On May 31, 1889, Walt Whitman’s seventieth birthday, 2,209 people were killed when the South Fork Dam failed, sending a wall rushing water and debris cascading into the riverside town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It was the largest civilian loss of life in American history up to that time (McCullough, 4). It was also one of the first major disaster relief efforts led by the American Red Cross, under the direction of Clara Barton.

source: Library of Congress

The dam, located 14 miles upstream from Johnstown, held back the artificial Lake Conemaugh, a canal basin that the state never completed due to emergence of the railroad. The lake was sold to private interests and became part of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, playground for wealthy Pittsburgh steel executives. The owners had made questionable modifications to the dam, lowering it in order to build a road on top of it. These modifications, along with poor maintenance and record rainfall were blamed for the dam’s failure.

On May 30, 1889, a storm swept over western Pennsylvania from the Midwest dumping six to ten inches of rain over western Pennsylvania. The following day, as Lake Conemaugh swelled, an impromptu team of men tried to clear debris from the dam spillway. At 3:10, the dam burst and the lake spilled into the narrow Little Conemaugh River, picking up houses, farm animals, people, barns, bridges, barbed wire, and train cars as it moved downstream. By the time the water and debris reached Johnstown, eyewitnesses reported it was 40 feet high and a half-mile wide (Loving, 116). At least 80 people died in the fires the followed as the debris that had piled up behind a rail bridge began to burn. Four square miles of Johnstown were completely destroyed. 1600 homes were lost. 2209 people, including 396 children and 99 entire families perished.

By the evening, the storm had reached Camden, where Walt Whitman and his supporters were celebrating the poet’s seventieth birthday party at Morgan’s Hall. Whitman was deeply saddened by the disaster. He found it ironic that the tragedy occurred during the height of his birthday celebration (Reynolds, 573).

Horace Traubel recorded Whitman’s remarks six days after flood.

8 P.M. Went down to W.’s with Harned, finding W. sitting in parlor at the window. Had but a little time before returned from his outing. Talked directly of the Johnstown affair. “It seems to hang over us all like a cloud,” he said—”a dark, dark, dark cloud.” And then he asked: “Do you think this Cambria matter interferes at all with the passage of the mails? We all live in Cambria County now (Traubel, 264).

Whitman wrote “A Voice from Death” about the flood victims. The poem was published in the New York World on June 7, 1889, only a week after the flood. Whitman was paid $25.

With sudden, indescribable blow–towns drown’d–humanity by
thousands slain,
The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron bridge,
Dash’d pell-mell by the blow–yet usher’d life continuing on,
(Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling, wild debris,
A suffering woman saved–a baby safely born!)
Although I come and unannounc’d, in horror and in pang,
In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale elemental crash, (this
voice so solemn, strange,)
I too a minister of Deity.
Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
We mourn the old, the young untimely drawn to thee,
The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
The household wreck’d, the husband and the wife, the engulfed forger
in his forge,
The corpses in the whelming waters and the mud,
The gather’d thousands to their funeral mounds, and thousands never
found or gather’d.
Then after burying, mourning the dead,
(Faithful to them found or unfound, forgetting not, bearing the
past, here new musing,)
A day–a passing moment or an hour–America itself bends low,
Silent, resign’d, submissive.
War, death, cataclysm like this, America,
Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart.
E’en as I chant, lo! out of death, and out of ooze and slime,
The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy, help, love,
From West and East, from South and North and over sea,
Its hot-spurr’d hearts and hands humanity to human aid moves on;
And from within a thought and lesson yet.
Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air!
Thou waters that encompass us!
Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep!
Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all, incessant!
Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm,
Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
How ill to e’er forget thee!
For I too have forgotten,
(Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
wealth, inventions, civilization,)
Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
mighty, elemental throes,
In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy’d.

Work Cited

Loving, Jerome “The Political Roots of Leaves of Grass.” A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman. Ed. David S. Reynolds.New York, NY: Oxford UP (2000): 116-117. Google Books. Web. 20 Oct. 2009.

McCullough, David G. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. 4-81. Google Books. Web. 20 Oct. 2009.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden Volume 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1964. Google Books. Web. 21 Oct. 2009.

Whitman, Walt. “A Voice from Death.” Whitman Poetry & Prose. Library of America College Editions, 1996. Print.

Camden’s role as a rail hub led to its rapid industrial growth in the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, the city had six railroads. Among the most important were the Camden and Amboy, and the Camden and Atlantic.

The Camden and Amboy Railroad was the first railroad in New Jersey one first in the United States. It was completed in 1834, connecting Camden to South Amboy on the Raritan River, where passengers could continue via ferry to New York City. Though it was called the Camden and Amboy Railroad, its real purpose was to monopolize travel through New Jersey between Philadelphia and New York City. It was the first railroad to use the all-iron flanged “T” rail, which would become standard on all US railroads (Lorett, 8).

image source: Library of Congress

The State of New Jersey granted the Delaware & Raritan Canal Company & Camden & Amboy Railroad and Transportation Company a limited-time monopoly in exchange for 1000 shares of the company.

image source: library of congress

Ownership of the Camden and Amboy Railroad changed several times over the nineteenth century through a complicated series of mergers, acquisitions, and leases. The Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad opened in 1836, offering a more direct route to New York City. However, the P&T terminal was inconveniently located in Kensington, far from Center City. Most passengers preferred to take the Camden and Amboy because its waterfront terminal was easily reached by ferry from Philadelphia.

1869 route map. image source: Rutgers University Mapmaker

Perhaps more famous than the railroad itself was John Bull, the original steam locomotive that served the railroad until 1866. The locomotive was built in Newcastle, England (no American company built locomotives at that time) dismantled and shipped without instructions on how to put it together. Camden and Amboy engineer Isaac Dripps reassembled it according to his intuition. The engine was originally called the Stevens, in honor of the railroad’s founder Robert L. Stevens. Over time, the crew began calling it the “Old John Bull” in a reference tothe cartoon caricature of Great Britain, similar to America’s Uncle Sam. In 1981, the John Bull was started up again, making it the world’s oldest running locomotive. It is currently in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History.

source: Library of Congress

Just a few blocks south was another important railroad, the Camden and Atlantic, which connected Camden to Atlantic City in trip that took just over an hour. Completed in 1854, the railroad was instrumental in transforming a thinly inhabited island to a thriving resort town. In fact, the Camden and Atlantic’s board of directors founded and planned the city. Atlantic City’s grid pattern intentionally copied Philadelphia’s, so that tourists from Philadelphia wouldn’t get lost in the resort city. The famous Boardwalk was the brainchild of Camden and Atlantic conductor Alexander Boardman. Atlantic City was a major summer escape for sweltering middle class city dwellers during the nineteenth century. Whitman frequently used to railroad to visit the Atlantic shore.

WHITMAN AND RAILROADS

Railroads were a theme in Whitman’s writing before he moved to Camden in 1874. For the poet, railroads were a powerful, unifying symbol of the modern age, the “pulse of the continent” (Nye, 172). He celebrates railroads in his 1870 poem “Passage to India.”

The earth to be spann’d connected by network

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

A new worship I sing,

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,

You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours

But in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul.

Historian David E. Nye wrote: “ . . . for Whitman the train was a part of a larger ‘passage to India’ that would link the Atlantic and Pacific and place the United States at the center of world commerce. He saw this “marriage of continents, climates and oceans” as more than the completion of Columbus’ voyages, for it intimated transcendent journey to the stars. . . The force of the locomotive became symbolic of the power to remake the land and to found new communities.” (Nye, 172).

Whitman mentions the Camden and Amboy Railroad in a letter from 1874, when he was living with his brother on nearby Stevens Street.

“The trains of the Camden & Amboy are going by on the track about 50 or 60 rods from here, puffing & blowing – often train after train, following each other – following each other – & locomotives singly, whisking & squealing, up the track & then down again – I often sit and watch them long … ”

It is likely that the trains from the Camden and Amboy Railroad inspired his 1876 poem “To a Locomotive in Winter”. The legendary John Bull locomotive was retired in 1866, before Whitman moved to Camden, so it is doubtful that he is referring to it here.

Thee for my recitative,
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,
shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of
thy wheels,
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern–emblem of motion and power–pulse of the continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps
at night,
Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,
rousing all,
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

The Camden and Amboy tracks ran just feet from the house at 328 Mickle Street where Whitman lived from 1884 until his death. The house was a short walk from the railroad’s terminus on the Camden waterfront.

REMNANTS TODAY

The legacy of these pioneering railroads lives on today. Both the Camden and Amboy and the Camden and Atlantic paths are still in use. The Camden and Amboy is now New Jersey Transit’s River Line, which opened in 1999. The River Line follows the exact Camden and Amboy path from just outside Camden to Trenton. Much of the route looks the same as it did in Whitman’s time, especially the scenic section between Bordentown and Trenton, where the line passes through Hamilton marsh. The Camden and Atlantic Railroad is now New Jersey Transit’s Atlantic City Line, which shares portions of its right of way with the PATCO High Speed Line and Amtrak.

Works Cited

Lorett, Treese. Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State

Landscape. Mechanicsburg, Penn: Stackpole Books, 2006. Google Books.

Web. 15 Oct. 2009.

Nye, David E. America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New

Beginnings. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Google Books. Web. 15 Oct.

2009

Whitman, Walt. Whitman Poetry & Prose. Library of America College Editions 1996.

Print.