The history of Township of Adams
The Township of Adams holds the remains of the South Fork Dam, built in 1836 for the Pennsylvania Canal and later weakened by a private fishing club, whose failure on May 31, 1889 sent twenty million tons of water into Johnstown, fourteen miles below.
Picnic Area Road, in the Township of Adams, sits beside the remains of the South Fork Dam, built in 1836 for the Pennsylvania Canal and weakened by a private fishing club before it collapsed on May 31, 1889, sending twenty million tons of water into Johnstown fourteen miles below.
A fishing club's repairs doomed the South Fork Dam
Johnstown Flood National Memorial is a National Park Service site that now preserves the broken remains of the South Fork Dam and the old lakebed above it. The visitor center sits close to this spot, built to look like the barn of the farm that once stood here.
The story starts with the dam itself. Builders finished it in 1836 to hold water for the Pennsylvania Canal, and at the time it was the largest earth dam in the world. It stood 850 feet across, made of packed earth and stone. The canal it served did not last. The Pennsylvania Railroad made canal travel pointless, and by 1857 the dam sat abandoned, its owners gone.
The South Fork Dam passed through private hands for years. Then in 1879, a businessman named Benjamin F. Ruff bought it from the state for $2,000. Benjamin F. Ruff and a group of wealthy Pittsburgh men, including Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Frick, formed the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club turned the lake behind the dam into a private retreat for summer fishing and boating.
The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club's repairs made the dam weaker, not stronger. The club lowered its height by two or three feet so carriages could cross on top, and patched old damage with mud, straw, and tree branches. Workers removed the pipes that once let water drain out safely. The club also put screens across the spillway to stop fish from escaping, screens that would later catch debris and block the water's only way out.
Two days of heavy rain filled the lake past what the narrow spillway could carry. The water rose until it topped the dam itself. At around 3:10 in the afternoon, the South Fork Dam gave way.
Twenty million tons of water poured out in minutes. It formed a wall seventy feet high and raced down the valley at forty miles an hour. Fourteen miles downstream, in about forty minutes, it tore into Johnstown.
All that wreckage piled up against the Stone Bridge, a stone railroad bridge built just two years earlier. About 100,000 tons of debris jammed against its arches. A fire broke out in the wreckage, and people trapped inside burned alive.
Clara Barton reached Johnstown on June 5, just days after the flood, leading fifty volunteers of the American Red Cross. It was the first major disaster relief effort the Red Cross had ever run in peacetime. Barton stayed five months and helped more than 25,000 people before she left that October.
The disaster was not over when the water receded. Typhoid fever broke out in the valley from contaminated water, killing 40 more people on top of the flood's toll. Survivors argued for years over who was to blame. Public opinion blamed the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for weakening the dam, but no court ever found the club legally responsible. Only lawsuits against the Pennsylvania Railroad, over lost property, succeeded.
The dam's remains sat largely untouched for decades after the flood. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law creating Johnstown Flood National Memorial, preserving what was left of the dam and the old lakebed above it. Congressman John P. Saylor had pushed for the bill.
The memorial grew slowly. In 2006, the National Park Service took over the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club's old clubhouse and two of its cottages, including the Lippincott Cottage, the largest one members ever built.
Starting in January 2020, park crews began clearing brush from the old lakebed to restore the view visitors would have had in 1889. The work proved too delicate for machines alone. A herd of goats and a donkey, borrowed from a Pittsburgh group called Allegheny Goatscape, grazed through the brush an acre at a time.
The visitor center near this point is built to look like the old Unger farm barn that once stood on the land. Inside, exhibits include a reproduction morgue book and the recorded voice of Victor Heiser, a sixteen-year-old survivor who remembered neighbors saying the dam would break, "but it won't ever happen to us.
The broken earthen embankment of the South Fork Dam still runs across the valley, with the old lakebed spreading out behind it as an open meadow.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.