The Dam Above Johnstown: The South Fork Club, the Flood of 1889 and the Price of Neglect · People & places
People, places, events and institutions in “The Dam Above Johnstown: The South Fork Club, the Flood of 1889 and the Price of Neglect”, with the chapters where each appears.
The Relief Machine Takes Shape…rs, to relief organizations, to families. The correspondents went to their editors. Within forty-eight hours of the line’s restoration, the Johnstown Flood was front-page news in every major city in the eastern United States. The physical connection of rail allowed for the rapid arrival of mort…
The Suits That Named No One…idest legal extent over the next four years, and this chapter follows that reach to the point where it stopped short. Its claim is that the Johnstown Flood produced no verdict against the men who owned the dam, not because the record was thin — the club’s minutes and deeds, the Cambria Iron war…
The Flood Enters the National Memory…ral cost was just beginning. The survivors had started writing almost immediately. Reverend David Beale published his account, “Through the Johnstown Flood.” Beale had lived through the water. He described the night, the morning, the people he saw, the sound. His book was one of the first. It w…
The Reservoir Above Johnstown…nty-two feet high above its foundation. Its crest stretched nine hundred and thirty-one feet from hillside to hillside. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had built it. High above the city, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania built the earthenwork South Fork Dam between 1838 and 1853 as part of a…
The Club Forms and Lowers the Dam…hat the lowering cost. The crew had one instruction: make the top wide enough for a carriage. The dam had been built by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania between 1838 and 1853 as part of a cross-state canal system, the Main Line of Public Works. As railroads superseded canal barge transport,…
The Club's Members and Their World…he Allegheny Mountains, fourteen miles upstream from Johnstown. The reservoir behind the dam covered roughly 450 acres. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had built the earthenwork South Fork Dam between 1838 and 1853 as part of a cross-state canal system, the Main Line of Public Works. Johnst…
The Reservoir Above Johnstown…purpose had changed. The dam was no longer a canal reservoir managed by state engineers. It was a private lake managed by owners who had no engineering expertise and no regulatory oversight. The structure had not been upgraded. It had been allowed to degrade. The deferred-maintenance debt w…
The Club Forms and Lowers the Dam…and the iron and the mud, in the height of the crest and the width of the spillway and the absence of the pipes. The work proceeded without engineering plans. No professional engineer supervised the modifications. No public authority reviewed them. No permit was required. The Commonwealth h…
The Club's Members and Their World…recorded ice deliveries, tennis balls, and the salary of the groundskeeper. It did not record masonry work on the dam. It did not record an engineering inspection. It did not record a spillway clearance. The dam held. The lake was full. The clubhouse was open. The season was pleasant. The d…