the period when thought for the morrow begins to take shape. Individual cases stand out. It becomes apparent who are the heaviest sufferers. The statesmanship of reconstruction must now assert itself. How can losses be restored, houses rebuilt, the necessaries of life replaced, ruined business built up? These are the questions for whoever would help in the great task of rehabilitation. Answers must be found before wise expenditure can be made of the money which has poured into the flooded region to swell the sums raised by the neighbors of those who have suffered.

For three months the Muskingum valley has busied itself in this third period of reconstruction, but the work is not yet done. The special

agents of the Red Cross, three of whom were snatched from charity organization work in eastern cities and found themselves on the scene co-operating with local citizens before the flood was a fortnight old, have long since departed. The work begun by them was left in the hands of local persons in whom the population, through long acquaintance, had thorough confidence. To these people, designated in turn as the special representatives of the Red Cros., was intrusted the spending of Red Cross money, so much to this family, so much to that. The ring of hammers and the slap of trowels bear witness to their success. But it is the success of those who have received even more than of those who have given.

July 5, 1913.

If we start at the head of the valley at Zanesville we shall learn how the raging current, rising 51 feet above its normal level, completely divided the town into three parts, between which there was no communication for taree days. We shall learn that 15,000 of the 30,000 inhabitants were at one time or another dependent on the bread line for food. We shall learn that in this town of 7,000 families, 3,441 houses were flooded. Of these, 157 were totally destroyed. 1,700 families needed further and constructive help.

How have the people of Zanesville, with the funds in hand, set about to rehouse the shelterless? In addition to extensive repairs to dwellings only partially damaged, two styles of cottages are being built. One has two rooms, the other three. Clare Benz, for example, an elderly unmarried woman who

lives alone, has been given a two-room house, measuring 16 by 24 feet. Rose Hoffman, a widow, has been given a threeroom house. Mrs. Hoffman will occupy one room and support herself by renting the other two. The contract price for this dwelling, which measures 16 by 36 feet, is $660.

A few miles south of Zanesville we come to Gaysport, a cluster of only 100 people, yet thirty houses were wrecked or damaged. Here will be pointed

out to us the largest remains of any bridge throughout the whole

July 5, 1913.

SEVEN IN A SHACK

A family of seven lost everything except enough wreckage to build a shack. In this and a borrowed tent they lived until their new home was finished.

sixty miles of valley from Zanesville to Marietta -a single span reaching a few feet into the river.

Community spirit is showing itself at Gaysport in the work of the "building bees." By the rules of this game, invented by Ernest P. Bicknell, national director of the Red Cross, and first played in the forest fire region of Minnesota, a group of those receiving new houses join hands and erect, one by one, all the houses for the group. Thus at Gaysport G. W. Leasure, Henry and Clarence Boetcher, Bert Trout, Charles Miller, Bert Wilson and James Pyle are putting up the seven houses which they will themselves occupy. These are two-room cottages 14 by 26 feet, with peaked metal roofs and ceilings eight feet four inches high. The pattern for each house, delivered on the site, consists of all neces

sary lumber, bricks for chimney, metal roofing, laths, two glass-pannelled doors, four windows, locks, hinges, nails. The location of doors and windows is optional with the occupant. Someone has to be in general charge. to see that those who need are supplied and that materials are delivered as ordered. To superintend the housing from Gaysport south to Beverly, a stretch of thirty-five miles the Red Cross asked Dr. Lee Humphrey and Frank Beckwith to act as its representatives. These men are long residents of the locality, the former a physician, part

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owner of a lumber mill and director in a dime savings bank, the latter a builder of roads, a contractor in coal in the winter and wheat in the summer. By common consent Mr. Beckwith does the traveling which their joint job entails. Everyone knows Beckwith and calls him by his first name. The farmers' wives greet him as he passes, the trainmen signal to him as they roll by. As we go down the valley we shall see everywhere the age-old struggle between faith in the future and the teaching of experience. "It will never happen again", is uttered simultaneously with "the hillside for me this time". One man whose house was only slightly damaged wouldn't think of building anew until he can get a lot 100 feet higher than the old one; another, who lost everything, is content to start again in the same place, or only ten feet higher. The general tendency, of course, is to build on higher ground. A woman of Gaysport who owns the greater part of one hill has divided her ground up into lots 70 by 150 feet and in spite of the demand for them is selling them for $50 each on long payments. At another point the father of five children has followed a different plan to defy future floods. He has anchored short cables the thickness of elevator cables into his foundation. When the framework is put on the cables will be laced up through it, so that the next rush of water will have to take the foundation if it gets the house.

In one of the small towns the story is told of a man who having suffered in a previous flood had constructed a waterproof house. By a pro

cess all his own he declared that he had "fixed it so no water could ever get into his shack." On the night when the flood drove him to a nearby hill he strutted around with his thumbs in his

arm holes chuckling at the trick he had played

on the river.

"It can't hurt my house, I tell ye," he boasted, "unless it goes down the chimney. I forgot to cement a piece of slate over the chimney."

Whether his process worked will never be known, for that night the water went down his chimney in torrents and in the morning no house was left.

At Eaglesport, a few miles below Gaysport, we will be introduced to the chicken house which for some time sheltered the five members of Charles Kennison's family. They have since moved out and secured a new home up on a hill. This chicken house is a palace in comparison with the kennel which a despairing bachelor of sixty. reared over his head down in Malta, five miles lower. This man owned a home and a large warehouse in which he stored tobacco. Both went with the water. He recovered some hogsheads from the warehouse and arranged them in the form of the letter U with some boards across the tops. In this hole he stayed day and night. until a committee of local citizens found him and

July 5, 1913.

forcibly took him off to the hotel. The relief funds have since supplied him with a new house and a small start in business.

Let it not be supposed that community resurrection extends only to making wise use of that which comes by way of gift. Many of those who are receiving new houses bear a part of the expense themselves. Take, for example, the complicated but typical case of George Cleves, father of two children, whose wife is in delicate health. Cleves owned a home in McConnelsville, across the river from Malta, on which a bank held a mortgage of $800. The bank offered to meet, dollar for dollar, whatever amount the Red Cross would give, taking their sum off the mortgage. Cleves had his eye on a house on the Malta side which he could get for $600. So he put his case before the Red Cross, declaring that if he could secure enough money to make a first payment on the new house he would sign a new mortgage covering the balance: of the old mortgage and the remainder of the price of the house. The arrangement was made and thus, by the combined effort of the man himself, the bank and the Red Cross one more family was rescued from poverty.

The generosity of the bank in this case is only typical of the helpfulness of neighbors. Those who had saved a little money in forms which water could not reach are loaning it lavishly to their less fortunate fellows. The remark of Frank Beckwith's cousin is only one instance: "Frank, if you know anybody that wants a little money, just you send him around to Jim Beckwith. My house went, but I've got two farms yet, and I guess I can fix 'em up."

At Malta the washing away of the bridge inspired the people of the town to rig up two impromptu ferries. Each consists of an ordinary flatboat slung on a cable which the people themselves stretched across the river. The cable passes through pulleys fastened at each end of the railing on the up-stream side of the boat. Wooden handles with notches in the end are supplied to the passengers. They go to the front of the boat, slip the notch over the cable and draw the handle in close to the cable so as to get a grip. They then walk back toward the shore which they are leaving, the handle remains firm on the cable and the boat is propelled its own length by the time the head of the procession reaches the rear of the boat. The whole thing is then done over again. It is possible for one man to propel the boat across the river in this fashion, but such is the spirit of helpfulness in the valley that he rarely has to do it. One day's count showed that these ferries had carried 4,600 persons, 420 teams, 22 automobiles and three carloads of sheep.

Such is the demand for lots away from the river that it would be easy for property-owners to boost prices. But one doesn't try to get the

better of one's own family in a business deal, and the people of this valley have been welded into one great family. A curious kind of competition has asserted itself, however, at Roxbury, a tiny center of 100 people which was completely wiped off the map. When the signboard of the railroad station was finally found, there was no place to put it. So it was propped up on a large boulder which the waters had placed conveniently near. There it stands today, inviting some grim humorist to inscribe across the top 'Here lies", thus completing the suggestion of a single sepulchre for a whole village. But the people of Roxbury, all of whom escaped, showed a disposition to scatter to safer regions. The storekeeper who, though owning most of the higher ground near Roxbury, was practically land poor, saw all his customers about to drift away. In order to keep them and their trade, he promptly opened sale on all his land, disposing of it at small prices on long payments.

At Beverly lives the luckiest man in the flood, the "barefoot poet" of the Muskingum. Political conventions, cosmic upheavals and elemental ravages are his favorite themes. Like a true laureate, he was putting the flood into rhyme before the waters had receded. If you are curious to know why so forlorn a piece of human driftwood considers himself the luckiest man in the flood, he will tell you, standing on tip-toe to do it. "I lost nothing", he will say in a shout plainly meant to be confidential. And then, raising himself still higher, "I had nothing to lose."

This, then, is the story of how one valley is raising itself from the dead. But it is also, in its essentials, the story of how every other valley in the flooded district is going about the same task. For this flood, which killed 625 people in two states alone, was no respecter of localities. Dayton and Hamilton on the Great Miami, Col

umbus and Chillicothe on the Scioto, Zanesville and Marietta on the Muskingum, Logansport, Peru and Terre Haute on the Wabash, and a score of places on the Ohio can testify that here was a rampage of the elements which seemed to leap from watershed to watershed, desolating a dozen valleys and laying waste a hundred towns. Other rainfalls may have totaled a larger volume or may have lasted longer or may have covered a wider territory, but none to which the memory of man returneth, says one student of the subject, established so unique a record in all three of these departments. Throughout the waterwrecked region, therefore, there have been the same problems of reconstruction as in the Muskingum, the same statesmanship of relief, the same community heroism.

However much others may look upon this work of reconstruction as a victory of the community and by the community, the stricken people themselves are not unmindful of the channels through which aid has reached them. To many of them the name of the American National Red Cross was never before known. To some of the more ignorant ones it is still but a hazy reality, moving mysteriously as some unseen power. Nevertheless, scores of letters have poured into the headquarters at Columbus, expressing the gratitude of those who feel that in some way their very lives have been returned to them by utter strangers. One of these will show the painful efforts which many of those helped made to record their simple thankfulness.

"Dear Charitable Friends

of the Red Cross Society :

"I received the check for $500 and also the tools and household goods which I lost in the high water. I thank you a thousand times for your great Charity wich you shoed on me and my Family and should it be in my Power ever to help the Red Cross Socity along in there Charitable Work I will sertainly do so, in short I can not thank you enough for what you have done for me and my family may God bless you one and all and may you prosper in all your undertakings. Thanking you once more I will remain your thankful Friend."