My cousin's husband. Ken, strongly suggested that I not miss Fallingwater while I was in the Alleghenies, and people have rarely steered me wrong so I decided to start the day there, which is about an hour and a half south of Pittsburgh.
Surprisingly, I was running early for my scheduled tour (you have to sign up for tours in advance at Fallingwater) so I drove about fifteen minutes further south to see Kentuck Knob, which is another Frank Lloyd Wright house. That is a beautiful drive on very winding and hilly roads through a whitewater rafting town called Ohiopyle (an odd name, don't you think?), and even though I didn't take/make the time to see the house, I'm glad I swung by. If you are heavily into FLW, you should see both. The owner of Kentuck Knob must have been quite a character, because in addition to some cool birdhouses in the front yard (the kind that look like dollhouses on a stick), there's a red English-style telephone booth sitting on the grass. A nice fallback if your cellphone goes out, I guess.
Fallingwater was built as a weekend home for the the family that owned the Kaufmann's Department Store in Pittsburgh. It sits, literally, over Bear Run at a spot where there are three small waterfalls, one of which is the central feature of the house. The house was donated to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., and has been run by the Conservancy for many years. It definitely has the feel of being run by something called a Conservancy. You are greeted at the gate by an older lady who, like the rest of the staff, manages to combine a sense of vague disdain and suspicion (that you will harm the house, or break a rule, or something) with a genuine expression of being glad you are here. It's very Old Money, really, and I don't mean that in a bad way. It simply is. I was assigned to Group 5 and we waited a few minutes until the appointed time to be summoned to a spot in the Visitor Center where we were sent on a short walk to the house itself.
Group 5 included a family with three sons who looked to be in their late teens. They were nice boys and their interests - or at least, their willingness to voice questions that several of us might have had - were funny. For instance, they asked why the toilets were so low (the answer - it was believed, in the 1930's, that such placement assisted in one's, um, use of the equipment). When Ed, our tour guide, described the third floor as being the sole residence of Edgar, Jr., the boys lit up, impressed with the thought of having an entire floor (it is three rooms, including a bathroom with a low toilet) to oneself.
April 9, the day I joined Group 5, is significant at Fallingwater because it is the birthday of Edgar Jr. and the anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's death in 1959. They didn't have a ceremony or anything, it was just something Ed the Tour Guide mentioned.
I won't go on and on about the architectural significance of Fallingwater, but it was really impressive. Another member of Group 5, who apparently lives in the area, has visited at each season. Here is what it looks like in mid-April:
You'll note the cantilevered decks going out over the waterfall. (Cantilever is a very important word at Fallingwater. For you non-technical people, it means something that is secured and counterbalanced at one end, and therefore does not require support on the other end.) You may also observe that the decks appear to be pulling a little downward. This is both accurate and not intended. Wright was more an artist and less an engineer, although he had great (and, it turns out, unjustified) confidence in his abilities. He didn't specify enough structural steel to support the weight of the decks. Mr. Kaufmann, being a man used to making his own decisions and understandably a bit nervous about the plan, consulted some of his engineer friends in Pittsburgh who advised that they definitely needed more steel if there were to be any hope of the building not collapsing. Kaufmann directed the contractor (who, although experienced, had never built anything like this before) to add more steel against the express instructions of Wright. Turns out it's a good thing Kaufmann did so - Wright was wrong (I had to say that - sorry) and the house would have fallen down without the additional steel. In fact, they didn't put enough in, and the contractor didn't think to allow for some gravity settling, so the Conservancy had to do a massive renovation a few years ago. Somebody always pays.
And then, with the theme of "You Can't Fool Mother Nature" firmly in my little head, I was off to Johnstown to see their Flood Museum.
On the way, I encountered the Kinsey Museum.
That's it. It's on Highway 271 north of Ligonier (Pennsylvania, not Indiana) in what seemed like a town but I think it was just Suburban Ligonier. It was neither open nor was it apparent how you'd actually get in, or even what it was a museum about, but there was a sign so I took a picture and continued north.
Johnstown seemed more like what I'd expected Youngstown would be like: not exactly prosperous. Okay, more than a little run down. The only employer appeared to be the hospital. But the people were extremely friendly and the town has been through a lot so it's hard not to want to give the place a break.
Situated in a valley, where the Little Conemaugh River comes down from the mountains, meeting the Stonycreek River to form the Conemaugh, Johnstown is not a stranger to flooding. But in 1889, the culmination of decades of short-sighted decisionmaking came home to roost in a terrible way.
In the 1840's you may recall, back before the railroads, a number of states invested heavily in development of the canal system (including Indiana, whose near-bankruptcy due to the canal left a legacy of unwillingness to invest in infrastructure that continues, IMHO, to plague the state - but that's sort of off-topic). Anyway, Pennsylvania decided it would be a good idea to build a reservoir, eventually known as Lake Conemaugh, by damming up the Little Conemaugh fourteen miles upstream from Johnstown. This was to be used as a way to transport goods from east to west through the Alleghenies. Like so many of the midwestern states that took a while to get into the canal business (again, including Indiana), by the time they finally finished building, they had been overtaken by technology. The railroads came along and the canals went away - almost as quickly as 8-track tapes, and for similar reasons. Lake Conemaugh instantly became something of a dead weight, and the state stopped maintaining the dam. In fact, they sold it to a series of private owners who not only avoided maintenance, but took a number of steps that made the dam even less safe. And despite a small failure of the dam in the 1870's, and routine warnings from people who were most likely viewed as Boys Who Cried Wolf, such neglect continued under the ownership of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club in the 1880's. The Club, an invitation-only club for 61 of Pittsburgh's most elite citizens, provided a beautiful getaway from the city's dirt and grime for people who made a lot of money off that dirt and grime. People like Andrew Carnegie were members, if that gives you any idea of how elite elite was in the 1880's.
Meanwhile, down in the valley, Johnstown was a prosperous industrial city. Seven thousand of the town's 30,000 residents worked for the Cambria Iron Company, living in company-owned housing, shopping at the company store, and being treated in the company hospital. Their steel was used to build the Brooklyn Bridge. An Academy-award winning film at the Flood Museum (which ironically is located in a renovated Carnegie Library) points out that there were 71 telephones in Johnstown in 1889. There were over 120 bars, but all that shows is that they had their priorities straight back then. And of course people in Johnstown were used to floods. But no one could be ready for what happened on May 31, 1889.
It had been raining heavily for several days when, on the morning of the 31st, the maintenance foreman at the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club observed that the dam was becoming compromised. He sent a warning downstream, which was no small trick since the storms had knocked out telegraph lines. They began efforts to shore up the dam, but it was too little, too late, and at 3:10 p.m. the dam burst. It only took an hour for the twenty million gallons of water in Lake Conemaugh to travel the fourteen miles to Johnstown, and the water arrived in a wave of over three stories (37 feet) above normal river level. It crashed through town until it reached a very tall hill, which had the effect of rolling the floodwaters back onto the city. A stone bridge stopped the floodwater when fourteen miles worth of debris created a dam that was stronger than the man-made (and man-ignored) dam upstream. The initial devastation occurred in just ten minutes - which fact was documented by a young boy who happened to check his pocket watch - but it was about to get even worse.
Just as survivors started to dig themselves out - and a number of folks were trapped in the makeshift dam - the oil and other industrial combustibles in the debris caught fire and burned for three days. 2,209 souls were lost in the flood, nearly 100 of whom died in the fire. Ninety-nine entire families were wiped out. Almost 400 children under the age of ten died. Children were orphaned, families left without their mothers or fathers. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati. The initial telegram sent out of the city after the flood requested "coffins of all sizes" because of the fear of typhus.
The museum shows a picture of the Fenn family, which consisted of two parents and seven children. Mr. Fenn died in the flood. Mrs. Fenn and her seven children were on the top of their house, but one by one the children all slipped away and drowned. Mrs. Fenn was pregnant and delivered a baby girl several days later. The baby also died. The museum doesn't say anything after that about Mrs. Fenn but I cannot imagine that the rest of her life was filled with happiness.
The relief effort was huge. Over $3.7 million was raised from donors in the United States and sixteen other countries. Among the donors were some of the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, reinforcing what seems to be an unfortunate aspect of human nature that we'd rather spend money after a disaster than on the work needed to prevent one.
The museum is really well done, and I'd recommend that you include it in any travelling you do in western Pennsylvania.
It has flooded since then, and sometimes significantly, but never anywhere near the level of tragedy created by the neglect of the South Fork Dam. And someone appears to have learned the lesson of not spending money on river-related infrastructure. This is what the river looks like today:
Another interesting place in Johnstown is called the Inclined Plane. It is the steepest vehicular incline in the world, allowing you to ride (in your car, if you're so inclined - I couldn't pass that one up, sorry) 900 feet up a 71% grade slope to Westmont, which was built as a suburb of Johnstown after the flood. When the rivers flooded again in 1936, nearly 4,000 people were taken to safety using the Inclined Plane. The opening of Highway 271 in 1953 doomed the Inclined Plane as a form of transportation, but it has been renovated for tourists and provides a really good birds-eye view of the city. If you ride up after you go to the Flood Museum, you can get a better idea of what happened.
An extremely friendly operator named Dave, who used to work at Bethlehem Steel, showed me the mechanical control room and told me all about the equipment - some of which is original. The cars are still manually controlled, by Dave at the top and another operator at the bottom. Very cool.
Since I was on a roll, I decided to visit the site of another tragedy - one that Mother Nature had nothing to do with: the Flight 93 Memorial. This is a field outside of Shanksville where the seven crew and 33 passengers aboard a hijacked flight from New Jersey to California realized that they were caught in a much larger problem and executed a plan to take back the plane, which resulted in their deaths and the deaths of the terrorist hijackers, and is generally thought to have prevented the destruction of the Capitol in Washington, DC. As you would imagine, it's a pretty powerful place to see. They have pictures of each of the crew and passengers. Interestingly - and, I think, appropriately - they don't talk much about the hijackers. There is a white marble wall inscribed with the names of the passengers and crew, and they are planting forty rows of trees to honor each person.
I have thought a lot about the people on Flight 93. Their flight had been delayed for about a half hour in Newark so the terrorists' original plan to destroy everything more or less simultaneously was foiled. Once they were hijacked, the crew and passengers learned (via passenger phones) that aircraft had been flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Although they didn't know their hijackers' target, they knew they were flying east and it didn't take much to conclude that somewhere in DC was the target. They decided to take action which ultimately resulted in their sacrificing their lives to save others.
I think about what these folks must have been thinking. On the one hand, what they did was self-sacrificing and therefore completely heroic. Certainly that was the result of their action. On the other hand, if you were on that plane you'd have to assume that things were going to end very, very badly if you didn't at least try to overpower the terrorists and take the plane back. Doing nothing had a 100% likelihood of death. Doing something, while very high risk, at least gave them a fighting chance. Still, taking action which is likely to result in your death requires more courage than just sitting around waiting to die. And in my experience brave people are nearly always those who don't feel that they have any other choice - even when they do.
Since the intended target was almost certainly the Capitol, where Congress was in session, I would hope that Members of Congress might spend a few minutes each day reflecting on the fact that forty strangers saved their institution (and for many, their lives). Perhaps that might make them behave better. And I do not intend that to be any type of joke. When someone has sacrificed everything for us, it's an opportunity to make that sacrifice more worthwhile.
The memorial closed at 5, so I headed south into Maryland where I finished the day at yet another site of man-made tragedy, the Antietam Battlefield.
The Battle of Antietam was one of the few bright spots for the Union in 1862, if you can call the bloodiest day of the Civil War a bright spot. General McClellan's victory over Robert E. Lee kept the Confederates from moving northward to Pennsylvania and returned the war to the South, at least for a time. The Federal victory was followed just a few days later by President Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
A lady who was there telling photography students that their instructor was ill and therefore had cancelled class told me to make sure to see the Burnside Bridge. Looking for the bridge took me on a nice tour/snipe hunt through the battlefield, a lot of which looked like this:
But you occasionally see interesting monuments like one built by the Irish Brigade:
Eventually I found the Burnside Bridge. It's one of those, "huh, yeah - there's the bridge" moments. I mean, it's a nice stone bridge and all, but it was quite a ways off the road and I was getting nervous about the impending loss of daylight so I didn't walk over to it.
For some reason, Verizon doesn't provide 4G (or, really, ANY G) service in northern Maryland, which is the single biggest risk I encounter in relying upon my Droid for navigation and one which I didn't expect 45 minutes from Our Nation's Capital. I was nervous that I'd be driving around completely randomly after it got dark, but just before total nightfall I found my way back to Interstate 70 which was the only part of the directions to my friends' house that I remembered. Crisis averted.
It was quite a day, reflecting on the power of Mother Nature and how people ignore her at their peril - or, more often, the peril of others - and on the nature of heroism, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to think about these ideas again while writing this blog. Thank you.
