Pete Bill and Arnold L. Sweet - Tippecanoe County and the 1913 Flood

INTRODUCTION

The 1913 flood and the disruptive March weather with which it was affiliated made headlines in almost every state in the United States. Large metropolitan areas like Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio, had strong news-gathering centers that were capable of documenting their particular views of the disaster and disseminating them across the telegraph wires to all corners of the continent. Other, smaller communities with less access to communication still had their stories told because their particular twists on the disaster made for good newsprint. For example, the circus animals that were lost in the flood in Peru, Indiana, and the flood-threatened orphanage at Fort Wayne, Indiana, both figured prominently in stories published in 1913 and in the flood centennial publications of 2013.

However, the devastating weather in March 1913 also produced thousands of other stories that were not newsworthy enough to be selected for publication in prominent newspapers or chosen by authors for inclusion in the books written in 1913 and 1914 about the 1913 flood. Since 1913, there have been many other floods and disasters, and with the advent of increasingly sophisticated means with which to broadcast news in ways that better capture the publics attention, the events of 1913 have largely been forgotten by the citizens of the same communities that were devastatedthat is, until a centennial or other anniversary occurs. This is especially true in the smaller communities that were hit equally as hard as the more publicized communities but whose stories were told only in local small-circulation newspapers or journals.

This book seeks to help preserve some of the stories of the 1913 weather disaster that affected the citizens of Tippecanoe County and the surrounding area. The individual stories are no less heroic or tragic than the more widely publicized events, but they are largely unknown and have been overshadowed and forgotten. Even within Indiana today, historical presentations of the Great Flood of 1913 by state organizations rarely give but a passing reference to any of the stories of Tippecanoe County. The 1913 book by Logan Marshall titled The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire, and Tornadodevoted three paragraphs of its 320 pages to Tippecanoe County. The more recent 2013 publication, Washed Awayby Geoff Williams, focuses largely on Fort Wayne, Peru and Indianapolis in Indiana, although it does devote 6 pages of one section specifically to Lafayette, Indiana.

The oversight of Tippecanoe County in the 1913 disaster is neither malicious nor historical malpractice but simply reflects that the story of the March 1913 flood, tornadoes and their subsequent destruction provides sufficient fodder to fill many volumes of books with tales of tragedy or survival. Thus, this book is intended to capture the stories of one often-overlooked area affected by the 1913 weather disaster: Tippecanoe County, Indiana.