County, Ohio is a 26-minute documentary written and
produced by Ohio University professor Rick Shriver
focusing on the 1913 flood in the Muskingum River watershed in southeastern
Ohio, and the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District constructed in the
1930s. An overview describing how century-old photographs were enhanced is
here.
The documentary premiered on March 21 with a screening at the Opera House in
McConnelsville.
A great number of additional
videos can be found on YouTube just by searching on “1913 flood” or “1913 tornado.” For example, The Greatest Natural Disaster in Ohio History: The Flood of 1913 is a 4:20-minute short told mostly through historic photographs and produced in
2012 by the U.S. Geological Survey. It also describes how today the USGS uses
data collected from networks of stream gauges to monitor river levels and warn
the public.
New Books
The March 26 installment “Book Report!” also highlighted 16 books—eight published in 2013 for the centennial. Now,
three more 1913 Easter disaster books have appeared, one on the Omaha tornado
and two on the flood in Ohio:
Brown, Tom, Warning!High Water Ahead: A Photographic History of the Great 1913 Flood at Zanesville, Ohio. Muskingum
County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, November 2013. Only 350 copies
printed. $25.00 plus $5.00 shipping; MCCOGS; Post Office Box 2427; Zanesville,
OH 43702-2427; (740) 453-0391 ext.139. I was unable to locate an image of the
cover.
In the category of a book to watch for in the future, historian
and writing consultant Anne Wainscott
is working on a historical novel Torrential about the 1913 flood in Dayton, based
in part on family stories she had heard since childhood. Meantime, in her November 7, 2013, blog
installment “Weather Storyteller Unleashes Lessons of Past Storm Disasters,” Wainscott profiled the work of Cleveland
National Weather Service hydrologist Sarah Jamison in sleuthing the origins of the monumental 1913 storm system (see also this blog "Be Very Afraid..." about Jamison's research).
Videotaped talks
Many historians, meteorologists, and flood-control experts in
Indiana, Nebraska, and Ohio were in demand to give keynote presentations or
participate in panel discussions at conferences, historical societies, or other
events commemorating the 1913 tornadoes and flood. Some of these presentations
were videotaped for posterity, and several have been made available to the
wider public online. For others, just the slides have been made available:
Flood of 1913: Centennial Commemoration Gallery is a web page maintained by the Michael J. Colligan History Project as a
permanent legacy project of the Hamilton Flood of 1913 Centennial
Commemoration. One of the most ambitious series of events run anywhere in the
nation, the two-month commemoration featured one or more events per week from
March 1 to May 4, 2013 (see full program). Partners included the City of Hamilton, the Michael J. Colligan
History Project, Miami University Hamilton’s Downtown Center, Butler County
Historical Society, Lane Libraries, Heritage Hall, the Fitton Center for the
Creative Arts, and many others. Videos of all the talks are archived (note that each talk consists of several separate videos for the introduction
of the speaker, the talk itself, and the question-and-answer session). Formal talks
directly on the 1913 flood itself (as opposed to background about the Hamilton
area’s arts, architecture, and culture) were given by Trudy E. Bell, Jim
Blount, Julia Dian-Reed, and Rose Haverkos (search on each name to find the
relevant videos on the long archive page). Also noteworthy are the filmed oral
histories by individuals sharing family stories of ancestors caught in the 1913
flood.
For the annual conference of the Indiana Association for Floodplain and Stormwater Management, held
in Angola, Indiana, September 11–13, 2013, the program was kicked off by two talks pertaining to the
1913 flood. A historical retrospective “Indiana’s ‘Katrina’: The Great Easter1913 Flood” was given by historian Trudy E. Bell, and a
forward-looking analysis “1913—Looking to Our Future, Enhancing Resilience” was given by Manuela Johnson of the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.
Only slides (no videos) are available from the conference presentations.
Television and radio coverage
Museum exhibits
Many museums and historical societies in Indiana, Nebraska,
and Ohio offered special exhibits on the 1913 tornadoes and flood. Most exhibits
were temporary; nonetheless, record of their existence is preserved in a few
photos throughout this installment; links to more information can be found in the four installments “Happy 1913Centennial Year!” (January 6, 2013);
“1913 Great Easter Disaster Centennial Update” (February 2);
“Centennial Month! Events Update”
(March 3);
and “Centennial Update: April through December” (April 13).
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| 1883 steam pumper. Chris Stewart |
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| WSU traveling exhibit brochure |
Newspapers and periodicals
Although dozens of newspapers around Ohio and Indiana ran individual
articles, individual articles are not cited simply because of their
overwhelming number. Below are links to newspapers that ran significant series
of articles:
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| In January, 2013, WSU performed 1913 |
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| Flood makes front page. Michael Chritton |
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| Exhibitor hold century-old flood mud. Greg Lynch |
The Marietta Times ran a special series of
articles under the title “Progress 2013: The great flood” on April 8, 2013, about
the 1913 flood in the Muskingum River watershed in southeastern Ohio—Ohio’s
largest watershed, accounting for 20 percent of the area in the state. Two
index pages to the articles appear here
and here. (Before Christmas, an editor told me that the paper was also running a wrap-up
of the centennial year on the 1913 flood on December 29, 2013, but it may be a
print-only feature as it does not appear to be online.) Another ten stories
about centennial talks, films, markers, exhibits, and other events from
February through April commemorating the 1913 flood around the Muskingum River
watershed are at WHIZnews.com .
The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran four stories on March 22, 2013: “Researchers trying to putflood of 1913 back in public’s consciousness on its 100th anniversary”;
“In 1913, a flooded Cleveland came to the rescue of city much harder hit”;
“A timeline of the great flood of 1913”; and an extensive reference section with links “The biggest disaster you neverheard of: 100 years ago, Ohio’s cities all flooded at once.” Also, see 21 photos of the 1913 flood around the Cleveland area.
“A timeline of the great flood of 1913”; and an extensive reference section with links “The biggest disaster you neverheard of: 100 years ago, Ohio’s cities all flooded at once.” Also, see 21 photos of the 1913 flood around the Cleveland area.
Many other newspapers
around the Midwest ran one or more centennial articles about local devastation
by the monumental 1913 Easter storm system (see, for example, these articles that ran in the Tiffin, Ohio, Advertiser-Tribune). Google on the name of a city and
state along with the words “1913 flood” or “1913 tornado” for additional links
and images.
Websites and blogs
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| Silver Jackets' 1913 flood portal |
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| From Polis and HND |
Speaking of comparing images, Jeff Satterly and Robert
Muhlhauser created HistoricNaturalDisasters.com to match photographs of historic
disasters with present-day photographs. For them also the 1913 flood was a
natural, as was the Easter 1913 Omaha tornado. Their work got some good
attention in Cleveland and Satterly wrote a guest essay for the blog Polis (about cities around the globe) “Mapping the Aftermath of Historic Storms,”.
drawing attention to the Google Map on the Great Flood of 1913 with
several dozen before and after photos.
See also their guests posts “Natural Disasters” in Steve Wolfgang’s blog “Eclectic” (which
actually goes under the Greek word ἐκλεκτικός ) and "James Cox and the Great Dayton Flood" published by DarkeJournal.com.
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| A City Under Water. Trudy E. Bell |
Finally, a searchable
Microsoft Word doc listing all 20 previous installments to this research blog “’Our National
Calamity’: The Great Easter 1913 Flood” with permanent URLs, from November 2012
through April 2013 can be downloaded from my 1913 flood web page—just click on the top left link "'Our National Calamity' research blog posts" to either open or save the file. ONC will continue (although not weekly, as during the
height of the centennial events—that nearly put me into the hospital!). Future
topics will include the role of the 1913 tornadoes and flood in developing emergency
radio, reshaping philanthropy, and impacting local and national business
communities, as well as tracing the flood’s devastation around Kentucky and
down the Mississippi River to New Orleans—as always, uncovering little-known
primary sources. Please let me know if you want to be notified when future installments are uploaded!
Next time: High-Wire Horror
© 2014 Trudy E. Bell
Next time: High-Wire Horror
© 2014 Trudy E. Bell
Bell, Trudy E., The Great Dayton Flood of 1913, Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Picture book of nearly 200 images of the flood in Dayton, rescue efforts, recovery, and the construction of the Miami Conservancy District dry dams for flood control, including several pictures of Cox. (Author’s shameless marketing plug: Copies are available directly from me for the cover price of $21.99 plus shipping, complete with inscription of your choice; for details, e-mail me at t.e.bell@ieee.org )
