To feed water into the canal near Johnstown, the Conemaugh River was used. The gap between the two canals was the Allegheny Mountains, and it would take one of America’s greatest technological and engineering achievements of the time to surmount that obstacle: the Allegheny Portage Railroad (also a National Park), an incline rail system that could haul canal boats up and over the mountains, taking them out of the water on one side and placing them back in the water on the other. One canal would be dug from Philadelphia to Hollidaysburg, and another from Pittsburgh to Johnstown. The western destination was Pittsburgh, which sat on the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers. Not wanting to lose the shipping business to New York, the state of Pennsylvania, with a major port in Philadelphia, decided to dig a canal of its own called the Pennsylvania Main Line. The canal ran from Albany to Buffalo, which was situated on Lake Erie. The first state to finish a major canal was New York, which completed the Erie Canal in 1825. Canals usually followed the non-navigable rivers and used them as their source of water. The solution would ultimately be canals: artificial and completely navigable waterways that could move boats loaded with cargo regardless of sloping terrain. While there were rivers that ran east to west, none were navigable, all having stretches of rapids, waterfalls, and low water. In the early 1800s, wagons were the only choice, but the journey took nearly a month, and wagons could not hold a lot of cargo. The main problem that all northeastern cities faced was that there was no easy way to ship goods westward. Likewise, the agriculture products produced on the fertile lands of the Midwest were in need of a faster way back to the heavily populated regions in the east. Where people go, goods and services must follow, and all large northeastern seaboard cities wanted to be major players in the shipping of commodities and people to the navigable waters of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, both gateways to the west. In the early 1800s, promises of untold wealth lured people from the east to the new western frontier. To this day the Johnstown Flood remains the deadliest flood in American history and the third deadliest flood in the world due to a dam collapse. Over 2,200 people were killed in the ensuing disaster. On May 31, 1889, two days after record heavy rain began, the dam that held back the waters of Lake Conemaugh, an artificial mountain lake created for the enjoyment of Pittsburgh’s elite, broke, sending a wall of water fourteen miles down the valley towards the industrial city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The Johnstown Flood gives a rich account of one of the worst disasters in America and the Keystone State.Johnstown before the flood (left) and after (right) (click to enlarge) Despite this devastation, reinforcements from the Philadelphia branch office were able to establish a new, greatly needed orphanage in what proved to be one of the most effective relief efforts after the flood. The group's headquarters had been transferred from Philadelphia to Johnstown just before the flood only two officers survived. The book also presents the tragic story of the Pennsylvania Children's Aid Society. His accounts of other catastrophic floods place the Pennsylvania disaster in historical perspective. Dieck includes reports of rains that inundated many river towns of the mid-Atlantic region. The flooding of late May and early June 1889 was not limited to the Johnstown area. Herman Dieck's Johnstown Flood, published shortly after the event, offers sensational stories of death, escape, sacrifice, and survival along with demographic reports and an investigation of several myths-such as the legend of a Paul Revere-like messenger on horseback racing down the valley, warning of the impending flood. On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam upstream of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, failed, unleashing a torrent of water that killed more than two thousand people and destroyed the city.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |