Four miles further down, on the Conemaugh River, which runs parallel with the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was the town of Mineral Point. It had 800 inhabitants, 90 per cent of the houses being on a flat and close to the river. Few of them escaped.
Six miles further down was the town of Conemaugh, and here alone was there a topographical possibility of the spreading of the flood and the breaking of its force. It contained 2,500 inhabitants and was wholly devastated.
Woodvale, with 2,000 people, lay a mile below Conemaugh, in the flat, and one mile further down were Johnstown and its cluster of sister towns, Cambria City, Conemaugh borough, with a total population of 30,000.
On made ground, and stretching along right at the river verge, were the immense iron works of the Cambria Iron and Steel Company, which had $5,000,000 invested in the plant.
The great damage to Johnstown was largely due to the rebound of the flood after it swept across. The wave spread against the stream of Stony Creek and passed over Kernsville to a depth of thirty feet in some places. It was related that the lumber boom had broken on Stony Creek, and the rush of tide down stream, coming in contact with the spreading wave, increased the extent of the disaster in this section. In Kernsville, as well as in Hornerstown, across the river, the opinion was expressed that so many lives would not have been lost had the people not believed from their experience with former floods that there was positively no danger beyond the filling of cellars or the overflow of the shores of the river. After rushing down the mountains from the South Fork dam, the pressure of water was so great that it forced its way against the natural channel not only over Kernsville and Hornerstown, but all the way up to Grubbtown, on Stony Creek.
By the terrible flood communication by rail and wire was nearly all cut off.
The exact number of the victims of this dreadful disaster probably will never be known. Bodies were found beyond Pittsburg, which in all probability were carried to that place from Johnstown and its suburbs. The terrible holocaust at the barricade of wrecks at the bridge of the Pennsylvania Railroad below Johnstown, where hundreds of men, women and children who were saved from the waves were burned to death, caused a terrible loss of life. The loss of property was about $10,000,000.
KNEW THE DAM WAS WEAK.
On the Monday after the catastrophe there came to Johnstown a man who had scarcely more than a dozen rags to cover his nakedness. His name was Herbert Webber, and he was employed by the South Fork Club as a sort of guard. He supported himself mostly by hunting and fishing on the club’s preserves. By almost super-human efforts he succeeded in working his way through the forest and across flood, in order to ascertain for himself the terrible results of the deluge which he saw start from the Sportsman’s Club’s lake. Webber said that he had been employed in various capacities about the preserve for a considerable time.
He had repeatedly, he declared, called the attention of the members of the club to the various leakages at the dam, but he received the stereotyped reply that the masonry was all right; that it had been “built to stand for centuries,” and that such a thing as its giving way was among the impossibilities. But Webber did not hesitate to continue his warnings. Finally, according to his own statement, he was instructed to “shut up or he would be bounced.” He was given to understand that the officers of the club were tired of his croakings and that the less he said about the dam from thence on the better it would be for him.