Great Dayton Flood: NCR, Patterson key players as life savers
By the third day of The Great Dayton Flood — 100 years ago today — the NCR factory had been transformed into a massive relief center, turning out 1,000 loaves of bread, hundreds of gallons of soup and nearly 300 flat-bottomed rescue boats.
Survivors found refuge here, on high ground, in what had rapidly become a small city, complete with a medical clinic and a morgue.
Here some survivors found lost loved ones in the morgue as National Guardsmen stood watch over the bodies. But there were joyful reunions as well.
Elizabeth Stoppelman of West Dayton arrived at the NCR building with a heavy heart, believing she had lost two of her six children on Tuesday morning.
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Two days later, when Stoppelman arrived at NCR, “she found all her children,” said Barbara Hoff Farrell of Maryland, Florence’s daughter. “The woman in the boat had made a mistake, and all of them were safe.”
Such vignettes already had established NCR founder John H. Patterson as Dayton’s savior. On March 27, Gov. James M. Cox officially named Patterson president of the Dayton Citizens Relief Committee to monitor the city’s recovery. “If Patterson hadn’t done what he did, a lot more lives would have been lost,” said University of Dayton history professor Paul Morman.
