History of the Johnstown Flood / Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

Among the lost was Miss Jennie Paulson, a passenger on a railroad train, whose fate is thus described by one of her comrades:

“We had been making but slow progress all the day. Our train lay at Johnstown nearly the whole day of Friday. We then proceeded as far as Conemaugh, and had stopped from some cause or other, probably on account of the flood. Miss Paulson and a Miss Bryan were seated in front of me. Miss Paulson had on a plaid dress, with shirred waist of red cloth goods. Her companion was dressed in black. Both had lovely corsage bouquets of roses. I had heard that they had been attending a wedding before they left Pittsburg. The Pittsburg lady was reading a novel entitled Miss Lou. Miss Bryan was looking out of the window. When the alarm came we all sprang toward the door, leaving everything behind us. I had just reached the door when poor Miss Paulson and her friend, who were behind me, decided to return for their rubbers, which they did. I sprang from the car into a ditch next the hillside, in which the water was already a foot and a-half deep, and, with the others, climbed up the mountain side for our very lives. We had to do so, as the water glided up after us like a huge serpent. Any one ten feet behind us would have been lost beyond a doubt. I glanced back at the train when I had reached a place of safety, but the water already covered it, and the Pullman car in which the ladies were was already rolling down the valley in the grasp of the angry waters.”

Mr. William Scheerer, the teller of the State Banking Company, of Newark, N. J., was among the passengers on the ill-fated day express on the Pennsylvania Railroad that left Pittsburg at eight o’clock A. M., on the now historic Friday, bound for New York.

There was some delays incidental to the floods in the Conemaugh Valley before the train reached Johnstown, and a further delay at that point, and the train was considerably behind time when it left Johnstown. Said Mr. Scheerer: “The parlor car was fully occupied when I went aboard the train, and a seat was accordingly given me in the sleeper at the rear end of the train. There were several passengers in this car, how many I cannot say exactly, among them some ladies. It was raining hard all the time and we were not a very excited nor a happy crowd, but were whiling away the time in reading and in looking at the swollen torrent of the river. Very few of the people were apprehensive of any danger in the situation, even after we had been held up at Conemaugh for nearly five hours.

“The railroad tracks where our train stopped were full fourteen feet above the level of the river, and there was a large number of freight and passenger cars and locomotives standing on the tracks near us and strung along up the road for a considerable distance. Between the road and the hill that lay at our left there was a ditch, through which the water that came down from the hill was running like a mill-race. It was a monotonous wait to all of us, and after a time many inquiries were made as to why we did not go ahead. Some of the passengers who made the inquiry were answered laconically—‘Wash-out,’ and with this they had to be satisfied. I had been over the road several times before, and knew of the existence of the dangerous and threatening dam up in the South Fork gorge, and could not help connecting it in my mind with the cause of our delay. But neither was I apprehensive of danger, for the possibility of the dam giving away had been often discussed by passengers in my presence, and everybody supposed that the utmost damage it would do when it broke, as everybody believed it sometime would, would be to swell a little higher the current that tore down through the Conemaugh Valley.

“Such a possibility as the carrying away of a train of cars on the great Pennsylvania road was never seriously entertained by anybody. We had stood stationary until about four o’clock, when two colored porters went through the car within a short time of each other, looking and acting rather excited. I asked the first one what the matter was, and he replied that he did not know. I inferred from his reply that if there was any thing serious up, the passengers would be informed, and so I went on reading. When the next man came along I asked him if the reservoir had given way, and he said he thought it had.

“I put down my book and stepped out quickly to the rear platform, and was horrified at the sight that met my gaze up the valley. It seemed as if a forest was coming down upon us. There was a great wall of water roaring and grinding swiftly along, so thickly studded with the trees from along the mountain sides that it looked like a gigantic avalanche of trees. Of course I lingered but an instant, for the mortal danger we all were in flashed upon me at the first sight of that terrible on-coming torrent. But in that instant I saw an engine lifted bodily off the track and thrown over backward into the whirlpool, where it disappeared, and houses crushed and broken up in the flash of an eye.

“The noise was like incessant thunder. I turned back into the car and shouted to the ladies, three of whom alone were in the car at the moment, to fly for their lives. I helped them out of the car on the side toward the hill, and urged them to jump across the ditch and run for their lives. Two of them did so, but the third, a rather heavy lady, a missionary, who was on her way to a foreign station, hesitated for an instant, doubtful if she could make the jump. That instant cost her her life. While I was holding out my hand to her and urging her to jump, the rush of waters came down and swept her, like a doll, down into the torrent. In the same instant an engine was thrown from the track into the ditch at my feet. The water was about my knees as I turned and scrambled up the hill, and when I looked back, ten seconds later, it was surging and grinding ten feet deep over the track I had just left.

“The rush of waters lasted three-quarters of an hour, while we stood rapt and spell-bound in the rain, looking at the ruin no human agency could avert. The scene was beyond the power of language to describe. You would see a building standing in apparent security above the swollen banks of the river, the people rushing about the doors, some seeming to think that safety lay indoors, while others rushed toward higher ground, stumbling and falling in the muddy streets, and then the flood rolled over them, crushing in the house with a crash like thunder, and burying house and people out of sight entirely. That, of course, was the scene of only an instant, for our range of vision was only over a small portion of the city.

“We sought shelter from the rain in the home of a farmer who lived high up on the side-hill, and the next morning walked down to Johnstown and viewed the ruins. It seemed as if the city was utterly destroyed. The water was deep over all the city and few people were visible. We returned to Conemaugh and were driven over the mountains to Ebensburg, where we took the train for Altoona, but finding we could get no further in that direction we turned back to Ebensburg, and from there went by wagon to Johnstown, where we found a train that took us to Pittsburg. I got home by the New York Central.”