Artisan to Abolitionist Part 3 The Johnstown Flood of 1889

   After the death of her husband (my 3 times great Grandfather James), Charlotte stayed in their hometown, Johnstown, PA. She continued to live in the family home that had served as a station in the Underground Railroad. 

  From looking through many census years, Charlotte moved around in Johnstown and stayed with some of her children as she aged. Most of the homes were in the downtown area.  There are records that show Charlotte and James' sons went into the painting and wallpaper business like their father and had shops and businesses in downtown Johnstown.  One grandson took it a bit further and made stained glass using James' formulas for pigments. 

  While spending her senior years in Johnstown, Charlotte lived through one the top 10 most devastating disasters in our country's history. It was one of the worst for the state of Pennsylvania. The Johnstown Flood of 1889. 

   Johnstown, the hometown of James and Charlotte, was about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, in the Allegheny Mountains. Stoney Creek and the Little Conemaugh River meet in Johnstown. About 14 miles upstream the Little Conemaugh divides into the North Fork and the South Fork. Pennsylvania built The South Fork Dam in the 1830s along the South Fork of the Conemaugh River. The building of the reservoir was to hold back water to run the local canals. By the 1850s the need for the canal system had diminished with the replacement of the railroad, which in turn there was no longer a need for the reservoir. Before the reservoir was sold there were reports that the overflow pipes for the dam were sold for scrap. This was not a good sign of things to come.

  In 1881 the reservoir was sold to wealthy railroad, steel and coal executives to turn into the "South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club". Some of the membership in this club were the rich and famous like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Philander Knox and Andrew Mellon. The Club had sixty or so members who built a clubhouse, cottages, stables, and boat houses. They held regattas on the lake and hunted on the grounds. They made modifications to keep the fish from escaping the lake by putting screens across the spillways. With these modifications they now had no way of controlling the water levels of the reservoir.  They also widened the road over the dam so that it would accommodate two carriages side by side. What they did not do was maintain the dam. While the Club owned the reservoir there were incidents of cracks and leaks, and no one at the Club enlisted an engineer to check out the condition of the Dam or did they make any solid permanent repairs.

Cottages at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club

The cities and towns along the river were use to floods. When you build a city on the banks of a creek or river you know the chances of flooding are great. They have had bad floods in the past and to them past  floods were just water filled streets and some flooding of lower levels of buildings. On May 31, 1889 after several days of heavy rains of 6-10 inches, and the water level in the reservoir raising a foot an hour, the water started going over the dam and then the dam let go. Fourteen miles up river from Johnstown where the dam was located men traveled with a warning of flood on horseback and by telegraph. The warnings were not taken as being more serious than the normal floods they were use to.

  The book by Willis Fletcher Johnson written 1889, titled "History of The Johnstown Flood" has a very descriptive few paragraphs written by a gentlemen named Jacob Reese.   It reads:

  How so marvelous a force was exerted is illustrated in the following statement from Jacob Reese, of Pittsburgh, the inventor of the basic process for manufacturing steel. Mr. Reese says:—

“When the South Fork Dam gave way, 16,000,000 tons of water rushed down the mountain side, carrying thousands of tons of rocks, logs and trees with it. When the flood reached the Conemaugh Valley it struck the Pennsylvania Railroad at a point where they make up the trains for ascending the Allegheny Mountains. Several trains with their locomotives and loaded cars were swept down the valley before the flood wave, which is said to have been fifty feet high. Cars loaded with iron, cattle, and freight of all kinds, with those mighty locomotives, weighing from seventy to one hundred tons each, were pushed ahead of the flood, trucks and engines rolling over and over like mere toys.

“Sixteen million tons of water gathering fences, barns, houses, mills and shops into its maw. Down the valley for three miles or more rushed this mighty avalanche of death, sweeping everything before it, and leaving nothing but death and destruction behind it. When it struck the railroad bridge at Johnstown, and not being able to force its way through that stone structure, the débris was gorged and the water dammed up fifty feet in ten minutes.

“This avalanche was composed of more than 100,000 tons of rocks, locomotives, freight cars, iron, logs, trees and other material pushed forward by 16,000,000 tons of water falling 500 feet, and it was this that, sliding over the ground, mowed down the houses, mills and factories as a mowing machine does a field of grain. It swept down with a roaring, crushing sound, at the rate of a mile a minute, and hurled 10,000 people into the jaws of death in less than half an hour. And so the people called it the avalanche of death.”

Citizens ready for the clean up in Johnstown

What was missing from Mr Reese's writing was the addition of humans. The "avalanche" of water as he called it was also filled with men, women and children. The citizens of the towns between the dam and Johnstown were also swept down the river, in there homes or businesses, some in trains or just swept from the streets. There were accounts of bystanders up on higher ground watching this disaster as it happened. These bystanders heard the screaming of the people riding this wave clinging to life on trees or roof tops all the time the bystanders were helpless to rescue them.

All the family members in this house survived the flood.

When the water reached Johnstown it split and met at the joining of Stone Creek and the Little Conemaugh and turned into a whirring torrent of water where bystanders could see people swirling several times in front of them, seeing the same people on their side of the bank over and over again. Once they finally arrived at the Railroad bridge that stopped the 100,000 tons of debris a new horror happened. With all the lumber, and fuel the debris ignited and those who survived the wild ride were then killed in an inferno.

This is the stone railroad bridge where all the debris was stopped and caught fire.

The stories that were told of the days, weeks and months after the flood are heart braking and uplifting. The number of dead was 2209 with over 750 not being able to be identified and buried in unmarked graves in a special section of a Johnstown Cemetery. There were articles in some newspapers, examples below, with descriptions of the unidentified victims to see if even their shoes or clothing would help in the identification. 

 

            

These articles are the gut wrenching to me.

 

The Plot of the Unknown in Grandview Cemetery

Some facts that were published about this flood:

• 99 entire families were killed including 396 children.
• 124 women and 198 men were widowed
• Bodies were found 400 miles away in Cincinnati
• Bodies were found from the flood up into the year 1911
• 1600 homes were destroyed
• 4 square miles of Johnstown were destroyed
• Clara Barton the founder of the America Red Cross arrived on June 5th to Johnstown for the first major peace time disaster relief effort for the American Red Cross.
• More than 750 victims were buried at the Plot of the Unknown in Grandview Cemetery.

Below is a link to a YouTube video called "The Johnstown Flood- What it looks like 131 years later." by Chris of Mobileinstinct. He does a good job of touring the site of the flood. You will have to cut and paste the link on your search bar. 

https://youtu.be/uCALCe3-lhk

 At the time of the flood my 3 times Great Grand Mother Charlotte Heslop was living with her son in the Johnstown downtown district on Vine Street. She was in the home when the water hit the city and was one of the lucky citizens to survive.  She did have to be rescued from the home by raft, but there was no information on what condition the house was in, if it was on its foundation, or where in the house she was rescued from. When researching her husband James I found that his grave and many graves of the soles that were resting in the Sandyvale Cemetery in Johnstown no longer had head stones because they were washed away by the flood. 

Charlotte moved to Middleport, Ohio in September of 1893, where she lived with her Daughter Mary and Eli Russell, my  Great, Great Grandparents. She fell shortly after the move and broke both hip bones. She died on November 4, 1895. Charlotte was a charter member of the Episcopal Church in Johnstown when it was organized in 1836. She was brought back to Johnstown to be interned near her husband in Sandyvale Cemetery.

The Sandyvale Cemetery is now called the Sandyvale Memorial Gardens. There have been three major floods in Johnstown, 1899, 1936 and 1977 and less than 200 gravestones remain from the estimated 6000 burials. Many people had been re-interred to other cemeteries on higher ground. The flood of 1936 destroyed all the records so, there was no way to place any of the headstones on the proper graves. The last burial in the cemetery was in 1977. At the Sandyvale Memorial Gardens all the remaining headstones displaced by all three floods are now assembled in a group of Memorial Beds next to the Sandyvale Trail. A sign/marker in Sandyvale reads, "Interred here in Sandyvale are Abolitionists: William Slick, Benhamin Slick, John Cushon, James and Charlotte Heslop.

The Memorial Bed of the displaced headstones. 

I have found no trace of my Grandparents home that they used for the Underground railroad and my assumption is that by the time it would have been labeled as a historic site, the house was no longer standing and could have even been destroyed by any of the flood. 

I hope you enjoyed the history of my amazing 3 times grandparents, and that you will look further into the history of the Underground Railroad and the Johnstown Flood of 1889. There are so many individual stories on the flood that are so amazing and stories of the brave men and women that fought for the end of slavery before the Civil War. 

Artisan to Abolitionist: Part 2, The Underground Railroad

When we last left our Heroes James and Charlotte Heslop, James retired from the wallpaper and painting business in Johnstown, PA in 1853. In a book about the History of Cambria County, PA this is how they started the section on James and Charlotte Heslop and their retirement years. "During the several years immediately preceding the Civil War he (James) took an earnest part in the general agitation of the slavery question, and arrayed himself clearly and firmly on the side of those who bitterly opposed it. Indeed he was one of the rankest Abolitionists in all the region, and held in utter contempt any measure; that tolerated traffic in human beings, white or black."

The Heslop's political leanings were first with the Whig party and when the Whig party collapsed  in 1854 they joined the anti- slavery Republican party. The Heslop's used their comfortable home as a station on the Underground railroad and they were conductors. They would hide runaway slaves in the attic of their home, an abandoned mine on their land and in a cellar dug under the horse stable. The door of the cellar was under the horse stall covered by hay and the horses.  

It was a dangerous business to hide fugitive slaves. Pennsylvania was the first free state north of the Mason Dixon line and bordered the slave state of Maryland. With the passing of the National Fugitive Slave Acts in 1793 and 1850 requiring free states to return fugitive slaves, and the later act requiring officials to assist in the recapture of fugitive slaves, it made their work even more dangerous. The Act also established a six month prison term and $1000 fine for anyone assisting the fugitive slaves. That didn't stop the Abolitionist community in Johnstown from protecting runaways by joining the Underground railroad in defiance of the laws. This came with personal risks for the individuals that were conductors of the railroad with the state being barraged with slave catchers where no home was safe from their searching parties with the law on their side. They were brazen in their pursuit and would raid private homes and property and even offer compensation for information on the location of the fugitive slave. They would also kidnap free black citizens and take them back to their states and sell them into slavery. James and Charlotte's home was frequently visited and searched by slave hunters, but not one was ever found or taken while at their station. They would aid, feed and house fugitive slaves and then send them safely to more friendly regions north where the slave hunters would not follow.

 

A US map of the many routes taken by slaves to freedom

I found this story in the book of the History of Cambia County, Pennsylvania, by Henry Wilson Storey, published in 1907. The story about my 3 times great grandparents is a testament as to how strong their abolitionist convictions were, especially Charlotte, and was told with a bit of humor on a subject that is not in the least bit humorous.

HISTORY OF CAMBRIA COUNTY.

After the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was substantially done in the famous compromise of 1850, an incident occurred in Johnstown which discloses strong conviction and decision of character, with a beautiful sentiment expressed by Mrs. James Heslop, who as well as her husband was an Abolitionist. An escaping slave had reached this town and had been 
secreted in Cushon's coal bank, under Green Hill, by John Cushon and other agents of the Underground Railroad. Soon thereafter, while Mr. and Mrs. Heslop were sitting in their room on the second floor, a knock was heard at the front door. It was about dusk, and Mr. Heslop, going to the door, became engaged in conversation with the visitor, which continued for some time. Mrs. Heslop, being acquainted with the escape, divined the matter to which the conversation 
related. Going to the top of the stairs she heard the visitor pleading with her husband to tell him where the fugitive was, and offering him twenty-five dollars for the information. Still Mr. Heslop denied any knowledge of the affair. Hearing the offer increased to seventy dollars, she descended the stairway, quietly walked to the door and closed it. In referring to it to a friend she 
mildly said: "I was afraid James might be tempted."

James and Charlotte were conductors on the Underground Railroad until James' death in 1865. He passed a few months after the start of the Civil War. He did not live to see the emancipation of slaves. 

In the next part of Artisans to Abolitionist I will tell the continuing story of Charlotte Heslop in her later years.