The Johnstown Flood Museum

Regular readers may recall me posting a few months back about reading David McCullough's 1968 book, "The Johnstown Flood" ( http://grandstander.blogspot.com/search?q=johnstown+flood).

Well, reading that book prompted me to want to visit the Johnstown Flood Museum in Johnstown.  We planned the trip for last Monday, October 29.  Kind of ironic that we made this visit on the same day that Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, bringing with it the type of devastation that was delivered to Johnstown back in 1889.  The Museum was a most interesting one.  The highlight was a documentary film that was made in 1990, and which won an Academy Award, by the way, and a diorama of the flood path from the dam at the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, through the valley, and onto Johnstown itself.

In the intervening week since our visit and the touchdown of Sandy, a couple of thoughts occurred to me.  Residents along the east coast last week knew that Sandy was on its way, knew to prepare for it and knew, in extreme cases, to evacuate the area.  This level of preparedness, which we take for granted in the 21st century, no doubt saved hundreds of lives.  The people of Johnstown had no such warnings in 1889.  Also, Sandy was natural disaster, and while it was torrential rains in 1889 that led to the breaching of the South Fork Dam, the disaster could have, maybe, been prevented but for the arrogance of those members of the South Fork Club.

It took about two hours to tour the Museum, and I would recommend it.  The weather was lousy when we were there, so we were unable to get to the site of the dam.  Maybe another time.

We were planning to stay overnight in Johnstown and, on our way home, visit the Jimmy Stewart Museum in Indiana, PA.  We did stay overnight, but we found out by checking on line that the Stewart Museum would be closed the next day due to the weather conditions.  Guess that a day trip to Indiana will be in the cards for us at some point in the future.

I will close with one more picture.  I found this bit of Label Copy at the Museum to be interesting considering what prompted us to make this trip in the first place: