One of the humorist James Thurber's most famous stories was inspired by a bizarre incident during the 1913 flood in Columbus, Ohio. The backstory…
“My memories
of what my family and I went through during the 1913 flood in Ohio I would
gladly forget,” recollected James Thurber in the opening line of Chapter 3 of his 1933 autobiography My Life and Hard Times, especially “that
frightful and perilous afternoon in 1913 when the dam broke, or, to be more
exact, when everybody in town thought that the dam broke.”
Indeed, what
Thurber described was a widespread panic inspired
by someone
![]() |
"Two thousand people were in full flight" is James Thurber's own caption to this drawing of his that first appeared in the chapter "The Day the Dam Broke" in his 1933 autobiography My Life and Hard Times. This image is a screen shot from a reading of the short story by Keith Olbermann on YouTube. |
shouting a rumor that a drinking-water storage dam north of Columbus
had broken. Thousands of people along High Street began running east, fearing
they would be “overtaken and engulfed by the roaring waters,” Thurber wrote.
But “when the panic had died down and people had gone rather sheepishly back to
their homes and their offices,…city engineers pointed out that even if the dam
had broken, the water level would not have risen more than two additional
inches in the West Side,” which was, Thurber noted, already under 30 feet of water. “The East
Side (where we lived and where all the running occurred) had never been in any
danger at all.”
The chapter “The
Day the Dam Broke” received instant fame when it was published in The New Yorker on July 23, 1933, as part
of the magazine’s serialization of the autobiography. Today it is often read in
high school English classes, where students are learning about Thurber and
humor in literature. Alas, often the lesson stops there, sometimes with tacit
or explicit assumption that the tale—and indeed the monumental flood itself—was
purely imaginary.
But it
wasn’t. That panic along High Street in Columbus really happened, and
![]() |
Columbus Dispatch, March 27, 1913, p. 8. |
largely
as Thurber described it—although Thurber, ever the humorist, never let key pesky
historical facts stand in the way of a great story and may have even
deliberately exaggerated for effect.
Facts and figures
Thurber was
born in Columbus on December 8, 1894, so at the time of the Great Easter 1913
flood in late March, he was an 18-year-old high school senior. That following
September, he entered The Ohio State University in Columbus, writing for both
the campus paper The Ohio State Lantern and
the campus humor magazine The Sun Dial. He
left the university in 1918 without a degree and worked for a couple of years
for the U.S. State Department in Paris, before returning to Columbus to a
three-year stint as a reporter for the Columbus
Dispatch. Then he bounced back to Paris for a couple more years writing for
the Chicago Tribune and other papers,
before moving to New York City in 1925. Eventually he ended up on the staff of The New Yorker. His short autobiography,
written at age 39, was the book that put him on the literary map.
So what
actually happened during the High Street panic? What was the dam that so scared
everyone, and why?
It is actually possible to fact-check Thurber’s famous story because local reporters covering the 1913 flood described the actual panic in the Columbus Citizen and the Columbus Dispatch.
It is actually possible to fact-check Thurber’s famous story because local reporters covering the 1913 flood described the actual panic in the Columbus Citizen and the Columbus Dispatch.
“The
Columbus, Ohio, broken-dam rumor began, as I recall, about noon of
![]() |
About 15 hours before the panic, the Scioto River swept away the Broad Street Bridge. Credit: Ohio Historical Society |
March 12,
1913,” Thurber wrote. “High Street, the main canyon of trade, was loud with the
placid hum of business and the buzzing of placid businessmen arguing,
computing, wheedling, offering, refusing, compromising.”
Sound the
buzzer: after two decades, Thurber misremembered both the date and time: the Columbus Dispatch put the panic at
around 4:30 PM, Wednesday, March 26 (see “'Dam Has Broken' Rumor is Cause for a Wild Panic” above left), a date
and time corroborated by the Columbus
Citizen.
Thurber’s
“canyon of trade” description of High Street is wonderfully evocative, but the
hum was likely not at all placid. On that Wednesday, the waters had fallen only
two feet from their record crest two days earlier, and
rain was still falling in torrents. Around 1 AM that very morning, the swollen Scioto
River had swept away the span of the Broad Street Bridge, isolating the city’s
low-lying West Side (see photo above). Moreover, levees had also burst along the Scioto
with the force of breaking dams. The West Side was under 17 feet
![]() |
In reality, Columbus received almost 7 inches of rain by Wednesday afternoon and much more had fallen upriver. Credit: Horton and Jackson, p. 20. |
Thurber
describes how the panic started with isolated individuals possibly running for
their own personal reasons, until “Two thousand people were abruptly in full
flight” along High Street and on side streets heading east. “Black streams of
people flowed eastward down all the streets leading in that direction,” he
wrote, …”housewives, children, cripples, servants, dogs, and cats…shouting and
screaming.” He recalls how his mother shut off the stove and carefully took a
dozen eggs and two loaves of bread into her arms before she, teenaged Thurber,
and his grandfather joined the surge of humanity, urged along by policemen and
children crying, “Go east!”
![]() |
Columbus Citizen article on March 27 is almost Thurber's plot. |
The Columbus Citizen in an article about the
panic published the next day (Thursday, March 27) on page 9, described the
scene in a hauntingly similar way: “Cross streets leading from High street were
instantly black with people, crowding, jamming, running, and some even crying,
in the grand scramble to places of higher ground.” In fact, that whole article
is full of absurd perspectives—telephone girls fainting, men turning pale:
“Automobiles, all kinds of horse-drawn vehicles, delivery wagons and heavy
trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, kids on roller skates, women with baby buggies,
peanut vendors with push carts, and one man leading his horse on a gallop—all
were seen in the swiftly moving throng of panic-stricken humanity that poured
into Third street from High street and the river front.” That both contrasts
somewhat but also confirms Thurber’s own recollection: “A funny thing was that
all of them were on foot,” he wrote. “Nobody seemed to have had the courage to
stop and start his car; but as I remember it, all cars had to be cranked in
those days, which is probably the reason.”
Thurber
makes the entire panic stretch six miles along High Street before the crowd
melted away. That may be an exaggeration for effect. From the streets cited in
the newspaper articles, the real distance was probably more like a mile (see
red ovals on the map above). He himself recalls slowing with exhaustion when he
reached Grant Avenue, a north-south street parallel to High Street about six
blocks east, and eventually reaching Ohio Avenue, at an even greater distance
even farther east. We-ell, maybe.
According to
both newspapers, the police and the Ohio National Guard were part of the
problem, not part of the solution, charging into stores and public places
ordering people to flee for their lives until (as the Citizen reporter wrote) “pandemonium reigned in the absolutely safe
districts because of the blundering methods employed in spreading the alarm
before waiting for verification.”
The alleged perp: Griggs Dam
The dam
whose supposed breaking ignited all the panic was the Griggs Dam across the
Scioto River completed less than a decade earlier upstream
![]() |
Griggs Dam around 1918. Credit: |
of Columbus, also locally called the
“storage dam.” It was built to create the city’s first reservoir of drinking
water, and was the only drinking-water reservoir serving Columbus for two
decades.
Technically, Griggs Dam is a curved (somewhat arched) concrete overflow
gravity dam. A gravity dam is one whose cross section is shaped like a wedge or triangle with a wide base;
the sheer weight of all the concrete in its massive base resists the horizontal
pressure of the water it holds back. An overflow dam is one where a significant
part of its length is basically a giant spillway. In the case of Griggs Dam,
the curved spillway—fully 500 feet long—is half the 1,006-foot length of the dam:
if the Scioto River reaches flood stage, the excess water just rolls over the
top by design. Absent an earthquake (rare in Ohio), overflow gravity dams rarely
fail catastrophically. Adding to the stability of the basic design, Griggs Dam is
low, only about 35 feet high; nonetheless, the reservoir it impounds extends upstream
for six miles, offering recreational fishing and sailing both then and now.
![]() |
Dam breaking rumors spread all around Ohio. Akron Beacon- Journal, March 27, 1913, p.1. |
They weren’t
the only ones. Elsewhere around the state, people were apprehensive about the
soundness of other dams during this unprecedented Easter 1913 flood, leaving their homes in
St. Mary’s and Celina in in western Ohio, fearful for the dam impounding the
Grand Reservoir (now called Grand Lake St. Mary's, and the largest man-made lake in the world when it was completed in 1845) as well as smaller dams in Akron and Kent.
And rumors were flying everywhere—assisted by even being printed as front-page
news (see the Akron Beacon-Journal above right).
“Order was
restored and fear dispelled finally by means of militiamen riding about in
motor lorries bawling through megaphones: ‘The dam has not broken!’” Thurber
wrote. “All the time, the sun shone quietly and there was nowhere any sign of
oncoming water.” The map of the flood region in Columbus (see comparison map above) and the
streets named both in the story and in the newspaper articles indeed confirm
that the regions from High Street east were free of floodwaters. But Thurber
was just plain wrong about the sunshine: Columbus got an inch of rain that
Wednesday, on top of nearly 6 inches over the previous three days. He was also wrong about the depth of inundation on the
West Side: it was a horrific 17 feet instead of 30, but at
those house-crushing depths, who’s counting—it’s all ruin.
The Columbus Citizen reported that Julian
Griggs—who had been the city engineer when the dam was constructed, and for
whom the dam was named—issued a statement Wednesday evening a few hours after
the panic: “That dam will not give way. It’s a scientific impossibility for it
to give way.” (See left.)
“That dam is
only 32 feet high, on a foundation built for a 50-foot dam,” added James
Westwater, the dam’s prime contractor. “No matter what the volume of water,
that dam can’t break.”
This article
also points out a final error in Thurber’s story, which the humorist either misremembered
or perhaps purposely exaggerated for comic effect: his assertion that had the
dam actually broken, the water level in the inundated West Side would have
risen only two inches. As revealed in the Citizen
article quoting the engineers, Griggs had actually said two feet; another engineer said maybe three
feet. Oh, well, what’s a factor of 10 or 15 among friends…
The last word
Regardless
of historical details and context, “The Day the Dam Broke” showcases Thurber’s vivid
story-telling plus his skill in capturing the essence of an event in a few deft
pen strokes in the accompanying cartoons—as well as recollecting a remarkable
afternoon from his youth. You can read the original text of “The Day the Dam
Broke” as published in My Life and Hard
Times here.
Also, check out two five-minute YouTube videos of Keith Olbermann reading the
short story aloud (Part I is here
and Part II is here.
Enjoy!
©2015 Trudy
E. Bell
Next time: Crisis Communications in a Communications Crisis
Selected references
In addition
to the articles cited above from the Akron
Beacon-Journal, Columbus Citizen, and Columbus
Dispatch, a few other sources were useful for fact-checking the story:
Griggs, Julian,
“The Recent Flood at Columbus, Ohio,” Engineering
News 69(15): 744–748. The panic even warrants a brief paragraph on page
747, where Griggs also confirms its date and time as being 4:30 PM on Wednesday,
March 26.
Horton, A.
H. and H. J. Jackson, The Ohio Valley
Flood of March–April, 1913, Including Comparisons with Some Earlier Floods,
(Department of the Interior, United States Geological Survey, Water-Supply
Paper 334, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1913).
McCampbell,
E. F., “Special Report on the Flood of March, 1913,” Monthly Bulletin Ohio State Board of Health 3(5):299–445, May 1913.
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 $4.00 shipping, complete with inscription of your choice; for details, e-mail me), or order from the publisher.
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