Mainers survived 1900 flood in Texas

Many people with Maine ties were in the great hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas, on Sept. 8, 1900. More than 6,000 people died in the tidal surge that swept over much of what was then Texas’ biggest city, causing the worst natural disaster in American history. Some of those who survived wrote letters home describing hair-raising experiences. A few of these letters were published in Bangor’s two daily newspapers.

John D. Blagden, a Carmel native who received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Maine, was a temporary employee of the U.S. Weather Bureau in the island city. He worked for Isaac Cline, the bureau’s local director, and is mentioned several times in “Isaac’s Storm” by Erik Larson and in other books on the disaster.

The letter Blagden wrote to his family in Duluth, Minn., is a prime source for historians and has been reproduced on the Internet and other places. I found a copy in the Bangor Daily News on Sept. 19, 1900, that had been received by his brother Charles, who lived in Damascus, a village in the town of Carmel.

Blagden spent the night of the storm at headquarters in a solidly built brick building that shook to its foundation at each blast of wind. When the storm died down, he walked through the wreckage to the south part of the island where he boarded. Everything had been swept away and nearly everybody drowned including the family with whom he was living. The sea had acted as a giant bulldozer, pushing a wall of houses and other wreckage before it for blocks.

“Hundreds are busy day and night clearing away the debris and recovering the dead. It is awful. Every few minutes a wagon load of corpses passes by on the street,” Blagden wrote on Sept. 10 by candlelight.

The Bangor Daily Commercial, the city’s other newspaper, ran a story on Sept. 19 proclaiming, “Bangor People Are Safe At Galveston.” It was about Capt. George E. Smith, formerly a local sea captain who now ran a stevedore and contracting firm in Galveston, and Judge Fred W. Fickett, a University of Maine graduate from Brewer.

Smith’s home, which was still standing, was sheltering three families. “Every house is flat for from five to ten blocks from the beach and many are flat and in the street all over the city,” he wrote to an unidentified business partner. “Every shed on the wharf is flat and all cargoes are gone.” He estimated his losses at $5,000, but at the moment, he said, he was interested only in helping to clear the city of debris and bodies to prevent disease.

Judge Fickett wrote a brief letter to his wife, who was in Bangor for the summer with her parents. He spent the storm in his office, where all the windows were blown in. He watched the roof on the bank next door fly off. At home, a stableman brought three cows and a horse up a flight of stairs into the parlor where they waited out the storm in 3 feet of water.

J.D. Norton of Addison Point and Edna George of Pittsfield rode out the storm on large ships. Both were as lucky to have survived as the people on land.

Norton, chief engineer of the steamer City of Everett, was anchored a half-mile from the docks, according to a letter to his parents published in the Commercial on Sept. 21. Loaded with 4,000 tons of coal, the ship had two anchors out and its engines working full steam ahead all night “and still we dragged anchors expecting every minute … to be our last.”

He wrote, “Some of our crew were praying and some swearing. As for me, I said nothing. I just attended strictly to business, but I had no idea of being alive this morning.” Afterward, many of the ships that had been anchored in the harbor were lying bottom up on the beach a quarter of a mile away with their crews drowned.

The next day they weathered the gale on the deck. “We have counted 68 bodies of men, women and children floating by our ship besides I should say about 10,000 horses and cattle, houses, beds, chairs, tables, trunks and everything connected with a city. … Just before supper I saw a man and a woman locked in each other’s arms floating out to sea for the sharks to eat. … We cannot enter port until a quarantine doctor comes on board. He is probably drowned as the government buildings are all destroyed.”

Miss George was aboard the Comal on her way to teach oratory at a female seminary near Galveston when the ship ran up against the storm, with “waves as big as the Allegheny Mountains,” in the Straits of Florida. After surviving that ordeal, they arrived a few days later in Galveston Harbor, where their joy turned to terror.

“Words cannot describe the desolation which greeted our eyes,” she wrote in a letter to her uncle, the Rev. F.D. George, that appeared in the BDN on Sept. 28. “We worked our way in past wreck after wreck, dead bodies of children, babies, boys, men and women, colored and white, and dead cattle, all floating promiscuously. And the city! … Huge ships were lifted up and set down in the streets. Gigantic brick buildings were toppled over. … The piers and wharves were smashed to atoms. Nine large steamers were ashore and stranded within plain sight of our decks at one time.

“Looking out of my window in the morning, a gruesome sight met my eyes. Dead swollen bodies were floating about on every side, and the odor got very foul,” she wrote. In his book, Erik Larson wrote that the captain of the Comal moved the vessel farther down the wharf, so repulsed was he by the stench of “putrefaction and human ash” that hung over the city. The mercury approached 100 degrees.

For decades, thousands of New Englanders had been going West, seeking wealth and adventure in places like Galveston. Many had faced danger and every sort of deprivation. For a few, their worst nightmare was realized on Sept. 8, 1900.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net