Thread by @bombsfall

We drove up to Potter County, a remote region with the darkest skies in Pennsylvania, to look at stars. Down the road from where we were staying is a tiny town called Austin, notable for a disaster that happened there in 1911. Although tbh "happened" is far too passive a term.

Austin was a small settlement in a valley between the heavily wooded hills, and it grew into a bustling town during the logging boom the region was undergoing during the late 19th century. It was also prone to an absurd number of complete disasters. A short list:

A short list of disasters I found mention of:
1889: destroyed by flood
1890: destroyed by fire
1891: destroyed by fire
1894: destroyed by flood
1897: destroyed by fire

By 1900 the logging boom was subsiding, in part due to the clear cutting of the old growth forests on the surrounding hills. Jobs were drying up. Enter George Corbett Bayless, son of privilege, noted capitalist, and complete piece of shit. I mean, look at this prick.

Fun fact: George C Bayless had, among other things, been the youngest ever mayor of Binghampton NY at age 24, making him one of the more infamous examples of the Boy Mayor phenomenon.

George and his bro started a paper company in the 1880s. By 1900 he was looking for somewhere to build a paper mill, which brought him to Austin. It had plenty of wood, workers in need of jobs, and if you were to build a dam further up the valley, all the water a mill could need.

After a failed earthen dam and one that was insufficiently large for the mill's needs, Bayless decided to build the largest concrete dam in Pennsylvania. He enlisted an engineer with the most 1900s name ever, T. Chalkey Hatton. No one has names like this anymore.

Hatton turned in a design, and Bayless went about cutting every corner and ignoring whatever parts of it were too expensive, despite Hatton's protests. Bayless assured everyone it would hold. Here is the finished dam, with the earlier dam behind it in the distance.

The dam was finished in 1909 and immediately began to crack. A grocer from Austin named William Nelson repeatedly told people that the dam was defective and a ticking time bomb. He made trips up to the dam to do his own inspections. People laughed at our boy William.

Due to Bayless' interference with the designs they had serious issues whenever the water filled in behind the dam. I won't go into it but there's a whole sequence of completely predictable problems and ridiculous fixes that were undertaken over the following year.

There was constant talk about the dam failing but Bayless assured everyone that it was The Dam That Could Not Fail (tm). And people wanted to believe this, because the entire region depended on Bayless and the paper mill. He had their jobs, where else were they going to go?

And so on September 30, 1911, the dam burst, sending a wall of water down the valley. Cora Brooks, who ran a house of ill repute up the hill, spotted it and called the telephone operators below in town. That's Cora in the middle.

Katherine Lyons was the head operator and she stayed in the building calling everyone in town and in nearby regions who had a telephone. Her coworker Lena ran from house to house screaming to run for the hills.

The town was destroyed. 79 people are recorded to have died, including William Nelson and his wife. There were also uncounted deaths of immigrant workers who lived in camps between the town and the dam, so the count was likely much higher.

It was a whole scandal, and it led to the first dam regulations in Pennsylvania. Check out this politician, who lost family in the disaster. The dynamics are still the same today, which is the darkest absurdity here.

This is all that remains of the dam. There's a mural, featuring William Nelson on the left, giving the stare of someone who very much told you so.

We're still in this same spot, really. The people were at the whims of the capitalists who owned their livelihoods. People in power were too afraid or straight up sympathetic to do anything about it. And so a lot of people suffered and died.

It's bleak that these disasters are described as "happening", like it just came out of the sky one day, as opposed to being the result of a very clear sequence of events enacted by specific people with specific goals. These ruins didn't "happen", they were made.

A mile or so down the wooded valley lies the ruins of the paper mill. It was destroyed by the 1911 dam breakage but a new one was rebuilt on the foundations. In 1944 it burned, leaving the skeleton that remains today.

When we parked down the back road to walk up to the mill, we ran into a local guy and his girlfriend. He asked if were there to see the mill, and warned us not to enter one of the buildings, as part of it had recently collapsed.

We talked for a minute or two, and we said we had been reading up on the history of the town. "Yeah man, I'm born and raised here and I don't know, this town is cursed". And then he laughed and then we all laughed and then he got in his truck and drove away. And we moved on.

We've been to a lot of old and crumbling places before, but this had the distinction of being the first place that was actively falling down while we were inside of it. Bricks and chunks of cement would just hit the ground. You'd hear thuds and cracks from unseen places.

Bayless, of course, skated through the manslaughter charges and other challenges by virtue of being a rich and connected capitalist. He just went on with his business before dying in 1923.

Legit shocked there isn't a Bayless Children's Hospital or library or something here, as the standard move when you want to launder the reputation of a shitty rich guy is to do that "but he was a philanthropist!!" shit. I live in a town called Carnegie. This is an old, old game.

You can get numb to this kind of thing after awhile if you don't take the time to stop and look and ask why things are this way, and if they have to go on like this forever, or if they could even if they wanted to.

If you want to read more about this whole thing there's a lot out there. Two of the several spots I pulled from here that are good expanded summaries are pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/Austi… and centralpahistory.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-tale….

tfw u told them so