MOUNT VERNON — A photo postcard recently came into my collection that records a momentous disaster that happened in Knox County 108 years ago this week.
After days of heavy rain, on Tuesday, March 26, 1913, rivers flooded all over the state of Ohio. Knox County saw extensive flooding in Mount Vernon (which we’ll explore on some other occasion).
The village of Zuck was completely wiped off the map. Another place hit hard was Brinkhaven, on the Mohican River.
Local weather watchers claimed that Brinkhaven saw over a foot of rainfall before the rainwater swelled the river out of its banks. The village has never entirely recovered from the flood, for Brinkhaven used to be almost double the size it is now. If you drive east on Ohio 62 past the town, the large grassy field between the highway and the village used to be an entire neighborhood.
Today it sits empty, because dozens of houses and businesses were washed away there in the 1913 flood.
In my 2018 History Knox column, “Postcards from the Brink,” I tracked down the whereabouts of the rental house shown in a photo postcard sent by Ada Grassbaugh. That house was located just west of the Wally Railroad trestle that swung through Brinkhaven running north and south, along the river.
This new postcard image — one I’ve never seen before — shows a couple of two-story houses in flood water that reaches up to the bottom of the second floor. Behind them, a small barn seems to be in the process of collapsing. By the end of the flood, over 20 houses would be destroyed here.
Examining the well-known “bird’s eye view of Brinkhaven,” a popular postcard of the period, one can see that the bulk of the neighborhood lay east of the trestle, unlike the Grassbaugh house. Though not enough detail is clear to identify these houses, it seems almost certain they stood in the eastern part of the neighborhood, for the railroad trestle is not visible.
The photographer documenting the event (and quickly selling his photo postcards) was either perched in a boat, or perhaps for stability of focus, standing on the roof of another flooded house. It is difficult to determine which way the photographer had his or her camera pointed.
It was presumably looking north from a boat or flooded structure, or southeast from the hillside the rest of the town stands on to this day.
The card is postmarked from Brinkhaven, on April 8, 1913, at 9 am. This is about a week and a half after the disaster, and the postcard writer seems to be quickly informing a relative that the family is OK.
The first part is a quick rundown: “all well & everyone else. Lauren is home Bill tomorrow, the Akron people are all well.”
Then it refers to the fatal tragedy that happened in the Brinkhaven flood: “found Harry & Kate Sunday, the funeral was held at M E Church yesterday at 2 Pm.”
Harry and Kate Workman lived in a house on the west side of town, adjacent to the Thompson Mill, right along the Mohican River. Eyewitnesses reported that at the height of the flood waters, the Workmans’ house began to give way. Observers saw the couple jump together from the house as it collapsed. They were swept away in the flood waters.
As the waters receded, many residents helped search for the couple and their infant child, also lost. But after days of searching, no bodies had been found.
The Friday after the flood, Harry’s brother Charles, desperate for information, went to the town of Newcastle, across the line into Coshocton County, and conferred with a fortune teller known as “Old Gorum.” The old psychic concentrated for a while and then told Charles that his brother and sister-in-law would be found “at the head of the mill race,” and that the child was further downstream.
Charles Workman, armed with this lead, had friends gather a large search party on Sunday. They built a temporary rock dam so they could deflect the waters of the Mohican away from the mill foundation (for the mill itself had also washed away in the flood).
After diverting the water, they used portable pumps to drain the mill race. Harry and Kate were found, clutching each other, just where Old Gorum said they’d be, at the head of the mill race. The child’s body was never recovered.
A famous (or infamous) photo postcard — perhaps by the same photographer — recorded the recovery of the bodies.
The writer of the new postcard sounds as if she actually attended the funeral. I say she, because, after a couple more partly illegible comments, she signs off, “will say good by from home, Mother.” This suggests she had been temporarily staying somewhere else.
Cracking exactly who the writer was is complicated by the fact that someone later on, perhaps a child, has scribbled on the card with a pencil.
That partially covers the address, which is made out to “Mrs. Art S. _____, Gambier, Ohio.”
I can’t make out the last name for certain. A perusal of the 1910 census of Gambier reveals an Arthur S. Thompson, but he was not married until 1914. It is interesting to note, however, that Art Thompson was a miller in Gambier. Perhaps the same family that owned the Thompson Mill in Brinkhaven?
Perhaps he did have an earlier marriage than the 1914 one, for which documentation has not survived. Or, if he was already engaged to his wife-to-be, perhaps this postcard is from her mother, already referring to them as a couple.
Art Thompson married a woman named Mary Lane in October 1914, but I’ve not been able to determine more about her, nor her mother.
In the end, it appears to be a quick reassurance note hastily scrawled (with misspellings and little punctuation) on the back of a photo postcard of scenes the writer likely encountered herself. The week and a half is explained by the fact that it took that long to restore normal postal service and train service.
Newspaper reports tell of three businessmen stranded in Brinkhaven and being fed by locals until the provisions ran out. After that, the business travelers walked to Danville, where they were able to find someone with a wagon — and passable roads — to get them to Mount Vernon, the nearest operational train station.
The men remarked to a newspaper reporter that they were treated so well in Brinkhaven, they would always remember it as “Brinkheaven.”
As for the fortune teller “Old Gorum,” a history of Newcastle township by Ken Slaughter that was published in the Jan. 4, 1953 issue of the Coshocton Tribune tells us that there was a fortune teller who lived in Newcastle named William Gorham. Slaughter describes Gorham as “one of the professors of the occult sciences, who claimed he could discover hidden objects by a magic formula.”
An article by D. S. Snider on the genealogical website coshoctonohio.pa-roots.com says that for a time, Gorham’s reputation was “almost national” and that Gorham would get many letters asking for his insights.
Snider said, “he did not presume to be positive. He invariably conditioned his statements with ‘It appears’ so and so.” According to Slaughter, Gorham’s success rate faltered and his reputation later crumbled.
As it turns out, there was more than one “Old Gorham.” William Gorham passed away in 1889, but he taught his son Ebenezer the trade that he himself had learned as a boy in England. Thus, the fortune teller that Charles Workman sought was Ebenezer Gorham.
Ebenezer had earned the epithet “old” himself by this time, as he would have been about 65 years of age. He can be found on the 1910 Federal Census for Newcastle, and sure enough, his profession is listed as “astrologist,” not something you see every day on rural censuses from this period.
According to a June 6, 1936 article in the Coshocton Tribune, “the Gorhams were never wealthy, but they became widely known as weavers of fine rugs and fortune tellers. In earlier years, it was not uncommon on Sunday afternoons to see scores of horses and carriages lined up at their humble little home, with visitors from Coshocton, Mount Vernon and other nearby points.”
For 25 cents, “Old Ebbie” would tell your fortune. For 50 cents, he’d even write it down for you. His “office” was a tiny room on the second floor of the small house. He permitted visitors to sign and date the plastered wall, so after many years, the walls were covered with hundreds of signatures.
Ebenezer lived with his sister, neither of them ever married. He died in 1920, then she passed away in 1936. The old house and all its contents were subsequently auctioned away, including an oil painting of William, the original “Old Gorum.” One wonders where that painting is at today, if it is still in existence.
Alas, today there is no psychic in Newcastle to tell us where to look.
