Local Resident Recalls: Little Girl Rides Attic Floor To Safety While Family Perishes In Johnstown Flood

Note: This article originally appeared in the Morrisons Cove Herald June 10, 1948, edition on Page 1. It was transcribed by Lugene Shelly.

Fifty-nine years ago last week, two simple words which contain one of America’s most gripping stories of horror and tragedy, first cast their spell on sympathetic minds.

As verification of their impact, the same words were featured this week in newspapers across the nation and crowded out of the day’s events on national news broadcasts.

To one resident of Morrisons Cove they were an especially bitter reminder:

Mrs. Harry Coons of Martinsburg was the sole survivor of her family in the Johnstown Flood.

It was Friday, May 31, 1889. Mary Renner, 12 years old (or maybe 13–birth certificates and family records were lost forever) was especially happy.

Her father had taken her and her brother to their first American circus, on Memorial Day. Her father was employed in a brick yard and their uncle was proprietor of a general store. He was fabulously rich, in the eyes of a child. He owned a large building with three stores on the first floor and several apartments on the second. His apartment had eleven rooms.

Out in the country, Mary Renner’s uncle was having a country home built. It was to be almost a mansion. The dumb waiters were especially amazing to the little girl from Germany.

It happened about 3 p.m. It was fun, at first. She asked children in the neighborhood to come up to her home to watch the water. Soon there were 18 boys and girls in her home. The house would never move, they were sure.

Suddenly, the danger and the horror and the tragedy gripped them. They saw a monkey from the circus float by on a barrel. Pigs, humans, trees, boards, buildings. Telephone poles–one ple drove through the side of the building like a sword piercing a straw stack.

They scurried for the attic.

The building groaned, swayed, cracked. The torrent tore it in two, like giant hands crumpling a match box. They were being carried away on the crest of the flood. Hungry, wet, terrified, the children clung together.

Twisting, turning their raft swirled downstream.

Screams and swift silence drummed on their ears.

The children lived long lives of terror in a few swift minutes.

The attic floor of Mary Renner’s home, with its cargo of playmates, neighbors and strangers, was gripped by the tentacles of trees and timbers and buildings which had piled up in the brickyards where her father worked.

The floor bumped and groaned and tipped again and again, into the water, but finally settled on their Mt. Ararat in the brickyard

They had no food, no water, no clothing. They were alive, but hardly aware of living.

Finally men came and carried them, one-by-one, to a nearby hill. Mary was offered stockings. “What would I do with stockings’? She asked the puzzled woman who offered help.

Then he uncle’s unfinished country home became the refuge of Mary and her friends. Her brother’s body was found downstream, 14 miles. Her mother was gone. Her father was not seen.

Fourteen of the survivors slept on the straw in one room of the country house for 3 weeks. But they were fortunate. There was milk from one cow. There were eggs. They set up a stove by running the pipe out a window.

Two weeks passed, and one day her father found her. He could no longer hear. Grief-stricken, he died soon afterwards.

Young as she was, the little girl joined in the overwhelming task of rebuilding the city. Help came from every side. Dealers from whom her uncle bought sent food and clothing for him and his family–even sending they by personal messenger from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

But Mary Renner for many years lived again in dreams of terror that May 31, 1889–which had promised to be such a happy day. Long afterwards she heard the echoes of the shouts for help–and the silence which followed them.

Soon she moved to Pittsburgh, where she grew up. After she and Mr. Coons were married, they lived in Pittsburgh for more than 20 years, then moved to Sharon. Mr. Coons, an official in the Westinghouse Company, retired two years ago and moved to Martinsburg. Last year they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Arthur E. Martz, proprietor of the planing mill in Martinsburg, is Mr. Coon’s nephew.