Hurricane Hazel, which hit the Easton area in 1954 (I am unsure of the month), was a scary, windy storm, which although I was only 7 at the time, I can still recall how it made the house sway a little as its strongest winds hit. We lived in a frame house on a fieldstone foundation, which meant the house wasn’t fastened too firmly to the foundation and relied mainly on its weight to stay in place. Hard rain hit a lot more often and opened a leak under the gutter outside my parents’ bedroom window and a drip to develop over Mom’s dresser.
The next year brought far worse weather to Easton, but more so to the whole Northeastern U.S. in some form or other. We were hit by two very wet storms close together, and while they never achieved hurricane status (winds exceeding 75 MPH), both Carol and Diane were called hurricanes anyway. Carol had hit the middle of August 1955 and dumped a lot of rain on our area and I think everywhere else it hit too. Directly on its heels, before the rivers had had a chance to carry all the water away from Carol, Diane hit, again more rain than wind. The ground was saturated and could only pass the rain onto the small streams, creeks, and the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers.
My father worked second shift at the Treadwell Engineering foundry on South 25th St., on the edge of Palmer Township, and days he did landscaping when the work was available. He had gone to Phillipsburg that morning (August 19th) to the Ricciardi estate and reported that when he came back at noon, the free bridge was closed due to rising water swirling around the two ancient stone piers in the Delaware River, and that the Pa. Side of the toll bridge had water high enough that he was in water up to his hubcaps. It was still raining at that point. Dad expressed doubts that he could go to work across the old Glendon Bridge, which he normally crossed to get to Treadwell’s, because the roads approaching the bridge on the West Easton/Wilson side of the river were low and flooded easily. I don’t remember if he went thru town on his way to work that afternoon or if he came straight off the Glendon Bridge and went up the hill to West Easton, which would take him away from any flooding, but he did get to work that afternoon.
Getting home that night was not going to happen. By the time his shift ended at 11PM, the water was so high that the downtown was beginning to flood and the Glendon Bridge was closed too, so he stayed at Uncle Jack’s, who lived in the 2700 Block of Freemansburg Avenue, about a mile from where Dad worked. The next morning he went up to Bethlehem, where there were high water bridges across the Lehigh River, and made his way down through the back roads to South Easton.
I’m sure by the time he got home Saturday morning that we had no electricity or running water, because while South Easton was too high to have anything other than localized street flooding, Easton’s water supply came from a plant that was flooded by the Delaware River, and was contaminated to boot. Our electricity came from a plant that was next to the Lehigh River just back from the Third Street Bridge. As I recall, we had no electricity for about a week, and had to boil drinking water at least 2 weeks and probably longer.
I should explain a little about how the various bodies of water at Easton are related. Easton is situated at the confluence of the Lehigh River, Delaware River, and Bushkill Creek, across from Phillipsburg New Jersey. There was and is a dam at the mouth of the Lehigh where it enters the Delaware. The Delaware flows south and The Lehigh enters it just north of the Canal Street area and South Easton. The Bushkill Creek enters the Delaware at the foot of College Hill on the north end of the downtown area. The picture then is of a relatively flat downtown area with flowing water on three sides of it. There is an unused canal system that runs on the south bank of the Lehigh and west bank of the Delaware. As I write this (2003) it has been and continues to be developed as a tourist attraction, but in those days it was just a stagnant breeding ground for mosquitoes. The only affect to South Side directly by the flood was to wells that were used by the water system that were in the area of the Abbott Street exit locks of the Lehigh Canal. Other than that, South Side was not directly flooded, just cut off for a few days.
Saturday the 20th, after Dad got home and did what he had to help us deal with the lack of electricity and water, He took us, us being Mom and my brother David, as well as he and I, up into Lachenour Heights, on the high ground at the northeast corner of South Easton above the area where the rivers came together. I shall never forget what things I saw. The Third Street Bridge was dry in the middle, but the Route 611 approach from the south was flooded, as was the downtown area to about halfway between Lehigh and Ferry streets. A house had floated down the Lehigh and smashed into the bridge, and there were people on the bridge with a pickup truck trying to remove the smashed timbers. I have no idea if they were from the authorities trying to take a strain off the bridge, or just opportunists looking for some free wood.
Then we moved over to look at the area where the two rivers merged. The water was so high over the dam at the mouth of the Lehigh that we could see no turbulence at all from the dam. It was totally submerged in the water. The free bridge had a huge section torn from its middle and was all but completely covered with water. There are railroad bridges, abandoned today but in use then, that are about 50 ft. over your head if you are standing on the canal bank today. The water was lapping at the tracks and there were people walking across them. I was only 8 at the time and I knew that wasn’t a very smart thing to do.
The low-lying areas of the downtown eventually flooded but the higher portions had the same fate as South Easton no utilities but no water damage either. There was much damage in all the low areas of Easton, situated mainly along large streams and the rivers. Odenweldertown, also known as the flats, a poor neighborhood situated about a mile west of the downtown along the north bank of the Lehigh near where Easton intersects West Easton, suffered greatly from the flood waters, as well as the road going back from there all the way past the Glendon Bridge to Harry Sampson’s dump at the intersection of Lehigh Drive and South 25th St.
For most of Easton the flood was a very real nuisance, but did not cause any real lasting problems beyond the utility problems. I do not mean to diminish the very real hardships the folks in the downtown area, as well as businesses, had to suffer at the hands of these two rainy storms. I remember one time we had to go all the way to Bethlehem and across the high water bridges at Bethlehem Steel just to get to 12th St. in Easton to buy a paper, which had to be printed in Bethlehem due to the lack of power for the printing plant, which was in downtown Easton.
In those days there was little government help available, such as was afforded to the devastated residents of the Wyoming Valley 17 years later after the Agnes flood. We did the best we could and helped each other. My parents gave my brother’s crib, no longer used, to a family from Raubsville who had lost everything. Our neighbor Clair Ackerman, sustained a nasty looking infection around his ankles from polluted water assisting his sister-in-law’s family, also from Raubsville.
The free bridge, between Northampton St. in Easton, and Union Square in Phillipsburg stood with a gaping hole in its middle for well over a year, with an Army Bailey bridge, a causeway on pontoons, replacing it until it could be repaired. To this day the structure of the free bridge, which has been well-maintained over the years, shows a visible sag in the middle where it lost about 40 feet of framework and open gridwork decking.