Conservancy work took 5 years to get started

Upcoming 1913 flood commemoration events

“The Lutie Gard Letters During the 1913 Flood: A Dramatization,” with Kathy Creighton and Richard Piland, 7:30 p.m. April 17, Butler County Historical Society Museum, 327 N. Second St.

“How a New River Was Built in Hamilton: Engineering the Miami Conservancy District,” with construction historian Dan Antenan, 7 p.m. March 24, Miami Hamilton Downtown, 221 High St.

A Guided Interpretive Tour of Hamilton 1913 Flood Sites, 2 and 4 p.m. April 27, Hamilton Welcome Center, High Street at Monument Avenue.

For more information, visit www.colliganproject.org

One of the enduring memes that came from the Great Flood of 1913 was the phrase, “remember the promise you made in the attic.”

“A lot of people rode out the flood and took the vow to never let this happen again,” said local historian Jim Blount in a talk with the same title Tuesday afternoon at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts, part of the city’s on-going commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the tragic flood.

A lot of people expected, even demanded, that something be done right away to keep the Great Miami River from flooding the city again, but it took five years to the day before the first shovels of dirt were moved in Hamilton to begin a flood prevention plan.

“Everybody was anxious to do something about it,” Blount said. “Even as the water was still high, the focus was not so much on recovery, but how to keep it from happening again.”

It would eventually take four acts by the Ohio General Assembly, five Ohio Supreme Court decisions and one United States Supreme Court decision before the Miami Conservancy District could begin its work.

At first, however, most of the communities along the river were not concerned about what flood prevention measures would take place above and below them, while other minds knew that it would take a concerted effort by everyone in the river basin, but it was a hard sell, especially to the cities in the northern part of the basin and created what Blount called “The Great Miami River Civil War.”

Dayton, the largest city affected, took immediate action by starting the Dayton Flood Prevention Committee on May 2, within six weeks of the high water, and raised the money to hire engineer Arthur Morgan.

“The problem with Morgan was that he was too thorough, too patient and deliberate for some people,” Blount said. “A lot of people wanted something done by the end of 1913, but cities were still busy cleaning up.”

In fact, in the 1913 election, the Socialist Party took control of the city of Hamilton on a platform that flood prevention plans were pitting the rich, particularly the Dayton rich, against the poor, but they were voted out again two years later.

Morgan began work immediately, however, not only sending his “Morgan’s Raiders,” a term borrowed from the real Civil War, up and down the river taking surveys, but also to Europe to study the long-term flood solutions in practice there.

The most popular plan among the citizenry was to simply widen the river basin, but in order to keep Hamilton from flooding again at the volume of water in March 1913, the channel would have to be three miles wide, Blount said.

So Morgan proposed a series of “dry dams” to be installed, mainly on the tributaries of the Great Miami, but that only served to rile the Northern faction who didn’t understand the concept and presumed that Morgan was trying to create large permanent reservoirs.

By January, 1914, Morgan has worked out a plan, but it was clear that it would take a new law to allow the creation of a commission that could work together across political boundaries to levy taxes and assume ownership of land by imminent domain.

The entry of the United States into World War I only served to complicate the issue, Blount said, because of the shortages of food and electricity and the railroads being jammed up moving war supplies. They also couldn’t get the excavating equipment that was needed and ended up using machines that had been digging out the Panama Canal.

“It was a big challenge,” Blount said, “and every county contributed, albeit some of them grudgingly.”

It took five and a half years for the Conservancy to do its work in Hamilton, 10 years and seven months after the Great Flood.