Upcoming 1913 flood commemorations
"The 2013 River & Our Future," 7 p.m. Friday, Miami Hamilton Downtown, 221 High St. Civic leaders will share visions for the future of the Miami River Corridor. Moderated by Frances K. Mennone, Great Miami Rowing Center, featuring Mike Dingeldein, Community Design Alliance; Jonathan Granville, Butler County MetroParks; Stan Kegley, Ohio's Great Corridor Association; Kimberly Munafo, YMCA, and Hamilton City Manager Joshua Smith.
The 1913 Flood Commemoration Finale, Saturday, RiversEdge Park & Amphitheater, 200 Riverfront Plaza. The day's activities include the Burgundy & Blue Regatta, sponsored by the Great Miami Rowing Center from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Entertainment at RiversEdge Amphitheater includes The Cincinnati Brass from the Hamilton-Fairfield Symphony Orchestra, 1 p.m; "After the Flood" by the Demetrius Klein Dance Company, 2 p.m.; "Stories & Songs of River Life" by the Rabbit Hash String Band, 3:30 p.m.; Ceremonial remarks by Hamilton Mayor Pat Moeller and Curt Ellison of the Flood Centennial Committee, 5:45 p.m.; Rockin' the River with Blue Sacrifice, 6 p.m.
Middletown’s Sam Ashworth debuted his video documentary, “The 1913 Flood: Shadow Over the Miami Valley,” to a full house Friday night in the Heritage Hall Museum.
Ashworth said he worked for about a year on the hour-long video, using archival film and photographs as well as readings from the diaries of flood survivors in the nine cities along the Great Miami River that suffered from the flood.
“When I got involved in this, I realized that the collective story hadn’t been told,” he said. “You could do a Ken Burns-style documentary on this that would be 12 hours long, there is so many photos and so much information out there.”
“This is really about the entire region, how the flood affected all of the towns that became part of the Miami Conservancy District,” he said. “We all know the stories of our own towns.”
“Shadow Over the Miami Valley” actually begins in San Francisco at the 1915 World’s Fair, which featured a “Dayton Flood” building with a scale panoramic model of Dayton that was flooded to show the destruction, and talked about how the disaster became the subject of circus and carnival sideshows.
The narrative then backs up to provide background on the geology of the area, and talks of how Dayton flooded just two years after it was platted in 1803. Since then, various flood control projects were installed, but the levees continually washed away as new waters would rise.
A plan had been in place to begin a new flood control project that would start construction just after Easter 1913, but the flood, which began the day after, halted those plans.
The video includes interviews with science writer Trudy E. Bell, who made a presentation in Hamilton near the beginning of the flood commemoration period to discuss the weather conditions that led to the flood, then Ashcraft follows the rising waters through each city in the Miami Valley, beginning with Piqua, which first experienced “the full power of the flood” in the early hours of Monday, March 24, and where 45 people lost their lives.
By 10 a.m. that day, the rising waters had reached Troy, eight miles south of Piqua, turning the central area of that town into an island, leaving 15 dead and 2,000 homeless.
A little farther downstream, citizens of Tippecanoe City (now Tipp City) used horses to move 14 homes from the edge of town into higher ground.
Dayton began experiencing high water at 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, March 25. By 6 a.m. a levee had broken and water started pouring into the downtown streets.
The video shows photos of the flood as it moves farther south, through West Carrollton and Miamsburg, then Franklin.
Middletown was spared the worst of the flood because the flood plain is so wide there, but still about 100 citizens were evacuated and both bridges in town were destroyed.
The flood hit Hamilton around mid-morning of March 25. All four bridges were lost in Hamilton, and it wasn’t until the end of the week that the waters were back to the normal level.
Ashcraft said that copies of the video will be distributed to all public access television stations, schools and historical societies in the Miami Conservancy District.
The historical societies will have copies for sale, he said, and the copies distributed to the schools will include a booklet detailing how to incorporate the story of the flood into lesson plans.
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