Slideshow: The Johnstown Flood

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

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Multimedia presentation by
Marylynne Pitz, David Bear, Larry Roberts and Lizabeth Gray
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The 35-foot-high wall of water that thundered into Johnstown in 1889 looked and sounded like the apocalypse to the Rev. David Beale. Then, 118 years later, a young historian who considered becoming a Methodist minister took a Bible in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. Nathan Koozer plunged into the 19th-century diaries of the Rev. Beale, a Presbyterian minister and flood survivor who wrote what is considered the best account of the "most appalling calamity of modern times."