Johnstown Flood National Memorial

About this property

The Johnstown Flood National Memorial is a unit of the United States National Park Service in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, United States. Established in 1964 through legislation signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, it pays tribute to the thousands of victims of the Johnstown Flood, who were injured or killed on May 31, 1889 when the South Fork Dam ruptured. Founded in 1800, Johnstown was a steel town that grew from the development of the Pennsylvania Railroad and other transportation services in Cambria County. By 1889, the town had a population of thirty thousand people who were of mostly German and Welsh ancestry. Established in the center of a narrow floodplain between Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek rivers, the community was surrounded, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, by land that had been altered by deforestation and the leveling of hills. These factors contributed to periodic floods, as did the narrow river valleys. In 1836, the South Fork dam was built to create a reservoir (later named Conemaugh Lake) for the Pennsylvania Canal's western division. Measuring eight hundred and fifty feet at its breast section, the dam was made of earth and stone. It was reported to be the largest dam of its type in the world at the time of its construction. Subsequently abandoned by the canal system, it was purchased by private owners, including a former congressman. Ultimately it was purchased by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive recreational group composed of wealthy individuals from the Pittsburgh region, for use as a summer mountain retreat. The club paid for repairs to the dam and additional development: a main building and "cottages" to transform the area into a boating and fishing resort community. On May 31, 1889, the South Fork dam broke from the weight of combined heavy rains and a sudden freshet that had caused a significantly higher amount of water to accumulate in its reservoir than normal. The dam's rupture released twenty million tons of water, which traveled at forty miles per hour, creating a seventy-foot-high wall of water that was propelled fourteen miles downward into the Little Conemaugh River Valley, where it flooded Johnstown. Property, industry, homes, farms, and lives were destroyed as the water, debris, oil, and bodies of flood victims were caught in the arches of a Pennsylvania Railroad-owned stone bridge. Eighty of the trapped people subsequently died in a related fire. Although the flood lasted for only ten minutes, the catastrophic damage it caused required five years of cleanup and rebuilding to enable residents of Johnstown to recover. In addition to the thousands of initial injuries and lives lost, the community was affected by an outbreak of typhoid fever, which developed from bacteria-tainted flood waters and lack of sanitation. Forty more people died.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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