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Updated: May 2, 2025
During all of this time the waters kept rushing down the Conemaugh and through the beautiful town of Johnstown, picking up everything and sparing nothing. The mountains by this time were black with people, and the moans and sighs from those below brought tears to the eyes of the most stony hearted.
The Pennsylvania Railroad, from its station in Johnstown City nearly to Wilmore, a distance of seven miles, had a magnificent road bed of solid rock. From East Conemaugh to the point in Johnstown opposite the Gautier Steel Works, this road bed, ballast and all are gone. Only a few rails may occasionally be seen in the river below. Freaks of the Flood.
One of the victims was removed from a piece of wreckage in which he had been imprisoned three days. His leg was broken and his face badly bruised. He was delirious when rescued. In some places it is said the railroad tracks were scooped out to a depth of twenty feet. A train of cars, all loaded, were run on the Conemaugh bridge. They, with the bridge, now lie in the wreckage at this point.
When the men to-day answered the notice that all should present themselves ready for work only 487 reported. That shows more clearly than anything else that has yet been known the terrible nature of the fatality of the Conemaugh. The mortality wrought among these men in a few hours is thus shown to have been greater than that in either of the armies that contended for three days at Gettysburg.
Two servant girls were burned in the Catholic priest's house. The church was also consumed." Along the Valley of Death. Fifteen miles by raft and on foot along the banks of the raging Conemaugh and in the refugee trains between Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Such was the trip, fraught with great danger, but prolific of results, which the writer has just completed.
Rushing out I found dozens of men standing around. Fear had blanched every cheek. The loud and continued whistling had made every one feel that something serious was going to happen. In a few moments I could hear a train rattling down the mountain. About five hundred yards above Conemaugh the tracks make a slight curve and we could not see beyond this. The suspense was something awful.
Most of the Pennsylvania Railroad passengers who left Pittsburgh for the East last Friday and were caught in the flood in the Conemaugh Valley reached Philadelphia in a long special train at 5 o'clock Friday morning, June 7th, after a week of adventure, peril and narrow escapes which none of them will ever forget.
The following comments by one of our journals sum up the situation after receiving the dreadful news of the three preceding days: The Great Calamity. The appalling catastrophy which has spread such awful havoc through the teeming valley of the Conemaugh almost surpasses belief and fairly staggers imagination.
It caught up houses and they began to drift all over the place, crashing into each other and grinding people between the timbers. All this time the houses down here by the Conemaugh had been floating toward the bridge.
The site chosen was the old dam on South Fork Creek, about two miles above the village of South Fork, on the Conemaugh river. This dam was built by the Pennsylvania Canal in 1830 as a feeder to the canal below Johnstown. When the canal was finally abandoned, after passing into the hands of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the dam was sold to a private buyer for the very reasonable sum of $700.
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