The day in 1915 when Waller and Shoal creeks collided

On April 22, 1915, it rained hard in Austin. Shoal Creek rose rapidly, as did Waller Creek.

Then age 7, Mrs. Gladys McCarty Shearer lived at 610 Wood Street. Now a small surface parking lot for the GSD&M offices on West Sixth Street, the property faces the southwestern banks of Shoal Creek.

Seventy-four years after the devastating 1915 flood, the Austinite, who also wrote a book about life in the 1920s, put down memories of her family’s escape into the darkness.

“The current was so swift, it was necessary to fight for every inch to keep us from being knocked down,” reads her account, housed at Austin History Center. “Added to this was the debris being washed down against us — all sorts of furniture, logs, animals, plus everything else of every kind and size but mostly large. We could see these coming by the angry, fantastic flashes of lightning on an otherwise very dark night.”

Just as harrowing as the sights were the sounds.

“Some were screaming, some yelling, some crying, some praying,” she recalled. “One screamed that a live wire was down. Another screamed that someone was washed away.”

The scene was just as bad on Waller Creek.

“Small houses were caught in the rising, boiling waters and carried downstream to pile up against the bridge on East Sixth Street between Sabine Street and East Avenue,” the April 23, 1915 Statesman reported. “A pitiful, heartsickening pandemonium reigned on the east side all along the vicinity of Waller Creek.”

Two days later, the paper counted 18 missing in addition to 14 known dead. Later accounts put the dead at 32 or 35 — or even as high as 57. One woman’s body was found many miles down the Colorado River.

Back then, people lived right on the creeks. Smashed houses, stables and other structures from both valleys met in the Colorado River, leading some to say that the two creeks collided there.

The southern approach to the Congress Avenue Bridge flooded and connections to South Austin were broken. A trolleyway on Dam Boulevard — now Lake Austin Boulevard — collapsed, taking a car with it.

Eleven bodies were found at Dyer’s Bend. (Still trying to confirm that location, but Mike Miller at the history center discovered that Elbert Dyer, former city engineer, helped build the Quality Mills flour mill near West Fifth Street and Shoal Creek.)

Of those bodies from both creeks identified the first day, seven were African American, three Latinos and five were members of an “Assyrian family named Halo.”

A fireman and father of a small child was drowned trying to save a woman. One offspring of privilege was killed: George Whittington, university student and son of A.G. Whittington, vice-president of the International and Great Northern Railroad.

In 1968, Regan B. Dickard, who had lived on a bluff above Shoal Creek at 808 West 10th Street, also wrote down his memories of 1915. The story is archived at the Austin History Center.

“We heard several gunshots followed by people shouting and hollering,” he remembered. “I put on a raincoat and walked to the edge of the bluff. At the southwest corner of the bridge was a house occupied by a Confederate veteran and his wife. I could see them walking around in a room holding a kerosene lamp, with the water up to their waists. The house started moving and disappeared.”

With the help of lightning, Dickard could see houses piling up downstream around Sixth Street, where the flood grew to several blocks wide. He could see the creek’s waters gushing into the Colorado River, which had not yet risen, then across a low-lying baseball field — now Butler Park — cutting off the Congress Avenue Bridge from the south.

“Part of the same flood came down Waller Creek with equal destruction,” he wrote. “I waited until daylight to do anything I could do. … At Seventh Street, we found two bodies, one of which was a policeman or a fireman and the other was that of a woman. I think that 57 people were lost and never found.”

After the flood, Mayor A.P. Wooldridge — namesake for Wooldridge Square — organized relief efforts. “Do you want to help the unfortunates?” newspaper notices read. “1 cent to $100.”

“The day after the flood, the people raised a large amount of money for relief,” Dickard wrote. “The second day after the flood, I drove a car for a lady whose name I do not remember. She lived on Pearl Street and her husband was a lawyer. She had $1,500 of the relief money which she dispersed in the Waller Creek area to the destitute.”

Dickard guessed that nine inches fell in less than hour.

“Today along these two creeks, there are many times the number of houses and buildings as then,” Dickard wrote in 1968. “And as sure as the sun rises, there will be another flood of the same magnitude.”

Since he put down his memories, some of those buildings were razed or moved as part of urban renewal. Others were damaged repeatedly in subsequent floods, including the deadly Memorial Day flood of 1981.

After that, much work was done on Shoal Creek and limits were placed on impervious cover, which forces water into the canyons more quickly. The Waller Creek Tunnel project, too, is meant to avert such future death and destruction.

For their part, Shearer’s family took refuge that terrifying night in a two-story rock house at West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard. They moved permanently to higher ground at 1011 Shelley Street.

Memories of 1915 never left, she wrote: “I relived it for years through nightmares and can still hear and feel the events of that night.”