A gas station is surrounded by water along East First Street in Williamsburg after the remnants of Hurricane Agnes swept through Blair County 50 years ago. Photo courtesy Williamsburg Then Williamsburg Now Facebook page

As Hurricane Agnes made its way up the Eastern seaboard 50 years ago, many Blair County residents assumed they would only receive a bit of rain — and rain it did, with Agnes dumping nearly 3 inches throughout the area during a 24-hour period.

The deluge in June 1972 caused widespread flooding and a landslide on Route 22 at the foot of Short Mountain, according to Mirror records. By the time Agnes left Pennsylvania, 50 people were dead, 220,000 were homeless and 68,000 homes and 3,000 businesses were destroyed — costing the state $2.3 billion in damages.

By the time the Mirror’s Friday, June 23, 1972, evening edition came out, Blair County was “reeling” from the flood brought on by Agnes.

Julia Shokker, a Blair County Historical Society board member, was a teenager when Agnes swept through the area. She and a friend had been leaving the old movie theater in Hollidaysburg after watching “Cabaret” when they saw how flooded the streets were.

“Everybody thought it was just going to be rain — and it was rain, but it was so much rain,” Shokker said. “The water was running so swiftly downhill, my parents were concerned with how they were going to get us.”

High water floods the railroad crossing at High Street with the bridge crossing to the Robeson Extension over the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata River in Williamsburg after the remnants of Hurricane Agnes swept through Blair County 50 years ago. Photo courtesy Williamsburg Then Williamsburg Now Facebook page

Driving home to the Allegheny Furnace area, she noticed how many trees were down and how many cars were stranded in the Kmart parking lot because of how high the water was.

“We thought minor flooding would be what happened; nobody thought, ‘oh gosh, the hurricane is going to hit us head-on,'” Shokker said.

Damage to Shokker’s home was minimal, with only the basement flooding.

Others, however, were not so lucky.

Some residents from Geeseytown, Kladder Station, the Loop, Frankstown and Canoe Creek were temporarily evacuated from their homes, according to the Pennsylvania Mirror’s “The Flood of 1972,” a special edition booklet that detailed the disaster.

Remnants of Hurricane Agnes caused Bald Eagle Creek to flood roads in downtown Tyrone 50 years ago, as seen in this image from the Pennsylvania Mirror’s “The Flood of 1972.” Courtesy photo by the Pennsylvania Mirror’s “The Flood of 1972”

In the Mill Run area of Logan Township, about 60 families were evacuated, according to Mirror records.

Sections of Sinking Valley and Claysburg were inundated in low-lying areas, the booklet read, and Brush Run Creek outside of Hollidaysburg also overflowed, submerging some 50 vehicles at the Samuel Rea Shop.

Also in Hollidaysburg, the water was described as “deep, with water coming out of the electrical conduits in the sewage treatment plant.”

Additionally, homes and trailers near McKee were flooded and Plum Creek between Roaring Spring and Martinsburg were threatened in some areas.

In Altoona, a retaining wall along Mill Run Creek was washed out and the center stone pier of the Spruce Avenue Bridge was washed away, the booklet said. At Ivyside Drive and Park Avenue, a pier to a bridge over Spring Run was washed out, along with the edge of Union Avenue along Mill Run.

The east side of Beale Avenue was also washed away at 31st Street and was partially undermined, the booklet said.

Williamsburg Mayor Ted Hyle, who graduated from Hollidaysburg Area School District two years after the flood, recalled being trapped at home because Route 22 was impassable due to floodwaters and the landslide at the bottom of Short Mountain.

While Hyle’s family only had a little water in their basement, he said some of his neighbors lost houses and that some trailers floated down the river.

“The neighbors and everybody along the river got their belongings, they kind of evacuated their places,” Hyle said.

While all of Blair County was inundated with rain, Tyrone was one area most notably affected by the floodwaters.

Tyrone reported “tons of water and the streams are rising” with the Juniata River cresting at 25 feet between midnight and 2 a.m. on June 23, Mirror archives said.

“It rained for eight days straight,” John Scott Hiller, president of W.F. Hiller agency in Tyrone, said. “I’ve never been so happy to see the sun in my life.”

Home from college at the time Agnes hit, Hiller helped his family prepare for the storm by carrying all of the files from his family’s insurance agency to the building’s second floor.

Located on Pennsylvania Avenue in low-lying downtown Tyrone, Hiller said he wanted to see how much water was in the agency’s basement during the storm. He opened the basement’s trap door only to see the water was mere inches away from overflowing onto the first floor.

“It didn’t get any higher than that,” he said.

Estimates of damage to other businesses were not available, but almost all downtown Tyrone businesses had at least several inches of water in their basements, the PA Mirror booklet said.

The original Shell Run Creek, which ran by an alleyway, created a ditch so large that people who had cars parked in their garages couldn’t get them out for months, Hiller said.

“I was in Guam at one point and we had a small monsoon season, and the eight days of [Agnes] was worse,” Hiller said.

He also recalled how the culvert in Tyrone couldn’t handle all of the floodwater so some of it ran down Logan Avenue, and how the bridge that crossed the Little Juniata “actually acted as a dam.”

According to the PA Mirror booklet, 260 people were evacuated from their homes along Bald Eagle Creek during the first night of flooding and approximately 100 homes were damaged by flood waters.

The bulk of evacuees who spent the night of June 22 at the Tyrone Area High School came from the section of town between 13th and 15th streets between Bald Eagle and Pennsylvania Avenue, the booklet said. Most of them returned to their homes on June 23 when waters began to recede.

Larry Derman, former Tyrone Borough Council member, remembered walking through a flume that came out near the Hookies Fire Company when the floodwaters finally receded.

“I saw one house whose foundation at the corner they could look into,” Derman said. “Everything in their basement was flooded and turned upside down.”

While the PA Mirror booklet said that Tyrone’s lowest point was covered in more than 3 feet of water in some spots, Derman estimated it probably reached 5 feet on the main street, as the parking meters were covered.

“There were major flood damages downtown; it was bad,” Derman said.

During the downpour, Derman rode to the reservoir with the water department foreman and saw that water was coming over the dam. The waterway on the side couldn’t handle all of the additional rainfall, he said.

“That was scary,” Derman said, adding that if the dam had failed, Tyrone would be gone.

“It would have been another Johnstown.”

Williamsburg hardest hit in Blair

Of all the flood-stricken areas in Blair County, the loss of personal property was greatest in Williamsburg, archives said.

Clover Creek, which went through the town, was “like a raging river.”

Businesses in Williamsburg, such as the paper mill, were damaged by the 5-foot high floodwaters from the Juniata River and Clover Creek.

The high waters also hit churches and homes, including the 24 mobile homes in a park on the river’s bank that were totally submerged.

Donna Tate, a lifelong Williamsburg resident, said that she had a relative who owned a home in the trailer park but was away when Agnes hit.

“When the flood came up into where the trailers were, farmers came with tractors and pulled the trailers out and put them on High Street in town,” she said.

Tate was 21 when Agnes hit and lived on a dairy farm between Short Mountain and Yellow Spring. With the floodwaters and the landslide, she couldn’t get to work at the Hollidaysburg Veterans Home for several days.

“It was blocked with flooded water,” Tate said. “There was no way out of Williamsburg.”

For Rich Brantner, who had become the Williamsburg police chief in February 1972 at the age of 25, the arrival of Hurricane Agnes just four months later was a trial not by fire but by water.

“I got my feet wet, literally,” Brantner said. “I got initiated at an early age.”

The only full-time officer at the time, Brantner was kept busy. Some part-time officers lived across the river, but since everything was shut down, no one could get in or out of the area.

He said that like with any other tragedy, “there’s always some people who try to take advantage” and that there was “some looting” throughout the town.

“I’m not sure how long I went without sleep so I could patrol the community,” Brantner said. “The National Guard coming was a big help to me.”

Brantner also remembered the trailer park by the river and the farmers that came to pull the trailers onto High Street.

“They didn’t take time to unhook everything — they would have been washed away,” Brantner said.

According to the PA Mirror booklet, Williamsburg’s sewage treatment plant had to be shut down because the motors supplying power to the plant were completely flooded.

“A week after the rains began and as sewage backed up in the borough system, there was still no date in sight for beginning operations at the plant,” it said.

Blair County wasn’t the only hard-hit area in Pennsylvania.

Barbara Hollander, who has lived in Altoona for the past 40 years, grew up in Wilkes-Barre and had just graduated high school when Hurricane Agnes made its arrival. When the floodwaters began to rise, she and her family fled their home to stay in a hotel about 25 minutes away.

They had only packed overnight bags because they thought they would be coming right back, she said.

However, when they drove to the edge of town, they saw boats being driven through the streets.

“We had to wait until the water receded, and when it did, it left mud,” Hollander said.

Once the water receded, they were able to return and were surprised to see their home still standing, she said.

She recalled seeing other houses that had been lifted off of their foundations and left in the street.

“We were a mile away from the river, people closer got hit harder than we did,” she said, adding that the water reached 2 feet into the second floor of her family’s duplex.

Hollander said her family lost nearly everything — she doesn’t have any photos of herself as a child and her father doesn’t have anything from his time in the U.S. Army.

“What was interesting was that the water must have lifted up the china cabinet and as it receded it lowered it and our china was still good,” she said.

The family focused on reopening their paint store first, so they could make a living. Hollander’s job was cleaning the mud off the paint cans so they could be sold as-is.

“He really opened up almost immediately because, you know, people were trying to clean up,” she said.

Then, at home, Hollander recalled having to cut the carpet into 3-foot pieces because it was so heavy with mud.

“I remember how surreal it was because the town was all one color — the buildings, the trees, the bushes, it was all brown, it was one color of mud,” Hollander said.

Besides assisting in the cleanup, her other job was to travel outside of Wilkes-Barre and pick up McDonald’s for the other workers. When she would come back, she would have to show ID to the police that stood on nearly every street corner.

“Looting was also a problem; they brought in the National Guard,” Hollander said.

The government gave her a stipend for clothes when she went off to college that September.

“When I went for orientation, I really had nothing with me,” Hollander said. “We really didn’t have anything.”

Hollander said that the government really helped out the area with loans to rebuild, giving out clothes and food and cleaning up cemeteries that flooded.

“I didn’t feel traumatized, I just felt we had to do what we had to do,” Hollander said. “In times of trouble, people have to stick together and help each other. There’s no other way to get through it. That’s my big take on life.”

Recovery operations were hampered across the state by lack of power, stranded or ruined machines and scattered fires, the PA Mirror booklet said. However, perhaps the greatest irritants to rescue workers in the devastated areas were “sightseers who hampered emergency operations, caused rush hour-like traffic and drew needed manpower away from the main recovery effort.”

In Blair County, flood damages totaled an estimated $15.7 million in today’s money, with Williamsburg and Tyrone reported to be the hardest hit.

In Williamsburg, damage to the Williamsburg Paper Co. alone was estimated to be between $500,000 and $1 million, or what would be $3.4 million and $6.8 million today.

Damage to Williamsburg Borough itself was estimated to be $875,000 or what would be $6 million today. In Tyrone, damages were between $255,000 and $355,000, or between $1.7 million and $2.4 million today.

Floodwaters from Agnes left 20 families in the county homeless eight days after their homes became inundated. Initially, 316 people were driven from their homes, the PA Mirror booklet said.

Temporarily displaced from their homes were 100 families in Williamsburg, 100 in Tyrone, 86 in Hollidaysburg and 30 in Logan Township. Permanently displaced were 17 families in Williamsburg, two in Hollidaysburg and one in Tyrone, the booklet said.

Donations of food, clothing and medicine continued well after the disaster, with some relief agencies receiving more donations than could be accommodated, archives said.

Following Agnes, William Fink ran for Tyrone mayor to “get some flood control in town, which we did.”

“Since we got that flood control into place, I’m proud to say we haven’t had any downtown flooding,” Fink said.

He said that the 6- to 7-year project to curtail serious flooding in the borough got over 400 homes out of the floodplain.

In Williamsburg, a playground and athletic fields were built where the trailer park once stood, said Donna’s husband, Rich Tate. The trailer park was apparently not allowed to rebuild there.

“I don’t know what government agency was responsible, but they tore a lot of those houses down so they couldn’t get damaged again,” Tate said. “A lot of houses were by the river, a large repair-type garage, they were razed, also.”

While the flooding was devastating, Tate said it only took about a week or two for things to get back to normal, with the guys who liked to fish getting back to it pretty quickly because there were big fish in places they normally wouldn’t be.

He also recalled those same men rescuing fish trapped in puddles left behind by the floodwaters. Most importantly, he remembered the Williamsburg residents helping each other recover.

“When people were having trouble with their houses, the kids jumped in to help them get their belongings out,” Tate said. “It’s not a bad little town.”

Mirror Staff Writer Rachel Foor is at 814-946-7458.

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