The Johnstown Flood Quotes
"The rain would drum down like an unyielding river."
"Life was comparatively simple, pleasures few."
"People were poor, very poor by later standards, but they didn’t know it."
"The mills were set just below town in the gap in the mountains where the Conemaugh River flows westward."
"At night the sky gleamed so red it looked as though the whole valley were on fire."
"But so far, and again unlike the big cities, Johnstown had only a few such men, and most of them lived in Cambria City."
"The Reverend had been in Johnstown only a few years, and it had been just the month before that he and his wife, Agnes, had moved into the new parsonage."
"It was a picture of a life so removed from Johnstown that it seemed almost like a fantasy."
"Boats of any kind were a rare sight in the mountains."
"But the system was a good deal better than any other so far."
"The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution."
"Business was the overriding preoccupation for now, and business in Pittsburgh, either directly or indirectly, meant the steel business."
"As far as the gentlemen of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were concerned no better life could be asked for."
"They believed in the sanctity of private property and the protective tariff."
"They saw themselves as God-fearing, steady, solid people."
"Quite a few had come from backgrounds as humble as Carnegie’s."
"They were living the good life as they thought the good life ought to be lived."
"But never for very long did they take their eye off the real business of the human condition as they saw it—which was business."
"The reaction in Johnstown to their doings on the mountain was mixed."
"Relations then deteriorated fast, with the club authorities threatening to shoot any invaders caught on the grounds after dark."
"Far more important, however, was the way people felt about the dam."
"We do not consider there is much cause for alarm."
"Forests not only retain enormous amounts of water in the soil but in mountainous country especially, they hold the soil itself."
"The dam was going to break that year, too, and every year, except one or two, up until 1889."
"‘Sometime,’ they thought, ‘that dam will give way, but it won’t ever happen to us!’"
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea..."
"We all stood there in the middle of the floor, waiting our turn to be swept away, and expecting every minute to be drowned."
"When our porches were torn loose, and the two bookcases fell over, the noise led us to think the house was going to pieces."
"I think he wanted to tell us he had lost his trunk with two or three hundred dollars he had saved to bring his mother and father over here."
"I kept paddling and grabbing and spitting and trying to keep the sticks and dirt and this horrible water out of my mouth."
"A moment later I felt the press of a heavy shock, a sense of excruciating pain came upon me that I was being crushed to death..."
"Run for your lives. Follow me straight to the hill."
"Don’t go back for anything. Don’t go back for anything."
"You terrible man," she shouted after him. "I’ll never help you."
"Libby, this is the end of the world, we will all die together."
"His whole right side had been caved in by falling timbers, and he was powerless to free himself."
"From out of nowhere a small boy had appeared among the chaos and told him his wife had drowned."
"Scarcely was the complement of passengers complete, when the current turned, and our ship was driven with terrific velocity."
"Through it all Rose lay helpless, in terrible pain, and shaking with severe chills as the cold rain beat down."
"The sound had a powerful effect on everyone who heard it."
"No one really knew for sure the extent of what had happened, but they knew it had been terrible beyond belief."
"People began thinking about whether their own corpses would be recognizable."
"The suspense was unbearable, and it kept on, hour after hour. It seemed morning would never come."
"I saw hundreds of them as the flames approached throw up their hands and fall backward into the fire."
"Everyone in Bolivar had seen the whole thing and they wanted to tell exactly how it happened."
"Another family named Williams had their house split in half at the bridge, then went floating up the Stony Creek in what was left of the attic."
"In the interest of humanity I think a public meeting should be called early tomorrow to send food, clothing, etc. to those poor people."
"It was nearly morning when the strange quiet began."
"About five the first dim shapes began emerging from the darkness."
"But in the last chill hour before light, the valley seemed to hang suspended in an unearthly stillness."
"Despite it all, the hunger, the grief, the despair and fear, people gradually did what they had to; they slept."
"A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power."
"Many thousand human lives—Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives."
"Trust in God. Johnstown had its day of woe and ruin."
"Neglect Caused the Break…Shall the Officers of the Fishing Club Answer for the Terrible Results."
"…the dam was dangerous. I told them that the dam would break sometime."
"…death by violence due to the flood caused by the breaking of the dam of the South Fork Reservoir…"
"Justice is inevitable even though the horror is attributable to men of wealth and station."
"The dam served no useful end, beyond the pleasure of a few rich men."
"If they were unable or failed to cope with forces of nature which they called into action, the responsibility is theirs."
"The capital stock of the club would be the extent of the liability, if, that is, there were any liability."
"I have tried to divest myself of my identity with the South Fork Fishing Club to see if there could possibly be any grounds for a suit against the company or individual stockholders, and I am free to say I have been unable to find any."
"But I cannot see how the organization can be held legally responsible for the breaking of that dam."
"For all the colossal wealth of the men who belonged to it, the club itself was capitalized for a mere $35,000."
"It is almost impossible to imagine how those people were feared."
"They were the ruling class. It was that simple."
"For to prove that any living member of the club had been personally negligent would have been extremely difficult."
"Like nearly every leading citizen of Johnstown, they made the mistake of assuming that the men who had rebuilt the dam had known what they were doing."
"The water in Lake Conemaugh, the attorneys for the defense must have claimed, was coming up so fast on the afternoon of the 31st."
"What the repercussions of that might have been is interesting to speculate."
"Certainly in the eyewitness testimony collected by the Pennsylvania Railroad in preparation for the suits it might have to face, repeated emphasis was placed on proving that no one had ever seen such a storm."
"The lesson of the Conemaugh Valley flood is that the catastrophes of Nature have to be regarded in the structures of man as well as its ordinary laws."
"Woe to the people who trust these powers to the hands of fools."
"For years, too, there would be much speculation on how many of those people listed among the unfound dead were actually very much alive in some faraway place."