How the 1915 flood changed America

Before the Great Flood of 1913, “it had already been a month of frightening weather.” Blizzards covered the Midwest, Tampa suffered a cold spell, and a hurricane hit Georgia and Alabama. So when weather forecasts predicted severe storms passing over the East from North Carolina to Maine nobody knew what to expect, not tornadoes, and certainly not flooding. 

Williams’ book chronicles a week that the Great Flood decimated the United States. While the flood is remembered locally, Williams’ research reveals tragedy on a scale that killed more than a thousand across several regions. Stories of the Great Flood remain observable within our national narrative, though the stories die as each generation ages and memory fails. Williams’ seed for his research came from his experience growing up in Ohio and hearing his uncle tell about the 1913 flood, which his uncle was too young to have experienced. He gathered most of his information from newspaper stories printed at the time of the flood and interviewed relatives of flood survivors. “These are tales of bravery, selflessness, tragedy, and even cowardice, and greed, although this is mostly a story about Americans at their best when Mother Nature was at her worst,” Williams says.

Williams structures the book chronologically so that readers get omniscient 21 century coverage of the disaster as it is happening. As tornadoes and cyclones wind down in the Midwest readers meet Miss Theresa Hammond, a schoolteacher. Williams sets the scene by reporting about her life, her monthly salary, where her trolley deposits her—Main Street being four feet underwater—how Hammond lost her father, a railroad worker, and that she taught orphans because she was orphaned young. The problem in this scene, as Williams outlines, is the St. Marys River in the orphanage’s back yard. The epilogue wraps up each person’s story and compares rescue efforts during the Great Flood to those after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.