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MARCH 1913 · IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS OWN FLOOD
The order: The great flood of March 1913 put some 2,000 Fort Wayne homes under water; the Maumee crested at 26.1 feet on the night of 26 March, the dikes guarding Lakeside breached, martial law was declared, and the relief organisation aided 11,187 people. In the middle of its own catastrophe, the city filled an order for thirty-eight coffins — for Peru, Indiana, down the Wabash, whose dead the same flood had made. Stephen B. Fleming sent a special relief train to Peru as well. The coffins survive in the record as a single line in the News-Sentinel's reconstruction of the week, and they are printed here at exactly that weight: a city underwater, counting its own homeless by the thousand, shipping coffins to a neighbor. It is the bleakest oddity in this section, and one of the best-sourced — the flood's file also notes, for the record's honesty, that no Fort Wayne flood of 1936 appears in any of the city's flood lists; that famous flood was Pittsburgh's and New England's, and Indiana's 1930s flood, January 1937, was an Ohio River event.
Sources: the Events section of this history (the Floods marker record and the News-Sentinel flood reconstruction — the crest of 26.1 feet, the 11,187 aided, the Fleming relief train and the 38 coffins for Peru); the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center's Fort Wayne flood case study (the city's flood list, with no 1936 Fort Wayne entry).