“In this plain there are now only the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad train, a school house, the Morrell Company’s store and an adjoining warehouse and the few buildings of the triangle. One brick residence, badly shattered, is also standing.
“These structures do not relieve the shocking picture of ruin spread out below the mountains, but by contrast making it more striking. That part of the town to the south where the flood tore the narrow path there used to be a separate village which was called Kernsville. It is now known as the South Side. Some of the queerest sights of the wreck are there, though few persons have gone to see them.
“Many of the houses that are left, there scattered helter skelter, thrown on their sides and standing on their roofs, were never in that neighborhood nor anywhere near it before. They came down on the breast of the wave from as far up as Franklin, were carried safely by the factories and the bridges, by the big buildings at the dividing line, up and down on the flood and finally settled in their new resting places little injured.
“A row of them, packed closely together and every one tipped over at about the same angle, is only one of the queer freaks the water played.
“I got into one of these houses in my walk through the town to-day. The lower story had been filled with water and everything in it had been torn out. The carpet had been split into strips on the floor by the sheer force of the rushing tide. Heaps of mud stood in the corners. There was no vestige of furniture. The walls dripped with moisture.
“The ceiling was gone, the windows were out and the cold rain blew in and the only thing that was left intact was one of those worked worsted mottoes that you always expect to find in the homes of working people. It still hung to the wall, and though much awry the glass and frame were unbroken. The motto looked grimly and sadly sarcastic. It was:—
‘There is no place like home.’
“A melancholy wreck of a home that motto looked down upon.
“I saw a wagon in the middle of a side street sticking tongue and all straight up into the air, resting on its tail board, with the hind wheels almost completely buried in the mud. I saw a house standing exactly in the middle of Napoleon street, the side stove in by crashing against some other house and in the hole the coffin of its owner was placed.
“Some scholar’s library had been strewn over the street in the last stage of the flood, for there was a trail of good books left half sticking in the mud and reaching for over a block. One house had been lifted over two others in some mysterious way and then had settled down between them and there it stuck, high up in the air, so its former occupants might have got into it again with ladders.