Twenty bodies – fifty bodies – a hundred bodies….
Appalled residents and outsiders alike, discovering the vast destruction of the flood, were convinced that the death toll, once known, would be sky-high. Remarkably, that was not the case as day after day passed, and despairing family members finally found each other. Makeshift morgues were set up in Corning and in Painted Post (what’s now Painted Post-Erwin Museum at the Depot), with funeral directors drafted in to assist. Not all the bodies of those swept away were found immediately, but finally officials came up with the numbers and the names. While not as catastrophic as had been feared, the list was still far too long.
Two Killed in Almond (Allegany County), June 21: John Ide, Amy Ide
One Killed June 21, Between Bath and Kanona: Farley S. Stamp
Eighteen Killed in the Corning-Painted Post Area, mostly on June 23: Hobart Abbey; Daniel M. Atwood; Martha E. Atwood; Elmer Benton; Ivelyn Cash; Joel Clark; Mrs. Charles Craig; Mrs. Beatrice Forrest; James Horton; Penny Horton; Nina Hough; James Ketler; Olive I. Lane; Mrs. Luella Lathrop; Mrs. Lena Moulton; Martha Raymer; Brian H. Tong; Eva Wheeler
Three Killed June 25 in a Helicopter Crash at Hornell, while Surveying Damage for the Army Corps of Engineers: Duane Tyler; Robert Crooks; Paul Meinen
The 1935 flood killed 44 people in our region, but the Hurricane Agnes flood of 1972 took a heavy toll specifically in Steuben County. The first Steuben victim was west of Bath on today’s Route 415, where four men were swept from the roof of their car. Three eventually dragged themselves out of the rushing water, about a thousand feet downstream, but Farley Stamp was lost. On that same day, just a few rods over the line into Allegany, John Ide and daughter Amy were lost when their boat overturned as they tried to escape the overflowing Canacadea Creek. Mrs. Ide and another daughter were saved.
The worst of it, of course, was in the crescent formed by Gang Mills, Painted Post, Riverside, City of Corning, and South Corning. Eighteen people died in that stretch, including Dallas Craig, widow of former Corning mayor Charles Craig, and nine month-old Brian Tong. Many of the victims taken as they slept, without warning, in the hours after midnight. Hobart Abbey of Forest View Fire Department (Gang Mills) was the first lost in this crescent, as he assisted with evacuations. He was posthumously named New York State Firefighter of the Year.
As if all that were not enough, three indirect deaths took place as three men were lost surveying damage from a helicopter, when they struck power lines and crashed into Crosby Creek at the Hornell city line.
And despite these numbers, could we but know the facts, the full death toll of the storm and flood, even just here in Steuben County, has to be a good deal higher. If someone had an utterly unrelated heart attack, three days after the flood… and the phones didn’t work, and the roads were blocked, and the hospital was closed… that person probably died, even though a week earlier he or she might well have been saved.
How many succumbed to diseases picked up from standing water and rotted organics? Did any cut themselves as they were clearing rubble, and die of tetanus? And what of emotional tolls? Depression, phobias, survivor guilt, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder all weaken the system, making the body even more susceptible to health problems. Someone who died twenty years later – but who SHOULD have lived for thirty years, under more normal conditions – was also a victim of the flood. The full death toll of the flood will never be known.
The storm killed two people in Canada, seven on the island of Cuba, nine in Florida, 13 in Virginia, 19 in Maryland, 24 in New York (not including three men killed in a helicopter crash shortly afterward), 50 in Pennsylvania, and four in other states, for a total of 128 deaths… which may be low. At the time, it was the costliest hurricane in U. S. history.
(Corning-area names from The Flood and the Community. Farley Stamp information from Heritage of Bath. Hornell names from the Lockport Union Sun Journal, found by Steve Cotton. Detail on Mrs. Charles Craig from an obituary provided by County Historian Emily Simms. Ide information from Almond Historical Society newsletter.)