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Updated: May 2, 2025
JOHNSTOWN, PA., June 2, 11 A.M. They have just hung a man over near the railroad to the telegraph pole for cutting the finger off of a dead woman in order to get a ring. Vengeance, Swift and Sure. The way of the transgressor in the desolated valley of the Conemaugh is hard indeed.
It was about ten o'clock when the waters of Stony Creek rose, overflowed their banks and what is known as the "flats," which includes the entire business portion of the city of Johnstown. The Little Conemaugh was running high at the same time, and it had also overreached the limit of its banks. The water of both streams soon submerged the lower portion of the town.
She chatted away quite volubly about the fire in the Catholic church, which also destroyed the house of her own mother, Mrs. Foster. "I know the church took fire after the flood," she said, "for mother looked out of the window and said: 'My God! Not only flood, but fire!" It was a burning house from Conemaugh that struck the house the other side of the church and set it on fire.
As fast as the wagons that are gathering up the corpses along the stream arrive with their ghastly loads they are emptied and return again to the banks of the merciless Conemaugh to find other victims among the driftwood in the underbrush, or half buried in the mud.
Sergeant Stewart, in charge of the bureau, says that the fall of water on the Conemaugh shed at Johnstown up to the time of the flood was probably 2 5-10 inches. He believes it was much heavier in the mountains. The country drained by the little Conemaugh and Stony Creek covers an area of about one hundred square miles.
Others floated all over town in circles and finally, having reached the Conemaugh, got caught in the jam at last and were destroyed by the fire which broke out there. After a time, too, the pressure at the bridge became so tremendous that the river burst a new channel for itself and then many houses came down again. "But I am anticipating.
They even persuaded her to not heed her husband's command. The wife went home and about her work. Meanwhile the telegraph operator was busy with his ticker. Down to Conemaugh he wired the warning. He also sent it on to Johnstown, then he ticked on, giving each minute bulletins of the break. As the water came down he sent message after message, telling its progress. Finally came the flood.
How many hundreds or thousands there are who found death by fire at this awful spot will never be known, and the people are already giving up hopes of ever reaching the knowledge of how their loved and lost ones met their doom, whether in the fierce, angry embrace of the waters of Conemaugh, or in the deadly grip of the fire fiend, who claimed the homes of Johnstown for his own above the fatal bridge.
Poisons of the foulest kind pollute the water which flows down the turgid Conemaugh into the Allegheny River, whence is Pittsburgh's water-supply, and thence into the Ohio, the water-supply of many cities and towns. Fears of a pestilence are not to be pooh-poohed into the background.
Assistant Superintendent Crump telegraphs from Blairsville Junction that the day express, eastbound from Chicago to New York, and the mail train from Pittsburgh bound east, were put on the back tracks in the yard at Conemaugh when the flooded condition of the main tracks made it apparently unsafe to proceed further.
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