“I left here Friday and got there Saturday evening. The storm was on when we got there. Our train was the last that went over the bridge before it went down. The water was then rising rapidly and nearly over the tracks. The conductor asked if any one had ever seen it that high before. Nobody had. A carload of cattle that followed us on the bridge went down with the bridge.”
“How came you to go to Galveston?” asked the reporter.
Mr. Grimes hesitated, as if considering, then said: “Well, sir, it was this way: I was sitting on the gallery with a baby in my arms—the child of that man standing there, whose wife cooks for me. Suddenly it was just like some one came to me and told me to go to Galveston. It came so powerfully I sprang up and handed the baby to its mother and told her I must go, and ordered my clothes prepared for the trip. In two hours I was on the way.”
“Did you have any idea what you were summoned to Galveston for?”
“No; only I knew there was some disaster threatening my children. I did not know what it was, but I could not refrain from going.”
Asked further about the trip to Galveston, he said the passengers got into the depot, but he never saw or heard of any of the train crew, and he thought they all must have perished. “I got a negro to show me the way to where my daughter, Mrs. Chilton, lived. The water was then all over the city and rising rapidly. When we got to Eighth street, my son-in-law here, Stufflebram, called out to me across the street. He had seen and recognized me. I went over and we started on. There was a lot of timber and driftwood floating, and some people along the way were pulling all of it in the houses they could get.
HOUSE WASHED TO FRAGMENTS.
“We had to push it apart to get through in places, and some of them laughed and said push it to them, and I did so, and they began hauling it in. Nobody thought how serious it was, but looked on it as merely high water. A little later all those buildings along there were destroyed and all the people there drowned. Stufflebram had taken his wife up to Chilton’s and Clarkson also, because it was a little higher ground there. We finally reached it, on Twenty-second street, just opposite Harmony Hall. We were all in the house together when Prof. Smith sent word over from Harmony Hall that we had better get out at once.
“We went to the hall, and the last of the party had hardly cleared the sidewalk when a large brick building gave way and mashed Chilton’s house to fragments. We staid in Harmony Hall until the cyclone ceased, though it looked once as if the hall would go when the roof blew off. It was the awfulest time I ever saw. My daughters and their families were saved, and I am truly thankful for it. They said at Galveston that we were the only family in the city who all got away alive. It must have been providential.
“We left there Thursday and went to Houston, where we were nicely treated. I never saw such charitable people and I just love Houston. Charity was a mile high there. They fed us and clothed our children and paid our fare to Hillsboro. The railroads, too, were nice, and did all and more for us than one could expect. I never saw or heard of such a time as we experienced at Galveston. Nobody can tell it as it was. It is impossible. For two days we didn’t think of eating. The dead people floating, the ruins all about us, destroyed all sense of hunger. It wasn’t the water that killed, death seemed to be in the atmosphere, there was so much electricity and such furious winds. It is awful, even to think of.”