Next event
What: The Smith Library of Regional History presents “Towns on the Tributaries in the 1913 Flood”
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, March 28
Where: Oxford Lane Library, 15 S. College Ave.
More info: Call 513-523-3035 or visit www.lanepl.org
Rumors and lies are rarely positive or helpful things, but misinformation about a broken dam may have saved hundreds or even thousands of lives when the waters of the Great Flood of 1913 roared through the streets of Hamilton.
Hamilton Historian Jim Blount and about 230 members of the community gathered at the Harry T. Wilks Conference Center on the campus of Miami University Hamilton to swap stories about the survivors and victims of the flood in a program titled “The Dam Lie That Saved Lives: Hamilton Family Stories of the 1913 Flood.”
“It’s a mystery,” Blount said of how the rumor got started. “I’ve spent several years tracking it down.”
The story is that there was a huge dam between Hamilton and Dayton that gave way on the morning of Tuesday, March 25, 1913.
Word got out that there was “a wall of water” rushing down the Great Miami River and would hit Hamilton around noon.
“Somehow, that story got to school officials and someone decided that if it was true, they should dismiss school and have the children tell their families to run for the hills,” Blount said.
And they did. On the West Side, people went as far from the river as the Twinbrook area, where farmers lodged them in their barns and fed them for the next few days. On the East Side, as many as 3,000 to 5,000 people went to the Butler County Infirmary on Poorhouse Hill, staying in the barns and sheds there.
“But there was no dam,” Blount said. “It apparently came from a report from the Troy area that two reservoirs for the Miami-Erie Canal were broken, but they weren’t broken. They overran.
“The whole thing was false, but it may have saved thousands of lives.”
There was a lot of confusion that day. Blount said that even though shop and locomotive whistles blew and church and fire bells rang, some people said they heard no warning at all.
“Other people say all they heard was the rush of the river,” he said.
People were surprised in part because Hamilton had several floods before, but not to that extent.
“When they heard the river was rising, they thought it would be the usual flood,” Blount said.
Blount shared some of the numerous stories about the flood, many of them collected in his 2002 book “Butler County’s Greatest Weather Disaster: Flood, 1913,” but he said he’s still hearing new stories, many of them tragic, of people floating on the roofs of their houses or hearing gun shots in the attics of nearby houses.
In a house on Garden Avenue, for instance, 15 of the 16 residents were in the house when it broke free and they all died. The 16th member of the family, the father who was at work when the waters came, survived but committed suicide within the year.
Blount projected one of the iconic flood photos of a house that floated off its foundation and crashed into an overhead crane at the Niles Tool Works. The family had been in the attic, but managed to make their way to the roof and spent the next 36 hours on top of the crane in temperatures as low as 20 degrees before being rescued.
There were many happy stories, too. Blount described how families that had been separated by the river tried to communicate their safety with large signs and bull horns.
One young man crawled across a bunch of coal cars that the railroad had put on the railroad bridge to give it some stability. The bridge crashed anyway, but the young man made it across.
Among the audience members who had stories to tell included Bruce Blankenship of Oxford, who noted that he still has a 1910 Bissell sweeper that survived the flood from his family’s home on S. Second Street
Mike Dingeldein told of two brothers in his family who were told to put their school books away. One took his upstairs to the bedroom and the other left his on the coffee table in the living room. The books on the second floor were ruined, but the other books floated around on the coffee table and were fine.
Richard Zettler told his father’s story about being sent from a funeral at St. Stephen’s Church to tell the nuns at the school that a flood was coming and they didn’t believe him. The family spent two days on Poorhouse Hill.
Dennis Malone told a family story about a horse that made its way into the living room of a house and was fed a straw rug.
About the Author