Tag Archives: Hurricane Agnes

Those Who Died in the 1972 Flood

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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.)

JUNE is Bustin’ Out All Over

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June is bustin’ out all over!
That show-stopping Rodgers and Hammerstein number (from Carousel, 1945) is only one of numerous songs that ring in what might be everybody’s favorite month. Weather-wise, you’re pretty sure you won’t get frost, but the hot hot HOT summer weather hasn’t hit yet. The grass and the trees are green, and flowers are bright. Evenings are mostly pleasant, and the big thunderstorms still lie in the future. Birds are raising their young. Fireflies sparkle the night.
The movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers includes the number “June Bride,” for June is the traditional month for weddings – partly because of the weather, but party because many people used to marry immediately after finishing school. “Honeymoon, keep a-shinin’ in June,” by the light of the silvery moon.
June’s weather is so reliably good that Great Britain celebrates Queen Elizabeth’s birthday in June, even though she’s actually born in far-tetchier April.
On the other hand, June 1 also opens the Atlantic hurricane season. The worst storms usually come later in the summer, but fifty years ago, on June 23, 1972, Hurricane Agnes struck murderously, leaving 50 people dead in Pennsylvania and 19 right here in Steuben County.
The so-called People’s Liberation Army massacred pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The Stonewall Riots took place twenty Junes earlier, ushering in a new age in which homosexuality finally dared to speak its name.
D-Day, the American-British-Canadian invasion of Nazi-ruled France, took place on June 6, 1944. Which reminds us that June is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Month.
June starts out with Regents exams, and ends with high school graduation, that inerasable dividing line in our lives – exciting, gratifying, and scary all at once.
With Memorial Day in the week before June starts, and Independence Day right after it ends, June has been a quiet month for official holidays – Flag Day and Father’s Day are greeted more with politeness than with excitement. But last year President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a national holiday to celebrate the death of American slavery. The Confederate army west of the Mississippi (mostly in Texas) didn’t get around to surrendering until June 2, 1865, almost two months after most of the other armies. News of Emancipation then trickled out through Texas, reaching various locations on various days, to free the last people liberated by the Civil War.
Midsummer’s Day comes in late June. It’s the summer solstice, the longest daylight period of the year here above the equator. Even though our world still warms, the light begins to shrink, back toward the darkest day of December. “On a midsummer night,” wrote Sara Teasdale, “I was fed with the honey of fragrance, I was glad of my life, the drawing of breath was sweet.”
If that’s the first day of summer, why’s it called MIDsummer? In olden times people only referred to two seasons, each six months long. The solstice fell smack in the middle of “summer.” It was long considered a magical time. Shakespeare wrote of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The story of “The Princess on the Glass Hill” takes place at midsummer. (The TV series Midsomer Murders is about a fictional region of England, but plays on the word suggesting a time when magic and reality merge.)
Even though June’s been shy of major celebrations until Juneteenth came to the fore, it offers up the official day, week, or month for Donuts, Fudge, Peanut Butter Cookies, Ice Cream Sodas, Vanilla Milkshakes, Peaches and Cream, and Chocolate Pudding! So one way or another, you should find SOMETHING you like about June!

Hurricane Agnes: 72 + 50

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In June of 1972, a horrendous flood pulverized our area, when remnants of Hurricane Agnes stalled overhead and poured out torrents.

In Allegany County, just over the line with Steuben, a father and daughter were swept away and lost. Outside Bath, another man was carried off. A Gang Mills firefighter died, looking for the Bath man. Before long another SEVENTEEN were dead in the Gang Mills-Painted Post-Riverside-Corning City-South Corning crescent.

A day or two afterward, three men surveying damage for the Army Corps of Engineers were killed in Hornell, when their helicopter struck utility lines.

The Canisteo, Conhocton, Tuscarora and Tioga all crested at about the same time, just where they were joining (in Painted Post) to form the Chemung. Young Tommy Hilfiger, watching from Harris Hill, saw the wall of water roll down the riverbed, and rushed back to Elmira to save the stock in his store.

This was America’s most expensive hurricane to that date. The Painted Post Methodist and Presbyterian Churches were condemned, and replaced by one United Church. Whole blocks were condemned nearby, replaced by a new shopping center. Much of the east Market Street area in Corning had to go. The Corning and Elmira library buildings survived, and so did Corning city hall, but the institutions all moved to new construction.

Corning and St. Joseph hospitals survived. St. Joseph’s sent its patients to Arnot, which pushed its “walking wounded” out and told them to make their own way home… often on foot. Corning Hospital, knee-deep in frigid muddy water, shipped their patients to the hospital in Montour Falls, stretched out in the back decks of station wagons driven by community volunteers. The Penn Central railroad bridge in Corning crashed into the Chemung, taking a line of fully-loaded coal cars with it. Railroads across the northeast went broke.

Houses and businesses were washed away, and some never found. Thousands of cars were under water, and though many of them were put back into useable condition, none of them ever worked quite right again.

Keuka, Lamoka, and Waneta Lakes all burst their banks. Parts of Bath and Penn Yan flooded, as did some or all of many other towns. Owego, Binghamton, and Wellsville were all badly hit. Corning Museum of Glass flooded, and so did Corning Glass Works, and most of “the flat” in Corning, and lots of Horseheads, and most of Elmira. Two radio stations cobbled together resources to get one transmitter on the air. The Corning Leader and Elmira Star-Gazette cranked out joint daily issues on a mimeograph.

People lost precious family treasures, and much disappeared from the records. A few years ago, at Steuben County Historical Society, we were called on to help a family find the grave of an infant sister. The funeral home in Horseheads lost all its records in 1972. Happily, we were able to help.

And then people shoveled out. Glass Museum professionals invented new ways to restore documents and artifacts, and their methods are still used worldwide. Amo Houghton announced that the Glass Works was staying put. Volunteers arrived from across the nation. Visionaries created new plans for downtown Corning, Elmira, and Painted Post. People started dividing time into two epochs: BEFORE the flood, and AFTER the flood.

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of “The Flood,” and memories are slipping away. At Steuben County Historical Society we are mounting a “72 + 50” campaign to gather copies of memoirs, diaries, documents, photographs… whatever (other than newspapers, which we already have) tells the tale of the flood as Steuben suffered it. We’re collecting county-wide, OR donate to your local historical society – and if you’re in other counties, reach out to your own societies and agencies there.

It’s often easy to overlook that Hurricane Agnes was a major national (another 100 dead) and international (Mexico and Cuba) disaster. But it’s also OUR story, right here. And we don’t want it to be forgotten.

Hurricane Agnes: Reality Was Bad Enough

Makeshift morgues were set up in Corning and Painted Post. Outside, people whispered. “There are fifty bodies in there… sixty… a hundred….”

*Nothing even close. But the reality was bad enough.

*The first local death in the 1972 flood took place when a man was swept away in Bath. The second death came downstream in Gang Mills, where a firefighter was searching for the body.

*Hurricane Agnes had already caused a hundred deaths from Cuba to Pennsylvania, and two more would die in Canada. The official New York state death toll was 24.

*The firefighter was the first of 18 in the Gang Mills-Painted Post-Riverside-Corning-South Corning stretch. A father and daughter died in Allegany County, right on the line with Steuben. Add in the single Bath death, and 21 of the 24 New York fatalities came in (or on the edge of) Steuben County.

*And the count of 24 does NOT include three men killed a day or two later in Hornell, when their helicopter crashed as they conducted a damage survey for the Army Corps of Engineers.

*It’s a wonder the toll wasn’t higher, given the fact that in the Corning area, the rivers burst their banks unexpectedly, in the early morning hours, meaning that many residents were taken by surprise.

*Then there were those who were already in distress. A doctor in Corning Hospital performed emergency surgery by flashlight while standing knee-deep in cold, filthy water. The hospital telephoned people with station wagons and begged them to come in. Each one laid a patient out in the car’s flatbed and drove them to another hospital – often, the one in Montour Falls. Amazingly, they didn’t lose a single patient, but in some cases families couldn’t find them for days.

*St. Joseph’s Hospital in Elmira, although flooded, was able to rush patients to nearby Arnot, where they lined the halls on gurneys. One young woman, who had had surgery in Arnot the day after her high school graduation, was bustled out of the hospital by a nurse who told her she had to get out, so they could use the space. With no one expecting her, and no phones working, she struggled several miles home on foot, then collapsed.

*Although this was certainly Steuben County’s worst flood in terms of deaths, the overall death toll was far worse in the flood of 1935, when 44 were killed, mostly in the Finger Lakes. (More about that in a couple of weeks.)

*President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration got very busy after 1935, putting in dikes and other flood control measures, such as the Arkport Dam. Believe it or not, without those improvements 1972 would have been far, far worse. But, as we said back at the beginning of this blog, the reality was bad enough.

Disaster!

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Disasters have struck our region since time immemorial. The Sullivan invasion (during the Revolutionary War) may be the first one about which we have detailed information.

*We are now in the bicentennial of a quiet catastrophe that brutalized Europe and North America – the Year Without a Summer. Snow feel every month of 1816, and frost formed very month. Tuscarora Creek had half an inch of ice in May, and a quarter inch in September. Crops failed, and livestock died.

*This is all believed to have resulted from the gigantic eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies, along with several other major eruptions and a low sun cycle. Steuben County was only 20 years old, so this was till largely frontier back then.

*Because of the smaller numbers involved, and because of the limited collateral damage, we don’t usually think of highway wrecks in terms of disasters. But several major crashes stand out.

*The Cady Crash took place August 23, 1936. Nine members of the Cady family were coming back from Woodhull when Forrest Cady, driving a 1935 coach in the rain, missed a curve at Jasper Five Corners, crossed a ditch, sideswiped a maple tree, then hit another maple head-on. Six of the nine occupants were killed, and one of them was only a few days from giving birth, meaning the loss of the unborn child as well. The six dead were buried side-by-side in Troupsburg Cemetry.

*The Avoca Bus Crash, December 14, 1943, I suppose was our county’s biggest highway toll. A busload of workers were heading from Avoca to their defense jobs at Ingersoll-Rand when the bus was sideswiped by an oncoming tractor-trailer at about 5:30 AM — still pretty dark in December. The bus was thrown over onto its right side, and then caught fire. Eleven men, including the driver, were killed. In year 2000 a monument was erected in Avoca.

*The Benton Amish Crash, July 19, 2012, actually took place in Yates County, but the victims were all from Jasper and Woodhull. A driver attempted to pass a slow-moving tractor on Pre-Emption Road in Benton. He struck an oncoming van carrying Amish farm folks who were on a tour to study agricultural techniques. This crash spun the van into the path of the tractor, which crushed it. Six people were killed and eight injured. The dead included a husband and wife who left 12 children ranging in age from 9 months to 18 years.

*Naturally this created a crisis not just for the families but for the Amish community and for the larger community as well. “English” neighbors provided transportation to and back from Strong Hospital, pitched in with farm work, helped to shield their neighbors from the morbidly curious.

*Floods have a long history in our region. One study, running from 1784 to January 1999, lists 84 significant floods, including the Ice Flood, the Big Flood, the Great Inundation, and several Pumpkin Floods.

*Probably the two worst, both within living memory, were the 1935 flood (44 dead) and the 1972 Hurricane Agnes flood (19 dead in Steuben County). They had eerily similar footprints and similar dates (late June, early July), and both sprang up in the early morning hours.

*They clobbered Corning, Bath, Elmira, Hornell, Hammondsport, Ithaca, Wellsville, Rochester, Owego, Binghamton – everything. It would take years of work and millions in treasure to recover.

*I’ll be speaking on these and other regional disasters (including fires, epidemics, and train wrecks) at the next Steuben County Historical Society presentation, 4 PM Friday September 9 at Bath Fire Hall. The event is free and open to the public, and we’ll also have copies of my book, “The 1972 Flood in New York’s Southern Tier,” for sale. Hope to see you!

Eighty Years Ago — the Horrendous Flood of 1935

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Once upon a time there was a flood that sprang up in the pre-dawn hours of an early summer’s morning, snatching away lives and houses while wrecking railroads, bridges, and highways. Many reading these words will say, “ah, yes, I remember it well.”
Maybe not. Because we’re speaking of the 1935 flood, which burst forth in the early-morning hours of July 8, eighty years ago this week.
While the 1972 flood arose from the remnants of Hurricane Agnes, the flood of 1935 sprang from several days of heavy rain – the earth and the watercourses just couldn’t hold any more.
As in 1972, the waters broke forth while most folks were sound asleep – a factor (in both cases) that contributed to tragedy.
When the 1972 flood struck the Corning-Painted Post area, many people at best got a few minutes of warning. But in 1935 a great many people had no telephone. Scarcely anyone outside the cities and villages had a radio, or even electricity. So for many people, there was no warning at all.
So… what happened?
The Genesee River flooded, inundating Wellsville, Mount Morris, and Rochester.
Crosby Creek, Bennett’s Creek, and the Canisteo River flooded, putting much of Hornell underwater. Hornell was an important rail center, and this flood ripped many of the lines to shreds. Farther downstream, Addison too was flooded.
The Conhocton River flowed into the grounds of the “Soldiers Home,” or Bath V.A. All of downtown Bath flooded, with people using canoes and rowboats out as far as the post office at William and Liberty Streets. A few steps up Liberty, the flood spared the municipal building by literally the width of the sidewalk. Davenport Library was in the flooded zone, leading to the loss of historic documents. Once again, railroad lines were wrecked. Upstream and downstream, Kanona and Savona flooded.
Most of Hammondsport village was inundated. Some streets, most of them still unpaved, were gouged into canyons. The churches, many homes, and the downtown business district were all trashed.
Torrents pouring out of the Glen tore through the Mallory Mill and its grounds, where Roualet Wine Company had stored casks of brandy. These were dumped all across the village as far down as the waterfront, leading to numerous local family legends as to who got the casks, how they got them, and what they did with them afterward. (Roualet went bankrupt.)
Cataracts rushing out through Watkins Glen tore away the state park gatehouse, and carried it down toward Seneca Lake. Ithaca flooded.
Farm livestock was carried away from Coopers Plains.
Painted Post and Corning flooded on both sides of the Chemung River, including Market Street, Corning Glass Works, and Ingersoll Rand. Rising water threatened the painstakingly-made 200-inch disc for Mount Palomar observatory, which was in the midst of a months-long cooling period. Rising water forced Glass Works men to move the generator that powered temperature-control equipment, meaning no control at all for several days. To everyone’s relief, the disc came through unscathed.
Elmira flooded. Owego flooded. Binghamton flooded. As in 1972, it would take a week or more just to sort out what had happened, and where everybody was.
Governor Lehman rushed to the area, as did Red Cross, Salvation Army, and National Guard. Hornell Armory and Hammondsport Presbyterian Church were two of many local centers where drinking water was trucked in. This was the midst of the Depression, but men with horse teams suddenly found themselves (and their animals) in high demand for cleanup and construction work.
This was a hydrologically-complex flood… actually a widespread set of simultaneous separate floods. One, for instance, occupied the north-flowing Genesee River and its tributaries. A separate flood flowed from the east-running Conhocton-Canisteo-Chemung System. Another flood followed the west-flowing Susquehanna and its tributaries. Three separate floods engulfed Hammondsport, Ithaca, and Watkins Glen.
New Deal programs set to work ameliorating the problem. C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corps) boys worked on hoe-and-shovel drainage projects, while Alfred and Almond dams were soon rising. The 1972 flood, believe it or not, would have been worse without this earlier work.
And, believe it or not, 1935 was arguably worse than 1972, with forty-four dead region-wide, as opposed to nineteen. Of course, the 1935 flood WAS essentially a regional event, while the total nationwide death toll from Hurricane Agnes was around 130, plus more in the West Indies. Since only 37 years separated the two disasters, a great many people in 1972 must have experienced an utterly horrifying déjà vu.