What was the flood like in 1913?
I left the farm one night, and I walked
out of our driveway up on the highway, and walked up to some neighbors. And I went home
that night at midnight, and I walked off the highway right into water clear up to my
waist. I had no idea it was raining like that. And it was two days after that, everything
was wiped out. The big bridge was taken out of Lockington on the Western Ohio. In Piqua, I
don't know how many people drowned, but I went with a friend of mine and we took our teams
into Piqua and helped to clean up after the flood. We also helped rebuild the bridge and
fill on the Western Ohio. (It crossed the canal at the firehouse.)
There were sad things. Last time I talked
to Harley Jones, we mentioned it. We had our teams there, hauling stuff from where it
flooded houses, trying to get the town straightened up. He said, "I got a bunch of
clothes here." He was digging behind a house. There was clothes, but there was a
woman in them. It just flooded people terrible. |
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I and my uncle, when it was flooded, walked down the old railroad through Kirkwood, then
down to Piqua. On the other side of that big railroad bridge that goes east and west, we
saw a house start to float. It just floated out houses, dozens of them. We saw a man, his
wife and little girl on top of one. They was crying for help but they couldn’t get to
them. And that house began to move, and hit the bridge. They just went under. It was a lot
of sadness at that time.
I helped to rebuild the Western Ohio. One thing was kind of nice. I
lived down at Lindsey Station. That was on the Western Ohio. I would get on there in the
morning, and ride to Sidney on the local, and catch a limited and go to Wapak. There was
several bridges up there [to work on], this flood was every place, and I would get off at
Sidney. I had a ten-minute layover there, and I’d go over to the Spot Restaurant, owned by a man by the name
of Miller (Spot Miller). I’d get a ham sandwich for five cents. You can’t
believe that, can you? But I didn’t get much for working; I only got two dollars a
day, ten hours. |
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I helped build the Lockington Dam. They had about a hundred people. It was all done with
hydraulic; that dirt was pumped up in there with water, and when it settled it was solid.
I was one of the men out at the end, where I kept the water dammed up and kept the dirt
going off smooth, kept it so it wouldn't pile up in one place. We had a hose, from the
water power, and that's the way we spread the water out. They had a steam shovel there,
and they'd dig that dirt, and keep it loose. And then they'd wash it and make a slop out
of it, and it would go up on the dam and it would settle, and you had to see to it that it
didn't wash back down off the dam. They had a big pump that ran with steam power.
There was a lot of doin's around there when they built that. My uncle
was caretaker on the dam many years. He kept it cleaned out above where the aqueduct went
under. Now the farm that we owned, if the water came up and they had a big flood and they
had to shut the dam, I couldn't get damage. It was in the deed that you couldn't get
damage. |