A Pennsylvania Town Watched Its Dam Bend 32 Inches in 1910. In 1911 It Killed 78 of Them

There is a concrete wall standing across a valley in northern Pennsylvania that has been broken for a hundred and fifteen years. It is fifty feet high. Pieces of it stand in the stream bed where they landed, and the stream runs between them. Two miles below it is the town of Austin, where the wall killed seventy-eight people on a sunny Saturday afternoon in September of nineteen eleven. Everybody knows what it is. There is a park around it now. You can camp there. And the part that is hard to sit with is this. The dam did not break once. It broke twice. Twenty months before the day it killed people, the whole town had stood on the hillsides and watched it bend. IF YOU ARE GOING UP THERE As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Pennsylvania Atlas and Gazetteer (DeLorme) - Freeman Run, the mill site and the back roads into Potter County are all on it: https://amzn.to/4iu51zY WHERE IT IS Austin Dam Memorial Park: 41.65306 N, 78.08556 W On Route 872, about a mile and a half north of Austin, Potter County, Pennsylvania. The park is free and open year round. The dam ruins are a short walk from the parking area, and the monument with the names is at the base of the largest standing section. Camping is available in the park. The ruins of the paper mill are a little further downstream and are being brought into the park; check locally before going onto that ground. Costello is pronounced kos-TEL-oh. Bayless is BAY-liss. A NOTE ON THE IMAGES The research and the script are mine, from primary records and archives, and the sources are listed below. Where no photograph of a place survives, and for this channel that is often, the images are period material from elsewhere rather than the place itself. SOURCES Association of State Dam Safety Officials, Austin (Bayless) Dam case study, damfailures.org Report of the Water Supply Commission of Pennsylvania, 1912 Engineering News, October 1911 Pennsylvania Center for the Book, "The Dam That Could Not Break: Austin, 1911" Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, "A Veritable Stone Wall of Death" Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Austin Flood Disaster historical marker Austin Dam Memorial Association Library of Congress, Bain News Service photographs, September and October 1911 Act No. 555, Laws of Pennsylvania, June 25 1913 IF YOU WERE THERE If a name on the monument is family to you, if your people worked at the Bayless mill either before or after the flood, or if anyone in your family remembered the second dam going in 1942, I would like to hear it. The night the town spent in the woods in January 1910 is barely in the written record and somebody's grandmother must have talked about it. Comment or write to [email protected]. Old Alignment. Abandoned American roads, railroads and infrastructure. New video every other day. #austindam #pennsylvaniahistory #damfailure