The Centerpiece of Hamilton History: The Great Flood of 1913
By Richard O Jones
Other than the founding of Fort Hamilton itself, no singular event in the history of Hamilton has had a greater impact than the Great Flood of 1913, which not forever changed the landscape in profound ways that can still be seen today, but instilled in the citizenry a dread of the river that took nearly a century to overcome.
“For many survivors of the 1913 flood,” writes local historian Jim Blount in his 2002 book “Butler County’s Greatest Weather Disaster — March 1913,” “… the emotional scars remained for a lifetime. Terrifying flood memories caused people to turn their backs on the flood.”
The rushing waters of the Great Miami River covered more than 80 percent of the city as it existed at the time, washing away bridges, businesses, and houses, claiming hundreds of lives and destroying what remained of the canal and hydraulic systems.
Hamiltonians tend to think of the event as “our” flood, but all throughout the Midwest and even as far as the Hudson River in Troy, N.Y., the water that fell set records in Terra Haute, Ind., Omaha, Neb. and Council Bluffs, Iowa, in addition to the cities along the Great Miami.
The weather system that resulted in the Great Flood of 1913 was “the most wide-spread disaster in the history of the United States,” according to Trudy E. Bell, author of the Arcadia book The Great Dayton Flood of 1913. “For Ohio and Indiana, it was a one-two punch,” she said in a presentation commemorating the centennial of the disaster.
It had been a wet and rainy winter. The ground was saturated and the river ran high through January. Going into Good Friday (March 21), temperatures were unseasonably warm, around 70 degrees, when an arctic cold from swooped down into the Midwest and the temperature dropped 50 degrees in six hours. For the next four days, four different low pressure systems pinned the front down and created a trough diagonally across the country. Although it was unknown at the time, the jet stream acted like a pump to draw moisture in from Caribbean to cover Ohio. The next four days saw eleven inches of rain in some parts of the Great Miami Valley.
Still, the flood came as somewhat of a surprise. While all eyes were anxiously on the rising river, the walls of the hydraulic reservoir in the North End collapsed, sending a veritable tidal wave down Fourth and Fifth streets into the downtown area.
On the morning of Tuesday, March 25, 1913, there were three bridges and one railroad bridge crossing the Great Miami River in Hamilton. Shortly after noon on March 25, 1913, they began to fall, almost like dominoes. At 12:12, the Black Street Bridge failed. Within a half hour, the High-Main Bridge failed, followed quickly by the railroad bridge. Around 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, when the flood was at its peak, the Hamilton Coliseum loosened from its foundation at B Street and Wayne Avenue, floated downstream and crashed into the Columbia Bridge. When it went down, the city was again divided in two.
By the time the waters receded, some 300 buildings were destroyed by the flood waters and another 2,000 had to be razed because of the damage. Even today, people are pulling clumps of “flood mud” out of German Village basements.
The death toll in Hamilton has historically been estimated at around 200 souls, but was probably much greater than that. As part of the 100th anniversary commemoration, the Butler County Historical Society combed through records to create a database of casualties, including those who died in the weeks and months later from the lingering health and safety effects.
Blount said that bodies turned up for months and years downstream, but because there was no DNA testing at the time and the science of fingerprinting still in infancy, it’s been difficult to get an accurate body count, but it could be as high or higher than 400.
We need not fear the river any longer. From that disaster came the largest public works project of the day, the Miami Conservancy District, which served as a model for similar plans throughout the country. Because of its efforts, it would take twice the amount of rainfall in March 1913 for the river to take Hamilton again.
Within a year, the Ohio General Assembly passed the Conservancy Act of Ohio, and community leaders up and down the Great Miami Valley petitioned to form the Miami Conservancy District, which was established in 1915.
Together they worked out a funding system and raised the bond money, about $35 million. Construction began in 1918 and was finished in 1922. It was the largest public works project of its day, but they put it on the fast track.
More than 3,000 workers were involved in the project as much of the work was performed by hand.
The chief engineer behind the project was Arthur Morgan, who sent a group of surveyors, known as “Morgan’s Cowboys”, down the river with buckets of paint, asking people where the high water was and they would mark buildings. Because flood records in American only went back 100 years or so, he studied European flood history so he could track trends.
Morgan developed innovative flood control techniques, including the invention of “dry” dams, which were constructed with permanent openings in their walls, sized to allow the passage of no more water than the river channel downstream could safely carry away. His model of dry dams to retain water has been replicated all over the country, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, which Morgan later ran, and in many parts of the world.
Although much of the city had to be rebuilt, the most visible change in the landscape came in the river itself. Before 1913, the river had an hourglass shape. North of the city, it was 600 feet wide, narrowing to 340 feet at the Black Street Bridge and was 390 feet wide at the High-Main Bridge, and spread out again south of the city. Because of the work done by the Miami Conservancy District, the river channel is now 540 feet at the High-Main Bridge. The difference can be seen in the markers that Jim Blount and his wife Jackie donated and had installed on the bridge.
Still, it took a long time for Hamilton to face the river again and not fear its waters. Indeed, it wasn’t until the last part of the century that the emotional wounds seemed healed enough for Hamilton to renew its relationship with the Great Miami River. With the construction of the low-level dam off Neilan Boulevard in the early 1980s, citizens once again began using the river for recreation, and city leaders now see Riverfront development as an integral part of Hamilton’s future.