Pennsylvania

On the afternoon of May 31, 1889, a dam gave way 14 miles above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and a wall of water carrying trees, houses and railroad cars came down the valley of the Little Conemaugh River. It reached the city in about an hour. More than 2,200 people died. It remains one of the deadliest disasters in American history.

The dam held back Lake Conemaugh, the private lake of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose members included some of the wealthiest industrialists in Pittsburgh. It had been poorly repaired and badly maintained, and the question of who was to blame was argued in newspapers for years. No court ever held the club responsible.

The flood was one of the first great disasters to be covered by photographers who arrived within days, and the pictures are hard to look at. Houses tipped on their sides. Streets buried under splintered lumber. The great stone railroad bridge where the wreckage piled up and caught fire, with people trapped in it. Clara Barton brought the young American Red Cross to Johnstown, its first major peacetime relief effort, and stayed for 5 months. In these pictures, look at the hillsides. The city sits in a narrow valley, and the steep slopes on either side explain why the water had nowhere to go.

Gettysburg is the other name in Pennsylvania everyone knows. The battle was fought over 3 days in July 1863, and Lincoln came in November to dedicate the soldiers' cemetery with a speech of about 270 words. Photographers reached the field within days of the fighting, and their pictures of the dead were among the first many Americans had seen of war.

The Delaware Water Gap shows a gentler Pennsylvania. The river cuts straight through the Kittatinny Ridge there, and by the late 1800s the Gap was a popular resort, with large hotels and visitors coming by train from New York and Philadelphia. The WPA posters belong to the 1930s, when the Federal Art Project put artists to work designing silkscreen posters for parks, health campaigns and public events. They are flat, bold and colorful, and nothing like the photographs around them.