The club took the drain pipes out of the dam and put fish screens in the spillway.

May 30, 1889.
40.3478° N, 78.7742° W

Pennsylvania built the dam to hold water for a canal. In the 1830s the state was moving freight over the Allegheny Mountains on the Main Line of Public Works, a system of canals and inclined planes that hauled boats up one side of the ridge and let them down the other. Canals need water in dry months. The plan was a reservoir on the South Fork of the Little Conemaugh River, held back by an earth dam, with water released down the river as the canal needed it.

Construction started, stopped when the state ran out of money, started again, and finished in 1853. The dam was earth and rock laid down in layers around a clay core, and it was among the largest structures of its kind in the country at the time. At the base, a stone culvert carried cast iron pipes fitted with valves. Opening them drained the lake from the bottom. A spillway was cut through solid rock at the eastern end to carry off any overflow.

By the year it was finished the canal it was built for was already finished too. The Pennsylvania Railroad bought the state's canal works in 1857 and had no use for a reservoir in the mountains. In 1862 the culvert under the dam collapsed and took part of the embankment with it. The lake happened to be low, and the water that got out did little harm downstream. The railroad patched the gap and left it alone. For most of the next fifteen years the reservoir sat empty, and the valley below it grew accustomed to a meadow where a lake had been.

The valley is narrow and steep. From the dam it runs fourteen miles down the Little Conemaugh to Johnstown, past South Fork, Mineral Point, East Conemaugh and Woodvale, towns strung along the water because the riverbank was the only flat ground on offer. Johnstown sat at the bottom of it on a flat where two rivers met, and it ran on iron. The Cambria Iron Company was one of the largest steel producers in the country, with mills, a wire works and company housing, and it pulled Welsh, German, Irish and Hungarian labor into a district of some thirty thousand people. The town flooded most springs. Families carried the furniture to the second floor, waited two days, and carried it back down.

In the 1870s the reservoir property changed hands twice. One of the owners, a sitting congressman, sold the cast iron discharge pipes for scrap. After that there was no way to lower the level of the lake except to let water run over the spillway.

In 1879 a Pittsburgh businessman named Benjamin Ruff bought the property and built a private club around it. The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was a summer place for men with money in Pittsburgh: a clubhouse with a dining room, cottages along the shore, sailboats and steam launches on the water. Andrew Carnegie belonged to it. So did Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon and Philander Knox. The club stocked the lake with black bass brought in by rail.

To hold water again, Ruff had the old breach filled. The fill went in as earth, rock, brush, hay and horse manure, put down by local labor with no engineer standing over it. The crest of the dam was lowered so that a road could run across the top wide enough for two carriages to pass. Lowering the crest cut into the distance between the top of the dam and the lip of the spillway. Iron screens were fixed across the spillway so the stocked bass would not swim out with the overflow. The pipes in the culvert were never replaced.

Daniel Morrell ran the Cambria Iron Company down in Johnstown. He heard what was being done at the lake and in 1880 sent John Fulton, an engineer on his staff, up to look at it. Fulton walked the dam and wrote a report. He found the repair work loose and carelessly done, he noted a leak coming through, and he set down plainly that there was no way to discharge water from the bottom and that the structure should be put in proper condition. Morrell forwarded the report to Ruff. Ruff answered that the club did not consider the dam unsafe. Morrell bought a membership and offered to help pay for repairs. He died in 1885.

The lake filled and stayed full. It ran about two miles long. Members fished it through the summers. In Johnstown the dam came up in conversation every spring, when the rivers rose and somebody said the lake was coming down on them, and every spring it did not, and men at the mills said it to each other as a joke.

May 30, 1889 was Memorial Day. Johnstown had a parade. Veterans marched through town behind a band, flowers went on the graves, and in the evening it began to rain. It rained through the night and into the morning, the heaviest fall of water the region had on record. Creeks came up in the dark. By the time Johnstown was awake on May 31 there was water in the streets, and people were carrying furniture upstairs the way they always did.

At the lake, the club president Elias Unger got up that morning and found the water risen nearly to the top of the dam. He gathered whatever men he could get, club employees and laborers from the village, and they went at it three ways. Some tried to cut a second spillway at the western end and struck rock a few feet down. Some plowed furrows and shoveled dirt onto the crest to raise it. Some worked at the iron screens in the spillway, which had fouled solid with branches and logs and were holding water back instead of passing it. The screens would not come up.

John Parke, a young engineer working for the club, rode down to South Fork and had a warning telegraphed. It went to the tower at Mineral Point and on down the line toward Johnstown. Warnings about that dam had come down the same wire in other years. Some men who took the message passed it along. In a town already under water with the rain still falling, it moved nobody to high ground.

By noon the water was running over the crest. In the early afternoon it began cutting a notch through the top, and the notch widened, and the face of the dam started coming away in sheets. A little after three o'clock the middle of it gave out. The lake went through the gap in under an hour.

What came down the valley was not only water. It took the dam with it, and the topsoil, the trees, the fences and the small settlements in the first mile. It rolled locomotives off their sidings. It carried track, telegraph poles and whole houses along in the front of it, so that what arrived at each town was a moving wall of wreckage with the river behind it.

Mineral Point was lifted off its ground. At East Conemaugh a railroad engineer named John Hess had his locomotive in the yard when he heard it coming down the valley. He tied the whistle down, threw the engine in reverse and ran it backward into town with the whistle screaming the whole way. People heard it and went up the hillside. Hess jumped clear. His engine stayed where he left it, under the debris. At Woodvale the water took the wire works, and the boilers went into the flood and burst.

The wave reached Johnstown a little after four in the afternoon. It came in higher than the houses, struck the town from the upstream side, and took the streets apart. People who had gone to second floors went into the water with the buildings. Some rode roofs and wreckage across town and lived. Others were carried down to the Stone Bridge below Johnstown, a masonry railroad viaduct that held when nothing above it had.

The wreckage stacked against the bridge and dammed the river with itself. Houses, freight cars, trees, track, livestock, machinery, barbed wire out of the Gautier works, and people alive and pinned inside it. There was oil in the pile. It caught fire in the evening and burned for days. People who had come through the water burned in it, in sight of the hillsides where the survivors were standing.

The rain kept on into the night. Survivors were on the hills with nothing, on rooftops in the water, and in the upper floors of the few buildings left standing. The first outside help walked in along the wrecked railroad grade. It was days before a train could get close to the place.

The dead were counted at 2,209. Ninety-nine entire families died, parents and children together, with nobody left to report them missing. Hundreds of the dead were children. Bodies were carried far downstream and were still being recovered years afterward.

Clara Barton reached Johnstown on June 5 with the American Red Cross, an organization then a few years old, and put up hospitals and shelters. She stayed about five months. It was the first large peacetime disaster operation the Red Cross ran in the United States. Money came in from every state and from overseas.

Survivors and the families of the dead sued the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. The suits failed. The courts treated the flood as an act of God, and no plaintiff collected damages from the club or from any member of it. No criminal charges were filed. Several members gave to the relief fund as individuals. Andrew Carnegie paid for a new library building in Johnstown, which is still standing and now holds the flood museum.

The club never reopened. The cottages and the clubhouse were sold off and the lake was never refilled. The bed of it grew over in timber. Johnstown rebuilt, and flooded again in 1936, and again in 1977, when dozens more died.

The National Park Service runs the site today. The clubhouse is still there. So are the two ends of the dam, one on each side of the valley, with the gap standing open between them and the empty lake bed behind. On the hill above Johnstown, in Grandview Cemetery, seven hundred and seventy-seven of the graves have no names on them.