Big Flats and the 1972 Flood

 by Rachel Dworkin, Archivist

1972 was going to be Big Flats’ year! It was the 150^th anniversary of the town’s founding and they had big plans. There were events scheduled throughout the year including a historic fashion show, town reunion, baking contest, art show, canoe race, antique show, and massive birthday party. The highlight of the whole thing was to be the Big Flats Diamond Jubilee three-day extravaganza from June 22^nd through the 24^th. The first night, Thursday the 22^nd, would start with an evening carnival at the Community Park. The next day would feature a firematics event, plus concerts and square dancing. Saturday was to be a massive parade featuring floats from every community organization in the town. Too bad Hurricane Agnes had to come and ruin everything.

Big Flats Jubilee button, 1972

 

The rain from Hurricane Agnes started late in the night on June 21^st and it just kept coming. By the 23^rd, the entire hamlet of Big Flats, plus large swaths of the more rural portions of the town along the Chemung River were under water. Nearly 3,000 residents were forced out of their homes into shelters at schools in neighboring Horseheads. To make matters, two ruptured oil tanks in the hamlet of Big Flats spilled a half-million gallons of gasoline into the flood waters. As the waters receded, crews from Sun Oil, Arco, and Gulf attempted to remove the fuel, but it wasn’t until June 28^th that the fire department declared that the threat of explosions had passed and allowed residents back in. Hundreds of homes were damaged. James A. Markell’s home on Olcott Road was entirely swept off it’s foundation. An additional five homes had to be razed by the town due to structural damage.  

Canal Street in the Hamlet of Big Flats, June 23, 1972

 Big Flats farmers were hit hard. Bill Smith, a State Senator with a dairy farm on Rt. 352, lost 18 of his 75 animals, plus 200 acres of corn, 20 tons of hay, and 10 tons of cow feed. The family had managed to move most of their furniture to the second floor Thursday night and had to be rescued by boat out of a third floor window Friday morning. All told, Chemung County farmers lost $3.5 million in crops and livestock. Thanks to that oil spill, some 4,016 acres of land in Big Flats, Southport, Ashland, and Chemung all showed signs of contamination, rendering them unusable for planting for years to come. Even without the spill, the flood washed away between 6 inches and, in some places near the river, three feet of once-fertile top soil, meaning even uncontaminated farms would struggle come spring. 

Smith farm in Big Flats from the air, June 23, 1972

Big Flats from the air, June 23, 1972

 The oil also polluted people’s drinking wells. In a recent interview with Big Flats resident Gloria Dick, she recalled that her family had been lucky enough to have a well fed by a spring which came down off a hill behind their house. As one of the few homes with safe drinking water, they kept their neighbors supplied. They weren’t the only ones helping. Teens from YES (Youth Emergency Services) under the auspices of Corning Glass Works cleaned flood mud from homes throughout Big Flats. 

As for Big Flats Diamond Jubilee? It was postponed until September, but folks still had a pretty good time. The real tragedy was the town’s planned history book, 150 Years: Big Flats, New York by Mrs. Samuel Farr. The first run of 2,000 copies had finished printing at 4pm on June 22^nd and was ready for sale at the Jubilee, only for the flood to destroy all but 700 copies. To make matters worse, the original manuscript, plus all the original photos, maps, and drawings used in the book were lost, meaning there could be no second edition. 

Town leaders had hoped to make 1972 a year to remember. It was. Just not the way they hoped.

Tales from a Flooded Hotel

by Erin Doane, Curator

On Wednesday, June 21, 1972, the rains from Hurricane Agnes began to fall on the Twin Tiers. By the next day, the Chemung River was at 15 feet in Elmira, local creeks were overflowing, and people all throughout the region had begun evacuating their homes. On June 23, the river overtopped the dikes in Elmira and surged through the city’s streets, submerging businesses and homes under feet of turbulent, muddy water. Local first responders and the National Guard rushed to evacuate hospitals and rescue as many people as possible from the raging flood waters. Through it all, the Mark Twain Hotel in downtown Elmira became a refuge, but not everyone got out alive.

Aerial view of Elmira, June 1972

The Mark Twain Hotel turned into an island as flood waters rose and was cut off from the outside world. Reports in the Star-Gazette estimated that there were 1,500 to 1,700 people who had fled to the hotel, but no one seemed to know who sent them there as it was not a designated evacuation site. The truth was that there were only 194 people at the hotel during the flooding including employees, registered guests, and people who sought shelter at the hotel as flooding intensified.

Roseanne M. Whitted and Nancy Rios were both working at the Mark Twain Hotel during the Flood of 1972. Our archive has an oral history recording of them telling about that time. Roseanne remembered working in the Connecticut Yankee Lounge in the hotel and repeatedly checking to see if the flood waters were rising. “We were basically going to the Grey Street entrance not thinking of the North Main Street entrance where the water would come in first.  Then when that appeared it was like ‘Oh, my G-d!’” When the water started coming inside, patrons helped her start moving things out of the lounge and upstairs to protect them from the rising flood.

Both Roseanne and Nancy lived at the hotel as part of their compensation for working there and so they became stranded with the rest of the guests when downtown went under water. Nancy recalled that they did not get evacuated because it wasn’t considered necessary. “We felt safe the whole time that we were there,” she said. Since the power was out, all the food in the big refrigerators and freezers in the hotel had to be cooked. Fortunately, there were gas burners in the kitchen so that could be done, and it gave guests and staff fresh food to eat on top of the supply of C-rations that were delivered to the hotel by boat. They spent a lot of time playing cards, hanging out in the lobby, and conversing with the guests because there was nothing else to do.

View down Gray Street toward the Mark Twain Hotel as the flood raged

Among the guests stranded at the Mark Twain Hotel was an Eastern League baseball team, Three Rivers, that had been schedules to play against the Elmira Pioneers on Saturday, June 23. (An amusing side-note: the game appeared with other Easter League scores in the newspaper as “Three Rivers at Elmira, rain.” Dunn Field was actually under water.) When the flood waters washed through Bern Furniture, which was across Main Street from the Hotel, the players and umpires grabbed furniture as it floated by and pulled it into the hotel to save it. One table still had a plastic floral arrangement on it as it rode the current across the street. After the waters receded, the team had to wait for a tow truck to come and pull their bus out of the three feet of mud into which it had sunk while parked beside the hotel.

Others, who weren’t already guests at the hotel, went to it to take refuge from the rising waters. 25-year-old Richard Wein of Williamsport, Pennsylvania checked into the hotel with his wife and two young children after a harrowing experience. While fleeing from their home, their car got caught in flood waters. Richard was able to get his family onto higher ground but had to abandon their car. They hitchhiked to Elmira where they found shelter at the Mark Twain Hotel.

Edward M. McNulty and his wife Edna check into the hotel at 3:30am on June 23 to escape the impending flood.  Just two and a half hours later, Edward suffered a heart attack and died in their room. Edward was a well-respected man in the community and served as executive director of the Chemung County Council of Alcoholism. He was 62 years old. At 8:00am that same morning, the dikes overtopped, and the hotel was surrounded by raging waters. Everyone became trapped inside, including Edna and her dearly departed husband. It was not until the next day when the flood waters receded that they were able to leave.  

All those who had been holed up at the Mark Twain Hotel during the flood were sent on their way as soon as possible. Even those who had been living and working there like Roseanne and Nancy were forced to leave as the devastated city went into lockdown and a curfew was put in place. Cleaning and repairs to the hotel began almost immediately as the building was to continue serving as a refuge for those affected by the flood. The Federal Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD) leased the second and third floors of the hotel to be used as homes for displaced flood victims over the age of 60. The senior housing officially opened just one month after the flood on July 24, 1972.

Mark Twain Hotel, 1974