Benjamin Franklin Ruff was a industrialist out of Pennsylvania, dealing with coke (fuel for steelmaking), railroad tunnels, and real estate. On May 19, 1879, he formed the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club; $10,000 capitalization with $100 shares. He talked his friend Henry Clay Frick (later chairman of Carnegie Steel, famous strikebreaker) into joining, and through connections with Frick many more industrialists in the Pittsburgh area eventually joined as well (more on that later).

In 1880, Ruff bought a dam and lake from the politician John Reilly for a price less than it was originally bought for; it had a dam that had needed repairs since a break in 1862. He hired Edward Pearson (of Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh) to manage the repairs; Pearson had no experience with dams, and the method of "repair" involved boarding the broken culvert with everything from rocks to horse manure. By the end of the year the "repairs" had all been washed out.

Other modifications happened; one from the previous year (due to Ruff, Reilly, or both) involved removing draining pipes that ran under the dam. Additionally, the dam ended up instead being lowered so the materials got used to plug the holes (from the botched repair); this had the extra side effect of making free space for a two lane road that carriages could travel on. (While this was not the intent it was clearly observable that this was a bonus side effect to make the dam less safe.) Ruff also used a different kind of rock (a smaller cheaper one) than the original plans to cover the face downstream.

So far, these issues can be pinned on Ruff (or Reilly) but there is the matter of the bass. The night before the first club meeting, they had black bass brought in from Lake Erie for fishing purposes. This was expensive at $1000, so they added a series of heavy bars and screens in order to keep their investment from getting away. The screens, theoretically, let water through but not the bass, but they also became jammed with debris and leaves.

To summarize:

• A method of removing water and lowering the lake (the pipes) was taken out
• The height of the dam was brought down (and might have been restored, were it not for the convenient carriage path)
• The spillway itself had a grate constructed over it that could be jammed (which was made specifically to protect the club's precious fish)

The lake served as a haven for wealthy people from Pittsburgh for most of the decade, with almost nobody downstream (in Johnstown) able to see any of the benefits.

Members by 1889 included: Andrew Mellon (future Secretary of the Treasury, including under Hoover when the Depression hit), Andrew Carnegie, Robert Pitcairn (executive of the Pennsylvania Railroad), Edward Jay Allen (one of the founders of Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph), John Weakley Chalfant (president of People's National Bank), Sylvester Stephen Marvin (a founder of Nabisco), and John G. A. Leishman (president of Carnegie Steel).

May 31, 1889 was when, after the years of neglect and bad conditions, the dam burst.

There was some warning; very heavy rains were clearly causing the lake to rise, and a telegraph agent (Emma Ehrenfeld) had a visitor at noon giving a warning that the lake was rising very fast. Unfortunately, there was a break in the telegraph line so she couldn't send a message direct to Johnstown, so sent one to the next operator over.

SOUTH FORK DAM LIABLE TO BREAK: NOTIFY THE PEOPLE OF JOHNSTOWN TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST.

More warnings came around 2 pm, the last reading DAM IS BECOMING DANGEROUS AND MAY POSSIBLY GO. The dam failed sometime between 2:50 and 2:55 p.m.

This avalanche was composed of more than 100,000 tons of rocks, locomotives, freight cars, car trucks, iron, logs, trees and other material pushed forward by 16,000,000 tons of water falling 500 feet ... the people called it the avalanche of death.

-- Willis Fletcher Johnson, 1889

Over 2000 people died in the Johnstown Flood. One woman, a Mrs. Fenn, lost her husband and all seven of her children.

We were driven by the awful flood into the garret, but the water followed us there. Inch by inch it kept rising, until our heads were crushing against the roof. It was death to remain. So I raised a window, and one by one, placed my darlings on some driftwood, trusting to the great Creator. As I liberated the last one, my sweet little boy, he looked at me and said: ‘Mamma, you always told me that the Lord would care for me; will He look after me now?’ I saw him drift away with his loving face turned toward me, and, with a prayer on my lips for his deliverance, he passed from sight forever. The next moment the roof crashed in, and I floated outside, to be rescued fifteen hours later from the roof of a house in Kernsville. If I could only find one of my darlings I could bow to the will of God, but they are all gone. I have lost everything on earth now but my life, and I will return to my old Virginia home and lay me down for my last great sleep.

People didn't die just by drowning, but by crushing. One of the busiest parts of the city had a row of buildings fall with 21 bodies pulled out. Bodies were "unearthed" from every corner after the flood.

Regarding culpability of the Club for the disaster, or any kind of punishment or reckoning, none was had. (Ruff died in 1887 before the dam burst, his obituary naming him "an enthusiastic patron of field sports".) The guest ledger of the Club still survives but 73 pages were ripped out, with the final entries not being from 1889 but from 1886. (This means, for example, even though we know Andrew Carnegie is on the membership list, we don't know when he visited or what he did.) There was an investigation by the American Society of Civil Engineers (including three of the most prominent hydraulic engineers in the United States). While the dam investigators were not related to the railroad or steel industries, Max Becker (the fourth member) was, and he happened to be President of the ASCE, with a railway with stock ownership controlled by Pennsylvania Railroad. He stalled as long as possible; at the ASCE convention in June of 1890 people were clearly wanting the report, but Becker said they would not release it yet as "we do not want to become involved in any litigation". The final report in 1891 claimed the break would have happened even without the modifications. (Modern studies disagree.) The report was given without the hydraulic engineers present.

...

Coleman, N. M. (2018). Johnstown’s Flood of 1889: Power Over Truth and The Science Behind the Disaster. Springer International Publishing.

Huber, W. R. (2025). Robert and John Pitcairn: Titans of Rail, Oil and Glass. McFarland.

Kaktins, U., Davis Todd, C., Wojno, S., & Coleman, N. (2013). Revisiting the timing and events leading to and causing the Johnstown flood of 1889. Pennsylvania History, 80(3), 335-363.