The Johnstown Horror!!!: or, Valley of Death, being A Complete and Thrilling Account; of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling RuinWalker, James Herbert
History
The Johnstown Horror!!!: or, Valley of Death, being A Complete and Thrilling Account; of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling Ruin
Mr. L.D. Woodruff, the editor and proprietor of the Johnstown
_Democrat_, tells his experiences during the night of horrors. He was at
the office of the paper, which is in the upper portion of the Baltimore
and Ohio Railway station. This brick edifice stands almost in the centre
of the course of the flood, and its preservation from ruin is one of the
remarkable features of the occasion. A pile of freight cars lodged at
the corner of the building and the breakwater thus formed checked the
onslaught of floating battering rams. Mr. Woodruff, with his two sons,
remained in the building until the following day. The water came up to
the floor of the second story. All night long he witnessed people
floating past on the roofs of houses or on various kinds of wreckage. A
number of persons were rescued through the windows.
A man and his wife with three children were pulled in. After a while the
mother for the first time remembered that her baby of fifteen months was
left behind. Her grief was violent, and her cries were mingled with the
groans of her husband, who lay on the floor with a broken leg. The next
day the baby was found, when the waters subsided, on a pile of debris
outside and it was alive and uninjured.
During the first few hours Mr. Woodruff momentarily expected that the
building would go. As the night wore away it became evident the water
was going down. Not a vestige of Mr. Woodruff's dwelling has been found.
The newspapers of Johnstown came out of the flood fairly well. The
_Democrat_ lost only a job press, which was swept out of one corner of
the building.
The Flood's Awful Spoil.
In the broad field of debris at the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct, where
the huge playthings of the flood were tossed only to be burned and
beaten to a solid, intricate mass, are seen the peculiar metal works of
two trains of cars. The wreck of the day express east, running in two
sections that fatal Friday, lie there about thirty yards above the
bridge. One mass of wreckage is unmistakably that of the Pullman car
section, made up of two baggage cars and six Pullman coaches, and the
other shows the irons of five day coaches and one Pullman car. These
trains were running in the same block at Johnstown and were struck by
the flood two miles above, torn from their tracks and carried tumbling
down the mighty torrents to their resting place in the big eddy.
Railroad Men Suppressing Information.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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