Schenectady's Worst Flood

This post was written by library volunteer Gail Denisoff.

This image shows flooding on the Erie Canal looking towards State Street. Advertisements for The Carl Company, J.E. Davidson's Son, Dan A. Donahue, John Wagner's Furniture are shown. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library & Archives Photo Collection.

Schenectady has experienced its fair share of spring flooding. Concerns rise, especially in the Stockade area, whenever temperatures begin to climb causing ice to start thawing and breaking up in the Mohawk River and the streams feeding into it. Couple that with heavy rain and you have a recipe for disaster. Schenectady residents thought the March floods of 1893 and 1913 which hit a high-level mark of 21 feet were the worst they had ever experienced. That was until the flood of 1914, still considered the worst in Schenectady history.

A view of State Street after the 1914 Valentine's Blizzard.
Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library & Archives
Photo Collection.

The winter of 1914 was a tough one. Not only were the temperatures unusually cold for all of January and February but Valentine’s day brought a blizzard dropping 32 inches of snow in less than 20 hours. Drifts reached 15 to 20 feet in some areas. March arrived with warmer weather and rains. Small creeks began to swell and ice that had built up over the long winter was breaking apart. In the early morning hours of March 27th, loud grinding and cracking sounds were heard emanating from the Schoharie Creek and other small waterways as gigantic chunks of ice started crashing and hurtling their way to the Mohawk River.

As the floes moved into the river, joining masses of slowly colliding slabs of ice, destruction followed. By 7pm that evening, a 300-foot bridge in Amsterdam gave way, the same bridge that had been destroyed exactly one year before. Soon after, two private bridges in the Schenectady area fell to the unrelenting mounds of ice. First the Rexford Toll Bridge collapsed followed by the Freemans Toll Bridge. Onlookers described the ice slabs as twenty feet high and three feet thick. The piers of the Scotia Bridge were also being barraged by the ice but were still considered secure.

Massive chunks of ice were common during the 1914 flood. This photo shows some of them on North Street. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library & Archives Photo Collection.

Early the next day linemen from the New York Telephone Company attempted to string cable across the Mohawk at Freeman’s. By this time the river was raging and rising rapidly. After rowing a boat through the hazardous current twice unspooling their cable, the three men aboard attempted a third crossing. This time they weren’t as fortunate. A massive cake of submerged ice shattered their boat sending the three men into the river. Two of the men, John Inglis and John Becker, were pulled under and drowned, the third, William Ryan, held on to wreckage from the boat and managed to get to a railroad bridge where he was rescued.

The Stockade experienced some of the worst of the 1914 flood. This photo shows the only method of transportation that people in much of the Stockade could use, boats. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library & Archives Photo Collection.

Meanwhile, the rising river was spilling over its banks in the city of Schenectady and heavy rain was falling. American Locomotive and General Electric, both having suffered losses from the flood the year before, had workers stack sandbags and timbers to block the water. Sandbags were also placed on manhole covers to prevent the back up of sewers on Dock Street and River Road along the canal. Washington Avenue, South Ferry Street, North Street, South Church Street, Ingersoll Avenue and other streets leading to the river were filling with water. By 5am on the 28th men were pounding on doors to awaken residents to vacate their properties.

At 10:30 am the General Electric whistle blew sending thousands of workers out of the plant to make their way home on flooded streets. Trolley service was cut off going into Scotia. People used rowboats to make their way through the rising water. By 11:45am flood levels had reached 23.5 feet. The area around General Electric was covered by two feet of water and four feet covered the grounds of American Locomotive. South Church Street was six feet under water and many riverfront cottages had water up to their rooflines. Between 300 and 400 homes had been evacuated.

Even with the flood, some people found ways to entertain themselves. This photo shows Reuben Dworsky (left) and Isidore Goldstork (right) rowing down a flooded Broadway during the 1914 flood. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library & Archives Photo Collection.

Between 2:00 and 3:00pm the ice jam finally began to move. Water rapidly receded and by the morning of March 29th much of the water had returned to normal levels. About 30,000 people made their way to the river to watch the massive chunks of ice floating by resulting in a boon for trolley service. What followed was a mass clean up effort. Stores tried to beat the flood by moving merchandise to upper levels, but many still had flood sales in the ensuing weeks. General Electric and American Locomotive reported relatively small losses, but other business and homes were hit hard with hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

Major flooding has continued to be a worry in Schenectady over the years. Most problems seem to occur in spring although some are associated with other events, most recently, Hurricane Irene in August of 2011. Much of the Stockade was once again under water with many people forced to evacuate. Hopefully, Schenectady will never again experience a flood that compares to that of 1914.

A First Look at the Dick Whalen Collection

Photograph of the interior of a barber shop operated by Benedetto "Benny" Zegarelli near the intersection of Main Street and Market Street in Rotterdam Junction. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

Nearly one year ago, the Rotterdam Junction home of former Rotterdam town historian Dick Whalen was severely damaged by flooding caused by Hurricane Irene. The first floor of his property flooded with four feet of water, and the basement and garage, where Whalen's collection of historical materials were stored, was completely filled with water for at least three days.



This photo, taken a few days after the 2011 flood, shows standing water in the back of Dick Whalen's home and garage on Main Street in Rotterdam Junction. Photograph courtesy of Dick Whalen.  

 One week after the flood, after obtaining permission from Whalen to try to salvage some of the materials, we quickly moved to recover as many original photographs and documents as we could. Whalen had organized the historical materials he had compiled into themed binders. We moved nearly fifty wet, mud-covered binders out of his home and into frozen storage, in order to prevent mold growth and further deterioration of documents and photographs.

In 2004, Dick Whalen stands alongside one of the historical information boards he created. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

Over the course of the next several months, I worked on thawing and drying out the materials from Whalen's collection binder by binder and rehousing them in folders and boxes. Many of the photographs and documents survived remarkably well. In June, volunteers and I began working on creating high-quality scanned images of the photographs and documents from Whalen's collection so that the historical information he compiled over the years would remain available to researchers in our library for years to come.

Many of the photographic prints in the Whalen Collection were in relatively good shape despite having contact with water. However, some photographs became so waterlogged that the emulsion lifted from the surface of the page. An example of this type of damage can be seen on this drawing of a Schenectady Savings Bank branch, although much of the image is still intact. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

Woestina High School students on set of operetta "Green Cheese," performed in 1937. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

The images you see here are just a few photographs and documents from the collection. The collection is a valuable resource about the history of Rotterdam and particularly of Rotterdam Junction, where Dick Whalen made his home for most of his life. Subjects documented in the collection include Rotterdam's town government, police, and fire departments, local schools and athletics, local industries, controversy surrounding the construction of the Rotterdam Square Mall, Rotterdam parades and historical celebrations, and historic houses in Rotterdam. Rotterdam Junction is particularly well-documented, from the Woestina School to local businesses to the people and families who lived there. For those interested in local history, the collection is truly a treasure. We're grateful for Whalen's diligence in compiling this material and his generosity in allowing us to record it and share it with others.

Rotterdam Town Supervisor John Kirvin marches in a parade in May 1978. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.



Carman Fire Department and members of the fire department, 1940s. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

Mrs. Madison of Lower Rotterdam Junction. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

Page from a 1898 diary of Norman M.F. Clute, a Rotterdam farmer. Note the drawing of a horse next to the entry about receiving a gray horse; Clute also inserted tiny drawings of chickens whenever he mentioned members of the family slaughtering one for a meal. From Dick Whalen Collection.



Photograph of a car near Hamburg Street destroyed during a severe storm in 1960. Photograph from Dick Whalen Collection.

Cover image from The Woestinian, a publication made by students at the Woestina School in Rotterdam Junction. From Dick Whalen Collection.

When it is Spring in the Stockade, One Word Comes to Mind: Flooding

Spring may be just around the corner for us here in Schenectady, and in the Stockade that means one thing for sure, flooding. Every year, as the snow and ice melt on the Mohawk, the river levels rise and parts of the Stockade district are flooded. However, unlike the earthquakes that have just hit Japan and the tsunami in Hawaii, the flooding of the Mohawk is a predictable result to the end of winter.



The flood of 1914, location unknown

Here in the library the flooding of the Mohawk is well documented with newspaper clippings and photographs, including information that goes back as far as the 19^th century. In 1832 a man named Louis John Barhydt was caught unprepared by the rising river and was forced to climb a tree, from which he was later rescued. The newspapers reported the worst flood in Schenectady’s history with two killed, hundreds evacuated and bridges destroyed by the end of March, 1914. In March of 1936 the water level of the Mohawk rose 17 feet above normal. Even my mother has stories of her grandmother refusing to evacuate her house on North Street because she lived on the second floor. She wasn’t afraid of a little water, and she had plenty of food, so she was staying put! That would have been in the 1960s and 1970s.



The ice on the Binnekill,
from the Grems-Doolittle library



If you are interested in learning more about the history of flooding in the Stockade, or if you would like to share your stories and pictures with us, come down to the Grems-Doolittle library and have a look through our files and photos. But be warned, if you come in March, you might want to bring some waders!