Virtually
all books, videos, and other works about the Great Easter 1913 Flood focus on its
monumental death and destruction, most often in the context of one locality.
Few encompass the multistate geographical scale of the natural catastrophe, and
almost none explore its human toll through time as families struggled to come
to terms with total loss.
That all changed
February 8–10, 2019, with the world premiere of an ambitious original opera
called The Flood—giving three performances to a packed Southern Theatre (seating capacity 900)
in Columbus, Ohio.
The project
was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts; the
music was composed by Korine Fujiwara, commissioned by OPERA America’s Opera
Grants for Female Composers program; the libretto was written by Stephen
Wadsworth (who, among other things, had written A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein). It was co-produced by Opera
Columbus and ProMusica Chamber Orchestra. The singers’ backgrounds included
education at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and the Juilliard
School in New York City (among others), and performances with the New York
Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra.
Warning:
plot spoilers ahead.
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The one-act opera The Flood was set in four interiors at different eras to reveal how later
generations of a family seek to resolve the trauma suffered by ancestors during
the 1913 flood. Before the Saturday evening performance at the Southern Theatre
in Columbus, Ohio, historian Trudy E. Bell set the wider context of the 1913
flood to audience members. Credit: Roxana Bell
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The Flood is set in two Columbus neighborhoods:
Franklinton—hardest hit by the 1913 flood—and Hilltop. Although librettist Wadsworth
had immersed himself in the history of the flood in Columbus—whose death toll
was equivalent to that in more famous Dayton—the story is much more universal.
Thus, the fictional characters and their situations are composites, and knowledge about specific
historical settings is not critical to understanding the drama. More important
is how the tragedy of loss ricochets through four generations of an extended family
over a century: 1913, 1940, 1970, and 2014.
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In the new opera The Flood, tragedy befalling a woman in the 1913 flood (left) plays out in the
later life of her former lover in 1940 (right). Photo: The Wall Street Journal
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The eras are
not depicted successively in acts. The opera unfolds in one act, with the
different eras depicted in four interiors on the stage simultaneously—especially
poignant in revealing how trauma from the past can cripple love for the present
or future, can engender future pain(or forgetting), and can trigger how people
wrestle with ghosts. Time is fluid, and future interacts with past. It is a
substantial, meaty work; I truly wish I could have seen it twice—once to absorb
the plot and a second time to more closely follow the complexities of the loves
and losses and rediscoveries.
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The father in 1940 (left), who had
lost his first wife and children in the 1913 flood, rejects the daughter of his
second marriage, who ends up in an insane asylum by 1970 (middle). She leaves
the asylum to marry, and eventually dies, but years later her own daughter discovers
her mother’s tragic secret in 2014 (right). Credit: Columbus Underground
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Because the
play is in no way a history of the 1913 flood, the Friday and Saturday evening
performances and the Sunday matinee were all preceded by a scene-setting “talkback”
by different guest speakers who recounted aspects of the history of the 1913
flood. Two (for Friday and Sunday) were local experts sketching its history in
Columbus, and I (for Saturday night) outlined its wider context.
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The Flood is a significant work, and to be
highly recommended if it comes to your city. Reviews of the weekend’s
performances were published not only in local outlets (including The Columbus Dispatch and Radio OSU) but also in The Wall Street Journal.
Police in Indianapolis
Patrick
Pearsey, archivist for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, has
expanded his research—some of it summarized for this research blog in April
2016 in his guest post “Men of the Hour”—into an entire book titled
The Time of Heroes: The Great Flood of
1913 and the Indianapolis Police Department (no date, but privately published
in 2018).
The book chronologically
outlines what happened in Indianapolis during the 1913 flood from March 21
through 30, focusing on the especially disastrous days of March 25–27. In
Pearsey’s words, “When the Washington Street Bridge collapsed on the 26th, the city
was cut in two. Marooned on the west side of the raging White River was Captain
George V. Coffin and a handful of police officers. Faced with rescuing, feeding
and clothing over 7,000 people that week, what these men did became the
Indianapolis’s Police Department’s finest hour.”
The large-print
book is 425 pages long and features some 200 photographs. Print-on-demand
copies can be purchased from Amazon.
A Day in Dayton
Corpses in Trees and Rats on a Raft: The
Great Dayton Flood of 1913, compiled by Danny Z. Kiel, is a transcription of the special “flood
edition” of the Dayton Daily News published
on April 2, 1913. That issue was likely the first attempt by anyone in 1913 to summarize
the drama of the flood in some kind of coherent narrative—preceding the “instant
books” that began to appear in late April (see “Profiting from Pain”). The original newspaper issue was a
makeshift affair, which resulted in many typesetting errors that Kiel has
sought to correct in his 77-page transcript.
Published in
2016, the work does not appear to exist as a printed book. A 99-cent Kindle
version is available on Amazon (along with a preview and introduction).
Happy reading!
Happy reading!
©2019 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 $4.00 shipping, complete with inscription of your choice;
for details, e-mail me),
or order
from the publisher.
[Note: I am in the midst of an unrelated book project that is currently claiming most of my time, but am posting here as often as possible. Feel free to contact me re the Great Easter 1913 natural catastrophe.]
