Read Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever for Free Online

two. The three young Hoosiers guided themselves by using poles to push themselves down the river. The plan was to travel to what was called the Wyandotte Bridge, leave the boat there, and walk back. Some of their friends took a look at the boat and probably the weather and warned them that it might have trouble, but the Rothenberger brothers and Myers felt that they’d be just fine. Hindsight is 20/20, and considering it was raining—it had been raining just about everywhere the day before and on this Monday—it’s hard not to wonder just what these three were thinking.
    7 A . M ., Fort Wayne, Indiana
    About 120 miles northeast of Mulberry, Indiana, a downpour pummeled Miss Theresa Hammond, an attractive schoolteacher who was also considered one of the town’s old maids at the age of twenty-seven.
    Her morning started as it pretty much did every day. As Miss Hammond had every morning for the last five years, she awakened at 1209 Barr Street where her mother Margaret and her older sister Mary also lived. Theresa had another sister, Elizabeth, who married around the time Theresa went into teaching and moved back with her husband to where the family had spent most of their years, in Miners Mills, Pennsylvania, which was as small a village as it sounds. Eventually it became part of the city of Wilkes-Barre.
    As for Fort Wayne, Theresa had lived here since around the turn of the century. It was a city with a population of 63,933, a growing metropolis with ample examples of progress. There was the large and new Y.W.C.A. building, and seven moving picture shows, eight if one included the one currently under construction. The city had its forestry department, an art school, four hospitals, twenty-four hotels, eight paid fire companies, and twelve public parks sprawling over 145 acres of land. Forty-three miles of road were paved, twenty-sixwith the modern stuff, asphalt, and seventeen miles of brick. It was a manufacturing hub for cigar factories (there were thirty-two), breweries (eighteen), broom factories (three), and washing machines (three). The historical society archived the past, and the five daily newspapers and six weeklies covered the present and pointed the way toward what looked to be a bright future.
    Theresa Hammond, whose teacher’s salary averaged about $30 a month, going up and down every month depending on how often she was needed, paid her ten-cent fare on the trolley. During her approximately four-mile commute, the conversation among passengers must have been about the rain, which had been going strong since the previous morning.
    On Saturday night, March 22, Fort Wayne’s weatherman, W. S. Palmer, assured residents that the next day would be “fair and warmer.” But Palmer had egg on his face that day, since it had rained all of Easter Sunday, and it was still raining on Monday when residents woke up to the news that Omaha, Nebraska had been devastated by a tornado, and Terre Haute, on the other end of Indiana, had been ravaged as well.
    Fort Wayne had its own problems, however. Main Street was four feet underwater, and yet people were not panicked. Other roads, like Wagner Street and Prospect and Baltes Avenues, in close proximity to the Maumee River to its south and the St. Joseph River to its east and Spy Run Creek to its west, were more prone to flooding than others. The occasional damp parlor was almost to be expected when you lived near the rivers, so Main Street flooding, while unusual, did not pose any immediate cause for alarm.
    People were also nonplussed when the stadium, Swinney Park, and other landmarks near the river were swamped. This was, based on past history, to be expected, and it would clearly get worse—anyone could see that—but the rain and flooding had to end soon. After all, W. S. Palmer predicted that the crest of the flood would end sometime in the late afternoon.
    Miss Hammond’s trolley deposited her on Bluffton Road. Against a backdrop