As an overview of the Johnstown Flood Story, have students read the background article “Johnstown Flood Story” and examine the Flood timeline and floodpath maps as linked in the “Readings” section above.
Explain the impact the Flood had on the media (and the media had on recovery efforts) of the time. It was the biggest news event since President Lincoln’s assassination, very much like the coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or the Southeast Asian Tsunami of 2005.
Today we are accustomed to watching news while it happens (“Live on location!”), thanks to videotape, satellite, and broadcast technologies that have only been available for the last few decades. In 1889, when the Johnstown Flood occurred, the new technologies that eventually evolved into today’s 24/7/365 news coverage were still young.
After the 1840s electric telegraph was the surest way of sending one-to-one messages quickly over long distances. Telegraph lines ran along the train tracks in most towns, because the railroads used them to control train traffic. Newspapers quickly formed networks like the Associated Press to telegraph stories to each other from every part of the country. A little more than ten years before the Flood, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which sent voice messages over telegraph wires. Some Johnstowners already had telephones, though they didn’t have many other people to talk to yet in 1889! A way to send signals without wires — radio— would have been a great help to Johnstown after the Flood washed out all railroad tracks and telegraph/telephone wires, but the “wireless telegraph” wouldn’t be invented for another seven years.
As for ways to publish or broadcast one-to-many, print on paper was the only medium available in 1889: newspapers, magazines, and books. The process for getting news to the public was for reporters to telegraph their stories to their editors who put together the newspapers, which were printed every day and delivered to subscribers.
Photographs did not appear with the stories, since newspaper presses couldn’t print them clearly. Instead artists would illustrate the stories, by looking at photos, if they were available, or listening to eyewitness descriptions. Like other artist-reporters, they often went on location sketching and drawing what was happening and sending them back for other artists to make into engravings. Some famous artists of the late 1800s, like Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast, got their start as artist journalists in the Civil War.
Instead of being published in newspapers and magazines, photographs were published as prints, as “plates” in books, or as stereographs. Almost every house had a stereopticon — a viewer for stereo photos — so this was one of the most popular ways of distributing photographs of the Flood.
Discuss:
Of course, print journalists had their own challenges — how to put into words the scenes of destruction that they could scarcely believe seeing with their own eyes! Turn this activity around for a descriptive writing exercise, that also stretches historical imagination: