In the central dead-house in Johnstown proper there lay two rows of ghastly dead. To the right were twenty bodies that had been identified. They were mostly women and children, and they were entirely covered with white sheets, and a piece of paper bearing the name was pinned at the feet. To the left were eighteen bodies of the unknown dead. As the people passed they were hurried along by an attendant and gazed at the uncovered faces seeking to identify them. All applicants for admission, if it was thought they were prompted by idle curiosity, were not allowed to enter. The central morgue was formerly a school-house, and the desks were used as biers for the dead bodies. Three of the former pupils lay on the desks dead, with white pieces of paper pinned on the white sheets that covered them, giving their names.
But what touching scenes are enacted every hour about this mournful building! Outside the sharp voices of the sentinels are constantly shouting: “Move on.” Inside weeping women and sad-faced, hollow-eyed men are bending over loved and familiar faces. Back on the steep grassy hill which rises abruptly on the other side of the street are crowds of curious people who have come in from the country round about to look at the wreckage strewn around where Johnstown was.
“Oh! Mr. Jones,” a pale-faced woman asks, walking up, sobbing, “can’t you tell me where we can get a coffin to bury Johnnie’s body?”
“Do you know,” asks a tottering old man, as the pale-faced woman turns away, “whether they have found Jennie and the children?”
“Jennie’s body has just been found at the bridge,” is the answer, “but the children can’t be found.”
Jennie is the old man’s widowed daughter, and was drowned, with her two children, while her husband was at work over at the Cambria Mills.
Just a few doors below the school-house morgue is the central office of the “Registry Bureau.” This was organized by Dr. Buchanan and H. G. Connaugh, for the purpose of having a registry made of all those who had escaped. They realized that it would be impossible to secure a complete list of dead, and that the only practicable thing was to get a complete list of the living. Then they would get all the Johnstown names, and by that means secure a list of the dead. That estimate will be based on figures secured by the subtraction of the total registry saved from total population of Johnstown and surrounding boroughs.
“I have been around trying to find my sister-in-law, Mrs. Laura R. Jones, who is lost,” said David L. Rogers.
“How do you know she is lost?” he was asked.
“Because I can’t find her.”