AT THE STONE BRIDGE.
bridge, asked, “Mamma, where is that God that Mr. Beale and Mr. Moore told us about, and said that he would save us?” but another little boy, despairing of temporal deliverance, was heard closing his prayer with the beautiful words of the 23rd Psalm: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” A son asked his mother, “Will we die?” She answered, “I can not tell; but one thing I do know, that God does all things well, and if he wants us to-night, he will take us; if not, he will find a way for our escape. We will go and sit down and see what the Lord will do.” A pastor, just escaped with his family to the third story, and waist-deep in water, before he could reach it, instantly opened and read from the family Bible, which he had caught up in his flight: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble; therefore, will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled; though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.” One of the sweetest singers in the city had retreated with her family to the attic; the house was lifted and apparently moving to destruction, when, to soothe her children and her husband, she calmly sang, “Jesus, lover of my soul.” While she continued to sing, the end of a large tree, having great roots, was driven through the house, anchoring it firmly just in the edge of Stony Creek River. A man who was carried over the Stone Bridge, saw a lady on a piece of wreckage shooting down the valley of death, and heard her singing those same immortal words of Charles Wesley; written by him at night, by a feeble spark, in a spring-house, where he was hiding from a raging mob:
“Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to thy bosom fly,
While the raging waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.”
A venerable man was seen upon his knees, with clasped hands, gazing steadfastly at the cross above St. John’s Roman Catholic church; while another, converted the previous winter, full of faith, and always rejoicing in hope, was last seen kneeling upon the roof of his house, riding with the torrent, and shouting, “Glory to God.”
The narratives of the survivors, whether from the upper, middle, or lower portions of the city, all alike serve to show that the suddenness of the doom could only be equalled by its awful horror.
The Hulbert House, built of brick, and one of the finest hotels in Johnstown, stood in the upper portion of the city. There were about sixty persons in it at the time of the catastrophe, and of these, the lives of forty-nine were lost. Many of these were in the office, when an unusual whistling of engines was heard. Imagining a fire had broken out in the midst of the flood, they all ran to the upper stories, except the proprietor, the clerk, and one guest. Two or three minutes later, the clerk walked to the window, and looked across the Conemaugh in the direction of Prospect Hill, and seeing what he mistook for a great cloud of dust, exclaimed, “My God, the hill is falling!” At that, the proprietor ran to the door, and looking up the street, realized at once the situation. Directing the other two to hasten upstairs and spread the alarm, he ran to the kitchen to warn the girls; then fleeing to the fourth floor, he reached it just as the building fell. One of the few survivors declares that the catastrophe overtook nearly all the guests no further advanced than to the foot of the stairway on the third floor, and as yet unapprized of the nature of their danger.
Rev. D. M. Miller, pastor of the Presbyterian church in East Conemaugh, had his home in Johnstown. To him and his family the deluge came without a moment’s warning. They were in an upper room, fearing, suspecting nothing, till they saw houses not half a square away starting from their places, reeling and crackling onward over fences, telephone poles and fruit-trees, and jostling against each other. Before they could fly in any direction, they were waist-deep in water. Beneath the lower sash which was raised, Mr. Miller sprang out upon some floating timbers, urging his wife to follow. She, however, mounted the bed, which being instantly forced up to the ceiling she was almost smothered. The water had closed the opening beneath the sash, and up to her neck in water she now set herself desperately to effect an opening at the top of the window, but she only tore her hands in the vain attempt to wrench away the slat. Mr. Miller, by this time recovering from his first plunge, with one hand caught hold of the spout beneath the eaves, and with the other, battered through two panes of glass, cutting himself badly. Drawing up one foot, with it he now kicked out the sash, when his wife dived out under the lintel, expecting to reach footing on the roof of a small porch below. The porch, however, was gone, and she disappeared deep beneath the turbid flood. A moment later, by some violent ebullition of the water, she was thrown to the surface, and at once laid hold on the spout. Meanwhile, the house was drifting rapidly toward Stony Creek. When the vast number of houses adrift struck the hill beyond the stream there was a fearful rebound; many houses were crushed to splinters, many were upset, and scores of clinging wretches were mangled, killed, or plunged into the water and drowned. The current, arrested by the hill, divided; a part turned to the left up Stony Creek, carrying many houses nearly a mile; part turned to the right, to add its freightage of life and ruin to the already tremendous gorge above the bridge, while between these currents a central portion was rolled back in the direction whence it came. On this portion Mr. Miller’s house was carried, till wandering round and having described two-thirds of a complete circle, by the subsidence of the water it found rest at last not more than a hundred yards from its original position. During much of this journey the pastor and his wife, up to their necks in water, and battered and bruised incessantly by the terrible drift, were clinging to the spout. At last two of their neighbors being in some manner, incomprehensible to themselves, thrown upon the roof and sitting on the comb, after a time espied beneath the eaves the heads of the unfortunate couple. To creep down to the edge of the steep roof, slippery through incessant rain and recover the pastor and his wife was an undertaking fraught with extreme peril, yet these men, as did hundreds more in this awful hour, freely risked their lives in the effort to save others. A little later a woman and a boy were recovered, and brought to the same roof, on the comb of which six persons now sat until nightfall, when the house having ceased from its wanderings, they managed to creep into the attic. This being unfinished, there was no floor on which even the sick could lie; so, in the dark, in their torn and wet and filthy garments, through all the long, dreary hours of an endless night, through the forenoon of the following day, and until the middle of the afternoon, on a narrow board, they sat together until the rescuers came. Then there was a laborious clambering over broken houses and great piles of wreck, a tramp of half a mile through mud and water, when they found at last rest and refuge and friends. Twenty-eight hours they