The 1889 Johnstown Flood (Episode 49)

In the late spring of 1889, southern Pennsylvania's South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club was gearing up for another summer of luxurious hiking, boating, and swimming, when an unexpected rainstorm dropped 10 inches of water on their pristine mountain getaway. The resulting rise in the club's lake, Lake Conemaugh, spelled disaster for the dam holding it back. And with the failure of the dam came the horrific flood in the valley below, a flood which took out railroad bridges, knocked over factories, tore houses off their foundations, and wiped out downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in less than an hour. 

In this episode, we're getting into the details of what that flood looked like to eyewitnesses; why the dam broke; the Carnegie libraries (it's relevant!!), the astonishing amount of money in the steel industry, and what exactly the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club was doing up there in the Alleghany Mountains. 

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Main sources for this episode include: 

Charles Guggenheim's documentary "The Johnstown Flood", 1898

"How Andrew Carnegie Built the Architecture of American Literacy", by K. Capps, Bloomberg City Lab, 2014

"A history of Johnstown and the great flood of 1889: a study of disaster and rehabilitation" by N D Shappee, 1940 

"Through the Johnstown Flood" by D J Beale, 1890