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 Page A

of lightning and thunder, hopefully underneath an umbrella, she hurried past the Gebharts’ farm and trekked over a foot bridge, the water below rushing to the nearby St. Marys River. She kept going until she reached a grove of barren trees encircling the Allen County Orphans’ Home.
    The orphanage, planted on nineteen acres of land, was a three-story brick building with thirty-five rooms that housed sixty-two children from infants to the age of sixteen, but it was capable of caring for as many as seventy-five kids. Not every youth staying there was actually an orphan. Like many such homes across the nation, this one was often used as a place where parents, often overwhelmed single parents, could leave their children—sometimes for only days or weeks at a time, and sometimes forever—when they didn’t feel that they could care for them on their own.
    The reasons why a parent couldn’t take care of their children were as similar as they would be during any age: poverty, alcoholism, death, or perhaps a divorce had broken up the family, so that both parents, or the surviving parent, had to work and the children would wind up here.
    Miss Hammond enjoyed spending time with the kids, and she could relate to all of them. She had lost her own father early in life.
    Michael Hammond had been a railroad worker, an employee of the Delaware and Hudson Company, first working as a brakeman until he was promoted to freight conductor and extra passenger conductor. On the morning of May 21, 1887, at the station that Hammond was working at, a few cars were in the process of being added, and as the locomotive began to back up, he noticed a woman and a little boy on the track directly in front of the moving train.
    Hammond yelled to them to get off the track; but the more he yelled, the more bewildered they looked. Finally, Hammond jumped from the caboose, sprinted along the track, and pushed them off the tracks, but in doing so he staggered backward and was caught by the wheels, thrown under the cars, and instantly killed.
    Hammond’s death was covered in The New York Times, which stated that “Michael Hammond was a popular, industrious and estimable man, about 30 years of age, and well known to railroad men generally.”
    Theresa was eight months old.
    Almost twenty-six years after her father’s death, Theresa was employed in one of five orphanages in the county. But the orphanage that Theresa Hammond worked for was the only one in Fort Wayne with the St. Marys River in its back yard. As she and the orphanage’s director, Mrs. Ida Overmeyer, would discover, this would become a problem.
    Mulberry, Indiana, 9 A . M .
    Roy and Roscoe Rothenberger and their friend Elva Myers actually started off in a shallow stream but soon felt confident enough to push themselves off into Wildcat Creek, and for a while they shot ducks. Perhaps they also talked about the brothers’ father, David Rothenberger, a carpenter recovering from injuries he sustained falling off a building several weeks ago, or it could be the conversation led to Myers’ two younger siblings or how business was going for Myers’ dad, a blacksmith. Maybe they talked about the storm that had rolled in the day before, although it seems unlikely that they would have had time to pick up a morning paper and read about the destruction in Omaha, which was dominating the front pages and undoubtedly the discussion in many kitchens and on many street corners across the country.
    Whatever they talked about, the Rothenbergers and Myers definitely discussed the river, which was getting deeper and faster by the minute. In fact, the water sped along at about 25 miles an hour, locals later guessed.
    The boat was becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
    Then when the brothers and Myers hit a whirlpool, the current spun the boat around and toward the river bank, lodging their craft against a willow tree; their situation went from difficult to