Our Johnstown Flood Ancestors --135th anniversary

 OUR JOHNSTOWN FLOOD ANCESTORS

On a rainy morning the last day of May 1889, the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam in Pennsylvania killed thousands of people, including some of our relatives.

The town of Johnstown Pennsylvania is in the tree-lined Allegheny Mountains, and situated right below a lake which wealthy Carnegie steel magnates turned into a pleasure reservoir for fishing and boating by adding a dam. Unusual amounts of rain that week caused the lake to overflow the poorly maintained dam, and it eventually collapsed and poured the entire reservoir onto the towns and valley below. Twenty million tons of debris crashed down in a wall of water sixty feet high.

Water wasn’t the only problem: railroad, bridge, and building debris caught fire and an inferno raged over the town for three days; it took months to clean up the disaster. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio and more than 20 years later. Clara Barton was the president of the Red Cross and led the organization’s first major disaster relief effort in this situation.

This event impacted our family. Wally’s mom Caroline Belle Mendell was a teenager at the time, living with her family in Nebraska. Although they were over a thousand miles away, both of her parents, George and Margaret, were from Pennsylvania and had close family living in Johnstown. As the Mendells heard the news, they must have wondered if and how their Grandma Miller, aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived in Johnstown had survived. 

Fortunately, some did: on Margaret’s side, her mother, brothers, sisters, and their children escaped with stories to tell. Sadly, George’s older sister who raised him, his brother-in-law who took him in as an apprentice, and their son perished, and their daughter was badly wounded. This event must have devastated their family, and had long-lasting impacts.

SURVIVED

• Margaret’s mom, 74 year old Sarah Jane Nealy Miller (Sally), living with son Forward Sargent & Emma Miller, and their sons Lloyd and Carl, ages 3 and 1

Margaret’s siblings/Sarah’s children:

• widowed tailoress Sarah Miller Frederick

• Isabella & Edwin Grovier, their 9 year old daughter Florence

• Carpenter Cyrus & Malinda Miller and their three young children

• Charles Bayly and teenage daughter Alice

• Watchman Harry Miller, his wife Sophia, three children

The story of Sally’s survival: Sally and her two grandsons had to climb out of an upstairs window, wading through knee-deep water, to reach the rescue wagon. Then she remembered her sunbonnet, and made the wagon wait while she went back to get it. Faud and his wife Emma remained in the house, and punched a hole in the ceiling and roof with a bed slat. They climbed on the roof and stayed there all night until their home floated against an old stone church that had withstood the current. They climbed onto the church's roof and stayed there until rescued.  Sadly, all of Sally's family records were lost in this flood, although this chair survived:

DIED

George’s older sister Caroline Augusta Mendell McConaghy age 65

Her husband James Patterson McConaghy 72, a leather tanner who had trained George–he died a few days later from injuries

Their son Wallace, age 25

[Their daughter Maggie was severely injured in the face but survived]

Caroline McConaghy

There is now a flood museum in town, and you can visit the Grandview Cemetery to honor the dead (Sally was also buried there when she died in 1903). 

http://www.familytreerings.org/2013/07/heritage-trail-millers-in-pennsylvania.html

http://www.familytreerings.org/2011/09/happy-197th-birthday-sally-nealy-miller.html