VIII. After the Great Flood
It had been raining continuously for a number of days, and water levels in creeks and streams in the Conemaugh Valley were rising at a disturbing rate. Spring had come later that year and water levels in the streams and creeks were already running high. It was not unusual for the small communities near the confluence of the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek to experience some flooding in the late spring and early summer. More often than not, basement and even ground floor flooding was common enough that residents routinely moved furniture to the second floor and livestock to pastures in the surrounding hills when rivers began to rise.
The strong downpour through the night and street flooding on the morning of May 31, 1889 were therefore not out of the ordinary, particularly for the communities of Woodvale, Conemaugh, Johnstown, Kernville, Millville and Cambria City which lined the river beds near the confluence. But by late morning it was clear that the flooding would be severe this time since both the Little Conemaugh and the Stony Creek were already to the point of spilling over the planks of their bridges several miles upstream. Both Johnson Company mills were closed for the holidays, and sometime after noon, Arthur Moxham and his plant foreman George Entwisle walked down to the Moxham Bridge to check the water level of the Stony Creek. There they observed two other men standing on the bridge as the water began to spill over its floor boards. Suddenly the water level rose more than two feet as a backwash swept up the riverbed, trapping the two men who desperately grabbed onto the bridge railings. Moxham and Entwisle quickly rescued the two men using a skiff, and headed back to the mill.
For years residents of the Conemaugh Valley had speculated ominously about the safety of the South Fork Dam miles up the Little Conemaugh, and Moxham feared the worst. On several occasions in the early 1880s, Daniel Morrell of the Cambria Iron had sent teams of company engineers up to the South Fork to check on the structural integrity of the dam. The backwash could only mean that the dam had given way and the waters of Lake Conemaugh had been loosened upon the small communities down the valley. Moxham immediately made his way, initially by wagon and the rest of the way by foot around the hillside, to Johnstown to see if his fears had been realized.
History has recorded the Great Flood of 1889 as one of the worst natural disasters in the nineteenth century. The waters of Lake Conemaugh became a rolling force that rushed down the valley destroying everything in its path. Virtually erased was the community of East Conemaugh, with its large Pennsylvania Railroad works. Also vanquished was the Cambria Iron company town of Woodvale, with its woolen and flour mills, street railway car barns and horse stables, and large Johnson Company switch works. Further downstream, the downtown Boroughs of Conemaugh and Johnstown were likewise destroyed as the raging waters slammed into the hillside at the confluence and produced a backwash up the valleys of both the Stony Creek and the Little Conemaugh. All of the debris from the ruined communities and industries dammed up against a stone bridge of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and formed a lake of twisted wreckage. The damming effect saved communities further downstream, including Millville with the huge iron and steel works of the Cambria Iron Company, from utter destruction, but not from significant flood damage. In all, over 2,200 men, women and children lost their lives.
The next day, as the waters receded and the degree of destruction was revealed, the survivors were stunned. In just over ten minutes, the waters of Lake Conemaugh had virtually wiped out a thriving industrial city it had taken over thirty years to build. A local emergency committee was immediately formed, and they needed someone to take charge. On that day, they turned to Arthur Moxham, the thirty-five year old Welshman who had come to the Conemaugh Valley just six years before. It was perhaps an unusual choice for small town folk, who tend more naturally to trust their own rather than an outsider. But Moxham had gained so much respect for his personal work ethic and for his organizational skills that the community turned to him to head their relief efforts.
For the next three days, from June 1 to June 4, Moxham responded in decisive (some thought dictatorial) fashion. He organized efforts to sort through and clear the debris in order to find both the dead and the survivors. He set up temporary morgues for the receiving and identifying of the dead, and shelters for the injured and homeless. As many as sixty or seventy of the homeless were sent up the Stony Creek to be sheltered and fed at his own home. He established a special emergency police force, made up largely of Johnson Company employees from the rail mill, to maintain order and prevent looting. And he set up a commissary for deposit of all remaining food stuffs, which he commandeered from all sources. By the second day, he was joined by Fred du Pont from Louisville and Tom Johnson from Cleveland, both of whom had made their way to Johnstown by train through Pittsburgh. Johnson was immediately drafted to organize debris removal, and later would chair the Board of Inquiry that assessed personal loss and allocated emergency relief aid.
On June 4, Moxham stepped aside as the Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania formed a state-wide relief committee to oversee operations and declared a state of marshal law. Moxham then turned to the affairs of his own company. While the rail mill had only taken on some water from the overflowing Stony Creek, the Woodvale switch works had been completely destroyed. Within days, a team of over 175 men organized in Pittsburgh by Captain W.R. Jones was placed at Moxham's disposal. Camped in tents along the eastern bank of the Stony Creek and under the command of M. W. Wray, the team set about to recover the major heavy machinery of the Woodvale switch works, most of which had been buried in the riverbed rather than carried downstream. Newspaper accounts indicate that most of the machinery from the switch works was salvaged and carried by wagon to the rail mill, where a rudimentary switch works and laying out yard was constructed at the southern end of the mill site. By late June, a little over three weeks after the flood disaster, the switch works at the rail mill was operational and filling orders.
The relocation of the switch works to the rail mill site forced Moxham to physically integrate the Company's production functions and to rethink the design of the entire mill. By mid-July, a General Office Building was constructed at the loop of the Johnstown and Stony Creek Railroad along Central Avenue. The two-story Victorian brick building contained general offices and an accounts vault on the first floor, and drafting areas and drawings vault on the second floor. As many as fifteen draftsmen were designing specialty track work on the second floor of the new building by August. A little over a year later, a third story was added, affording more space for drafting and housing the company's first industrial laboratory.
By the summer of 1891, the plant was fully integrated. The switch works had taken on a true sense of permanence with many wood frame buildings and a large laying out yard. It also included a pattern shop that enclosed a 100-foot square lay out floor, a large blacksmith shop, and a small machine shop. Behind these buildings stood a bending room for forming curves, and the mill's punch and bolt shop, where materials were sheared to length, shaped by steam-powered drop hammers into tie plates and brace chairs, and punched for spike holes.
Immediately west of the switch works, toward the river side, lay the mill's wood-frame boiler house containing five brick furnaces, one large furnace with a 46-foot iron chimney and four smaller furnaces with 26-foot iron chimneys. These furnaces produced artificial gas by the Archer process to fuel the engines of the switch works. Behind the boiler house was a large brick dynamo room, the company's first electrical department, which was completed in April 1891 and housed the new electric welding machines the company had been developing through its collaborations with the Thomson-Houston Company.
That same year, Moxham built a large brick machine shop near the General Office at what had become the new plant entrance along Central Avenue. In the same complex were also to be constructed, in similar Victorian style, a large two-story engineering building and a separate laboratory building. The construction of the engineering facility, referred to as the Drawing Rooms and Laying Out Floor Building, was a direct reflection of the growth in the market for the company's specialty track work. Adjacent to the General Office along Central Avenue, the building was designed to contain not only specialized drafting spaces and a lay out floor, but also a blueprint room and an enlarged drawings vault on the second floor in which all drawings and work orders were carefully recorded and blueprints stored. The lay out floor and adjoining carpentry shop comprised the entire first floor, completely open to the expansive skylight in the roof two stories above. Drafting tables were located on the balcony around three sides of the second floor, and through interior windows, draftsmen could overlook the laying out of wooden track design models on the floor below. Begun in the spring of 1893, the building was completed within six months.
Directly across from the entrance to the General Office, a two-story brick laboratory building was completed in 1892. Based on his personal experiences in Birmingham and Louisville, Moxham was an early exponent of systematic experimentation to both improve production processes and develop new product lines. He had initially established a small industrial research laboratory in the General Office Building in the late fall of 1890, and for years had been encouraging his engineers to develop and patent both manufacturing processes, tools, machinery, and innovative track work designs. By the time the laboratory building was built, the Johnson Company was already a significant industrial innovator in steel fabrication, primarily in machinery development and the use of electric welding at the plant and in railway construction.
At the point of integration, the Johnson Company was marketing an impressive range of railway products and installation services. By 1888, prior to the widespread acceptance of electrification of street railways, the company had established one of the most sophisticated marketing systems of its day, more than two decades before such marketing practices were adopted by most modern corporations. Rather than hiring agents in various cities as was customary for manufacturing companies that distributed their products beyond the local market, the Johnson Company opened its own regional offices, staffed by company employees, in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis and New Orleans. On request and at no charge, these offices would send qualified engineers to cities in their region to work with owners and operators of local street railways, cable lines or steam railroads. They would gather and transmit by Western Union specific information on track work needs back to the company's main office in Johnstown, where draftsmen would execute drawings of customized specialty track work, such as crossings, curves, or turnouts, and render estimates of job costs by the piece or for an entire route or system. By 1892, the company had added regional offices in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and San Francisco, and were in the process of establishing a permanent office in England to service its expanding clientele list in Europe.
Company representatives worked from handsomely bound and illustrated catalogues of company products and services. These catalogues, published every one or two years, offered detailed specifications of the different rail sections and track work available, and described some of the custom track work completed for previous clients. Each catalogue also contained an extended preface describing the development of the girder rail and its technological advantages in different operating climates and circumstances, and invited potential clients to contact the company's regional offices for free consultation.
The product line of the Johnson Company reflected the broad range of railway needs in the early 1890s. Catalogue No. 8 (1892) for example offered three varieties of side-bearing electric rail and one type of the lesser-used center-bearing rail, all available in four standardized section heights of 5 7/8", 7", 8 7/8", and 10". In addition, the company continued to offer the standard side-bearing Jaybird and groove rail designs, a design of center-bearing rail, and various designs of strap rail to accommodate the peculiar needs of existing horse-drawn street railways. The Jaybird was offered in 24 different combinations of heights and weights, ranging from the ultra-light 3 3/8" (at about 35 lbs per yard) horse car rail to the more standard size of 6" rail (at about 65-68 lbs per yard).
To supplement its offerings of rail sections, the Johnson Company provided a wide range of cast steel splice plates, tie plates, chairs, clips, and spikes. Its most notable product line was its impressive array of standardized specialty track work that could be custom-designed to compliment each of the available rail designs. Catalogues contained detailed drawings of single- and double-track curves (plain, branch-off, Y and barn curves), passing switches, tongue and transfer switches, turnouts, crossovers, frogs, and a variety of curve, guide, and runoff crossings.
Also featured was the Marshall Clip, a widely-adopted tie plate that allowed connection of rail sections onto crossties without either bolts or rivets. The clip was designed and patented by Charles Alfred Marshall, a young engineer from Louisville who had joined the Johnson Company in 1886 after working several years for the Cambria Iron. Ironically, Marshall was on one of the teams of Cambria Iron engineers sent by Daniel Morrell to check on the structural integrity of the South Fork Dam in the early 1880s. At that time, serious questions were raised about the dam's safety.
It was at the Moxham residence in Woodvale in 1887 that Charles Marshall met and fell in love with Helen Moxham's younger sister Dulcenia Coleman who visited frequently from Louisville. They were married at the Meadows in October 1888 and were residing temporarily at the Club House the day the South Fork dam gave way. Late that morning, Marshall had sent his young wife, now expecting their first child, out to her sister's new home in the town of Moxham. Attending to last minute business in town, he took refuge in the Hulbert House where he was killed instantly when the structure disintegrated under the force of the flood surge. His body was found the first day after the flood and transported back to Louisville for burial in the Cave Hill Cemetery. Dulcenia moved back to the Meadows, where her only daughter was born in December.
The Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 proved to be a tragedy of monumental proportion for both individual families and for the communities in the Conemaugh Valley. But for the Johnson Company as an enterprise, it turned out to be only a momentary interruption in its rapid development as a nationally prominent steel fabricator. By destroying the Woodvale switch works, the Flood had actually accelerated the inevitable integration of the company's operations at the rail mill site. Once accomplished, the integration allowed Moxham to further rationalize his production and distribution activities and drive toward domination of the national market for street railway track work.