The Galveston Storm

Water Front, Galveston, Texas,
1910.
Taking the Long View, 1851-1991

On September 8, 1900, hurricane winds of at least 120 miles per hour ripped across the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, killing over 5000 people and decimating the city of Galveston. During the eighteen hour storm, tidal waves swept through sea-level streets, destroying homes and buildings and wiping out electricity, roads, and communication systems. As news of the disaster spread, supplies, including tents for the nearly 8000 homeless, poured into Galveston from across the nation.

Seawall and Beach, Galveston, Texas,
circa 1910-1920.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America

Rebuilding Galveston involved construction of a reinforced concrete seawall and raising the city above sea level. Eight miles long and seventeen feet high, the massive seawall repells Gulf winds and water. Equally impressive, sand from the Gulf of Mexico was used to lift the city far above its previous grade. Ultimately, portions of Galveston lay fifteen feet above former levels. These fortifications continue to help protect the city from hurricane damage.

Galvestonians also transformed the structure of their city government. During reconstruction, a five-man commission replaced the mayor and board of aldermen. Initially viewed as an emergency measure, the commission form of government was so efficient that Galveston permanently adopted the scheme. The "Galveston Plan" was widely imitated by other cities and became a benchmark of early twentieth-century municipal reform.

Galveston Flood, Coney Island, New York,
circa 1910-1920.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America

The powerful hurricane's devastating impact on the people of Galveston captured the nation's imagination long after the water subsided and the town was rebuilt. By 1904, the "Galveston Flood" amusement park attraction at New York's Coney Island promised patrons a first-hand glimpse of the "scene of horror." On a stage two-hundred-feet-square, the audience watched a simulation of Galveston's destruction. A 1904 guidebook describes the show:

Thunder, lightning, the fury of the wind until the maddened waters leap from the depths, rush wildly over the city, carrying death before it, leaving a scene of despair after it—all of which forms an exhibition entirely new in the annals of the European or American stage.

History of Coney Island (New York: Burroughs & Co., 1904.)

Documenting Disaster for the Public

Searching Ruins on Broadway, Galveston, for Dead Bodies,
1900.
Inventing Entertainment: the Edison Companies

Purchase The Galveston Cyclone series, the Edison Films Catalog urged theater owners:

Procure these films and increase the receipts of your exhibitions. This great disaster which has startled the entire world, has made an indelible impression on the minds of the public, and everyone will be interested in seeing authentic moving pictures of a representative American city almost entirely wiped out by the combined power of water and wind.

Learn more about Galveston in American Memory:

• Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, ca. 1851-1991 contains many pictures of newly rebuilt Galveston, Texas. Search under Galveston to access these photographs. The seawall is prominently featured in many pictures including the "Second International Pageant of Pulchritude and Eighth Annual Bathing Girl Revue," of 1927.
• Search American Life Histories, 1936-1940 on Galveston to find stories such as "The Blessed Candle," Mrs. Thresia B. Callahan's account of her experiences in Galveston during the Civil War.
• Search the collection Inventing Entertainment: The Edison Companies on Galveston to locate additional films from the The Galveston Cyclone Series, including Panoramic View of Tremont Hotel, Galveston.

The Quarrymen of Vermont

Take granite out of Barre, and it would be like taking the Capitol out of Montpelier.

"President of the Barre, Vermont Chamber of Commerce,"
circa 1940,
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

The American Federation of Labor granted a charter to the granite quarry workers of Barre, Vermont on September 8, 1903. To document the lives of workers whose union standards outpaced the nation's, writers from the Federal Writers' Project interviewed Barre quarrymen in the early 1940s. Many of these interviews are in the American Memory collection American Life Histories, 1936-1940.

The North End Granite Plants,
Barre, Vermont, 1917.
Taking the Long View, 1851-1991

One of the workers' chief concerns was stonecutters' tuberculosis, a deadly condition caused by inhaling airborne granite particles. Labor unions organized to insist employers install dust-removing equipment. One Vermont granite worker explained, the workers were "pretty well resigned to their fate. These stonecutters expect that one day sooner or later they will get [stonecutters' tuberculosis]." Interviewed in an era when when workers' rights were very narrowly construed, he recounted:

The big worry of some of [the quarrymen] is that they'll die before they have made good provision for their families. That's the real reason behind the strikes. They feel that since they're 'marked' men with perhaps less time to provide for their families than the average man, that they are entitled to higher wages. Besides there are certain periods in the year - we call them slack time and dead time - when there is little work to be done. Sometimes only a few men work during these slow weeks; sometimes, none at all.

"Granite Worker,"
Montpelier, Vermont,
Mary Tomasi, interviewer, 1938-1939.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Channeling,
a New England Granite Quarry,
circa 1908.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

Barre, Vermont (the Granite City),
1891.
Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929

Each death was mourned by the community of laborers. Interviewer Mary Tomasi recounts the sadness Giacomo Coletti felt on the loss of his friend and fellow stonecutter Pietro:

Tonight he does not feel the wretched guilt that the news of Pietro's death first brought him. It was Giacomo's glowing letters (22 years ago) of excellent wages paid in America that persuaded Pietro to cross the ocean and learn this granite-cutting trade. These last two nights were an excruciating nightmare of thinking that if Pietro had stayed in the old country perhaps he would not now be lying dead from this stone-cutters' TB. It took Nina and the children to convince him that the 'Dio's will' called Pietro from this world, and he would have been forced to answer had he been in Italy, Africa, or the very ends of the earth.

"Giacomo Coletti,"
Montpelier, Vermont,
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Learn more about the stonecutter's life:

• Search American Life Histories, 1936-1940 on Barre or the words quarry, granite, or stonecutter to find interviews like "A Barre Family."
• Search Taking the Long View, 1851-1991 on Barre or the words quarry or granite to find related images.
• Search the collection Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920 on quarry to find images such as Loading, a New England Granite Quarry.