Memories of winter flood, carver’s visit
Lincoln funeral train model turns up again
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 9-10-05
The Mohawk Valley was hard hit by winter floods in February 1938. Although not by any means comparable to today’s devastation in the Gulf Coast, the flooding did get extensive local newspaper coverage.
John Bianchi’s family in Amsterdam saved newspapers from that date to remember the flooding.
There were 48 hours of incessant rain and the river became “a mass of swirling torrents and battering ice floes,” according to the Knickerbocker News, a former Albany newspaper.
One picture showed water rushing a few feet underneath the old river bridge to Amsterdam’s South Side.
“There goes old mill Number 4 of the Mohawk Carpet Mills of Amsterdam,” wrote the newspaper in a photo caption. “Piece by piece, brick by brick, the old structure is tumbling into the swollen Mohawk today as the aftermath of a night and day of battering by racing ice floes.”
Loss of the building was estimated at $100,000 and the lower mill of Mohawk Carpets closed for the duration, as did Chalmers Mill on the South Side. Amsterdam’s gas supply was cut off because water surrounded the gashouse, near what is now Riverlink Park. Some streets were covered with three to twelve feet of water.
In Fort Johnson, residents were heading for higher ground and Main Street in Fonda was flooded. Route 5 S east and west of Amsterdam was impassable.
But no injuries were reported and the weather turned colder, cutting down the threat of further flooding.
WOOD CARVER VISITED AMSTERDAM
“Your mention of a traveling medicine show (in a recent column) leads me to tell you about a personal coincidence involving a traveling show in Amsterdam,” wrote local native Richard Ellers from Ohio.
Ellers wrote: “I grew up from third grade on East Main Street, downtown Amsterdam, near Rapello's City Pharmacy.
“Sometime in the 1940s, after the Kresge 5 & 10 store on East Main Street west of Railroad Street closed, the vacant store became the venue for all sorts of traveling shows. One that impressed me was a gentleman’s intricate and large woodcarvings. I still remember his model of President Abraham Lincoln's funeral train.
“Who would have guessed that I would see the train again, and meet the carver, 30 years later, here in Ohio, after and because I became a traveling state reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. One of my earliest assignments was to travel to Dover, Ohio to do a story about a wood carver, Ernest "Mooney" Warther. What a surprise: I walked into his museum and there was the funeral train model that I remembered. Mr. Warther told me he'd taken his carvings on the road to earn money during the Depression.”
Warther was born in Ohio in1885 to a family of Swiss immigrants and lived until 1973. According to the museum web site, the Lincoln funeral train currently on display was carved when Warther was 80 years old. Perhaps Ellers saw an earlier version in Amsterdam in the 1940s.
According to a Lincoln history web site, the Great Emancipator’s funeral train in fact passed through the Mohawk Valley, going by Amsterdam at 5:25 p.m. on April 26, 1865.
Historian Hugh Donlon wrote in his “Annals of a Mill Town” that soldiers of the 153rd regiment from Amsterdam, Glen and Mohawk were on guard duty during the trial of President Lincoln’s assassins.
Donlon said that support for the Civil War effort was not unanimous in the Mohawk Valley. Although Lincoln carried the town of Amsterdam and Montgomery County in 1860, Lincoln trailed General McLellan by 391 votes in the county in the 1864 election, although Lincoln did carry the town of Amsterdam by 131 votes that year.
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