By: Marianna Gatto, ISDA Contributing Editor

The Flood: The Story of a Family Heirloom on the Centennial of the Disaster that Begot It

It is said that every family heirloom holds a unique and deeply personal history. The story of my heirloom—a late Victorian golden oak dresser—begins with a flood: the 1921 Pueblo, Colorado flood. Although the dresser figures in my earliest memories and, more than any other piece of furniture, has remained a fixture in my life, it was not until recently that I came to understand the enormity of the event—the tragedy—that begot this most treasured heirloom.

I first encountered the word heirloom in the second grade when my class was reading a story about a girl who had unraveled a family mystery by way of an ancestral quilt.

Not only did I find the notion of heirlooms intriguing, the sound of the word itself enchanted me, conjuring images of tintype portraits, jeweled lockets, and hope chests. We had nearly completed the book when my classmate Erin invited me to play at her house.

Our conversation drifted to the story we had been reading and, as I came to learn, Erin was as captivated by heirlooms as I was. “Do you have any?” I asked in an excited whisper. Erin led me on tip-toes to the enormous china cabinet in her dining room and pointed to a large, green-and-white vase on the top shelf. “It’s Wedgewood,” she said, looking at me knowingly. “A family heirloom that belonged to my great-grandmother,” she continued, with the same snobby pretense that her mother spoke.

Her mother’s family—Erin frequently boasted—had come over on the Mayflower, and the way she emphasized the word, it was as if the Mayflower ended with an exclamation point.

As I stood gawking at the vase, I imagined her ancestors, dressed in their finest Pilgrim attire, passing the porcelain relic to a younger but equally ancient-looking member of the family. It was one thing to read about heirlooms, but seeing one firsthand was another matter entirely.

Admittedly, in second grade, I did not know Wedgewood was synonymous with fine china nor did I understand the implied superiority of being an Old Stock American.

By contrast, my father’s family had been among the huddled masses who fled southern Italy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although my father had achieved considerable success in his adult life, scarcity and want had defined his childhood.

I had heard—though seldom from him—stories about his early years, growing up during the Great Depression, when his mother made meals out of vegetable scraps and fabricated undergarments from repurposed flour sacks.

A horrible thought occurred to me in Erin’s dining room that afternoon: had my father’s family been too poor to even have heirlooms? What, if any, objects tethered me to the history, heritage, and experiences of my ancestors?

Later that evening, I cornered my father in his study and, wasting no time, I probed, “Dad, do we have any heirlooms?” Fearful he would confirm my suspicion, “No honey, my family was too poor to have heirlooms,” I braced myself. My father put down the book he was reading and looked at me quizzically. “Heirlooms?” he repeated. I stammered, “You know, things that are passed down….” He interjected, “Well sure, but why—what are you looking for?” A sense of relief passed over me; we indeed had heirlooms. Much to my amazement, my father got up from his desk and beckoned me to follow. Motioning to the piece of furniture that stood in my bedroom, he said in the tone my father used when sharing something pleasant or awe inspiring, “Your dresser has been in the family for many years. It survived the Flood.”

The Flood. It was an event so significant that it required no temporal or geographical reference point.

My father, who was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and had lived there until the age of 13, had spoken about the Great Flood of 1921 on a few occasions.

He described it in such vivid terms that not only did it make me recall passages from Genesis, but I assumed that he had experienced the disaster firsthand. As I came to learn, the Flood had predated his birth by more than a decade, yet the impact it had on his life was nonetheless profound.

Pueblo, a city 115 miles south of Denver, sits on the floodplain of the Arkansas River. During the early nineteenth century, the river ran through the heart of town and demarcated the international border between the United States and Mexico.

Then came the Colorado Gold Rush, and before long, the Borderland era gave way to the Gilded Age, a time when Colorado achieved statehood and the railroad connected Pueblo with the rest of the nation.

The opening of what would be known as Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) in 1882 led Pueblo to become a national—albeit now largely forgotten—manufacturing powerhouse. For its industrial prowess Pueblo, then Colorado’s second largest city, was christened with the monikers “Steel City” and “Pittsburgh of the West.”

CF&I, owned by John D. Rockefeller and railroad magnate Jay Gould, was the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi and a driving force behind Pueblo’s economy. The opulent mansions of Orman Avenue, the ornate commercial buildings of the Union Avenue Historic District, and the stunning Richardsonian Romanesque Union Depot, considered one of the finest railroad stations in the West, testify to the enormous wealth and stature that Pueblo had amassed by the late nineteenth century.

The steel mill would also define the city’s cultural fabric. CF&I, along with Pueblo’s smelters, foundries, factories, and fertile farmland, drew many immigrants to the city, especially Italians, Slovenians, Mexicans, and Czechs. At its peak, over forty languages were spoken at the steel mill alone and more than two dozen foreign language newspapers were published in Pueblo. In neighborhoods like the Grove, three different ethnic churches could be found within a couple blocks. The city’s Italian immigrants often hailed from Abruzzo and Calabria, but the majority, including my grandmother’s family, had immigrated from a remote village in Sicily—Lucca Sicula. So many Lucchesi settled in Pueblo that the two later became sister cities.

In 1897, my great-grandfather, Giuseppe Cortese, and his 12-year-old son, Giovanni, left Lucca Sicula for the United States, and like many Sicilians, Louisiana served as their port of entry.

Giuseppe and Giovanni worked on a sugar plantation near New Orleans for a season, scraped together their earnings, and purchased passage for my great-grandmother, Vita Soldano Cortese, and her infant son, Antonio.

Louisiana was only a sojourn for my great-grandfather; he never intended to remain in New Orleans. A padrone working on behalf of CF&I had recruited him and scores of other men from Lucca Sicula to work at the company’s main plant in Pueblo.

The promise of well-paying employment in the steelworks, coupled with the miserable nature of agricultural labor in the South—not to mention the region’s volatile racial climate—eleven Italian immigrants had been lynched in New Orleans six years earlier—ensured that my family continued west.

By 1899, my great-grandparents and their sons had settled in Pueblo, and while accounts of their early years are nearly lost to history, every indication suggests they were exceptionally modest times.

The family’s first home was among the ramshackle dwellings that clung precariously to the hillside overlooking the smelter. The enclave’s Italian families who raised goats on its shale slopes led to the neighborhood becoming known as Goat Hill, a name it still retains to this day. It was there that my grandmother, Maria Antonia Cortese, was born in 1901.

Like many Italian Americans, I feel a profound, if not inexplicable connection to the cities that served as portals for millions of our forebears—New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh, among other places.

However the spirits of my ancestors draw me further west, to the coal fields, steel mills, and farms of southern Colorado, a fascinating, though largely overlooked chapter of the Diaspora.

Imagining how my family survived Pueblo’s freezing winters, scorching summers, and the Influenza pandemic in a shack constructed from salvaged lumber with neither running water nor electricity never ceases to humble me.

Within a few years of their arrival in Pueblo, my great grandparents and their children had moved to a more dignified home in Central Santa Fe Bottoms, another predominantly Italian neighborhood located at the foot of Goat Hill. In June of 1921, when the Flood occurred, my great-grandfather Giuseppe was 67 years old and had retired from the steel mill.

He and my great-grandmother had become property owners. Their eldest son, my great-uncle Giovanni “John,” had also left the mill and was the proprietor of a successful barber shop on Union Avenue. My great-uncle, Antonio, who preferred the more American sounding “Anthony,” had finished his first year of dental school in Texas and was home for the summer.

My grandmother, Maria Antonia “Mary,” who was then 20 years old, did not work outside of the home. A devout Catholic, Mary was known as a “seer” among the women of Pueblo’s Little Italy, and was gifted in the folk religion traditions of Benedicaria.

Nanna Mary’s family felt a sense of optimism for the future, a sentiment shared by many Puebloans at the time. The Great War was over, the pandemic was behind them, and they were carving out their place in the United States.

Pueblo was also modernizing, improving its infrastructure, and establishing itself as a premiere American city. President Woodrow Wilson had recently affirmed Pueblo’s prominence by choosing it as the site for an important speech in which he advocated for the United States to join the League of Nations.

On the afternoon of Friday, June 3, 1921, a bank of ominous black clouds filled Pueblo’s western horizon and lightning flashed across the sky. Torrential rain fell in the center of town and where the Arkansas River and Fountain Creek converged. North of the city, heavy precipitation also fell in the area of Fountain Creek, and as it flowed southward towards Pueblo, the creek continued to swell.

But even as the storm intensified, and parts of Pueblo received more than twelve inches of rain in a span of an hour, a major flood seemed like a remote threat. The city was also in the middle of a protracted drought and the water level of the Arkansas River was at a historic low.

By the time Puebloans sat down to dinner that evening, the Arkansas River had neared the top of its banks. Steam whistles screamed out warnings, and as the downpour intensified, hundreds of residents rushed gleefully towards the river and the bridges that spanned it to witness the water as it sloshed against the edge.

There was little danger, they thought, as city engineers had recently widened the Arkansas’ channel and fortified its levees. In reality, conditions were growing more precarious with each minute that passed.

Jubilation soon turned to terror when it became clear that the levees would not sustain the rapidly rising waters and as word spread that levees had already collapsed in some parts of the city.

The crowd began to back away, slowly at first and then in a great panic, running through the streets while dodging automobiles filled with frantic drivers and their passengers.

Pueblo’s telephone operators, including those who were not scheduled to work that evening, braved the perilous conditions, made their way through the inundated streets, and reported to their posts, joining their colleagues in sending out distress calls. The women contacted every subscriber they could reach to warn them of the impending danger while fielding calls from trapped residents.

Even as the waters penetrated the lower floor of the telephone company building, the operators continued their work until telephone communications were lost, saving an untold number of lives.

Meanwhile, the authorities, assisted by volunteers, including veterans, Boy Scouts, and members of the local Elks order, raced to the city’s low-lying neighborhoods—Peppersauce Bottoms, the Grove, and Central Santa Fe Bottoms, where my family lived—urging residents to leave as a furious wall of water came crashing into downtown.

My family had only minutes to act before the Flood swept away most of the tangible representations of their American Dream. Nanna Mary managed to grab a handful of family photos—the only pre-Flood photographs of the family that now remain—and she, her brother Anthony, and their parents fled with little more than the clothing on their backs.

In parts of downtown and the low lying neighborhoods the floodwaters reached 18 feet, and while many residents managed to evacuate, others could not escape in time, did not understand, or dismissed the warnings. The force of the water was so great it disintegrated multi-story masonry buildings and bridges, tore houses from their foundations, uprooted hundred-year-old trees, and ripped train cars from their tracks.

When the floodwaters reached the power plant that evening Pueblo was plunged into darkness. An eerie quiet fell over the city, followed by a series of explosions and the sinister glow of flames. With its rail lines and roads in shambles and its telephone and telegraph communications lost, Pueblo was cut off from the outside world.

As dawn broke, the magnitude of the devastation became apparent. The Flood had covered over 300 square miles and had carved the city into three sections. It had caused the equivalent of $300 million of damage, destroyed 600 homes, and left more than 3,000 people homeless, including my family.

Entire neighborhoods and business districts were reduced to expanses of putrid water, mud, and rubble. Among the rescuers, the Grove, once a densely populated neighborhood, would be referred to as “Death Lake,” as it had been transformed into a vast basin, a catch-all for debris and the Flood’s human and animal casualties.

“Conditions are beyond description,” the Los Angeles Times would observe. Refugees, clutching the few belongings they had managed to salvage, filled the streets and sought shelter at the courthouse, local churches, and in tents supplied by the Red Cross.

Although Prohibition had gone into effect eighteen months earlier and Colorado had been a Dry state since 1916, bourbon was distributed to Flood victims for its medicinal properties. The National Guard also administered vaccines to protect residents from typhoid and smallpox.

For many of the Italian women of Central Santa Fe Bottoms, the Flood had stolen more than their homes and material possessions. It had also washed away the final resting places of their children.

In an era of high infant mortality, families who lacked the funds to pay for proper cemetery burials resorted to burying still-born babies and those who had died during infancy in the yards of their homes.

Over 1,500 people were initially thought to have lost their lives in the Flood, but the true number of casualties will never be known.

Many residents were single immigrant men who had no one to report them missing, while in other instances entire families perished.

Some of the disappeared were never found and many more were impossible to identify. As bodies overwhelmed the coroner’s office and local funeral homes, scores of victims were buried in a mass grave at Pueblo’s Roselawn Cemetery. Roselawn has created a memorial to those interred at the cemetery whose names and identities were never recorded.

When the Flood waters had subsided, my grandmother’s family returned to the site where their home of over a decade had stood and, using long poles, they clawed through the mud, hoping to locate personal items among the wreckage.

Submerged in the sludge, they saw the outline of a piece of furniture, and as they raised it above the surface, it revealed itself to be a woman’s dresser. The dresser did not belong to the family or any of their neighbors, however, so they placed it in one of the many “lost and founds” created to unite residents with their property. Days passed, and then weeks, but the dresser was never claimed.

The process of rebuilding Pueblo began immediately. Residents banded together, and within three years the city had largely recovered.

A return to normalcy would prove more elusive for my family, however, as there was no safety net or insurance policy to help them get back on their feet. Nanna Mary and my great-grandparents moved in with their eldest son whose Goat Hill home had been spared, and they brought the orphaned dresser with them.

Almost six months to the day after the Flood, my great-grandfather Giuseppe died. His official cause of death was nephritis, or inflammation of the kidneys, but I suspect the trauma of the disaster and the losses it precipitated were factors in his demise.

The economic toll that the Flood had on the family, coupled with her father’s untimely death, was likely why my grandmother would not marry until a decade later, when she was 31 years old, which was considered late for the time.

Following her marriage to my grandfather, Mercurio Ferdinando “Fred” Gatto, Nanna Mary assumed ownership of the dresser.

During the darkest days of the Great Depression, Nanna Mary gave birth to three sons in a span of four years. My grandparents, their three children, and my great-grandmother resided in a tiny, 700 square foot home at the very top of Goat Hill. In 1946, Nanna Mary turned to my grandfather and, with great conviction said, “There’s no future for our boys here, Freddy. We have to move to California.”

My grandfather stared at his massive, calloused hands, and nodded his head in resignation.

After being laid off from the steel mill he had gone to work for the WPA, but when employment was scarce, Grandpa Fred had resorted to riding the rails from city to city in search of an honest living, spending months at a time separated from his wife and children.

In the summer of 1947, my grandparents and their children packed their few cherished possessions, including the dresser, and bid farewell to Pueblo. Los Angeles—then a city where the heady essence of orange blossoms filled the air—would be their new home.

Upon Nanna Mary’s passing, my father inherited the dresser, and when I came to occupy my own bedroom around the age of four, he passed the dresser down to me.

From an early age, I knew the dresser was older than the rest of my furniture. It was also unlike anything my friends had. I would admire its serpentine front and wonder how the dresser’s fabricators had made the wood curve and undulate.

The dresser also fueled my imaginative play. I would often remove a drawer, empty the contents, and sit down inside it. It would become a car in which I would pick up imaginary friends or a boat that carried me to distant lands.

When I was very young, I would stand on my tippy toes in order to see my reflection in the dresser’s smokey cheval mirror. Buried deep in its draws, I would hide my most precious belongings.

For more than four decades, the dresser, like a steadfast companion, has reaffirmed my sense of self and helped span the psycho-physical divide.

It has provided a reflection of both the internal and external, and stood witness to moments both seminal and quotidian, as well as a panoply of emotions.

At age six, I peered into the mirror and discovered, with great delight, my first loose tooth. As an adolescent, during what I refer to as the “too” and “not enough” years, I stood in front of the mirror filled with self-loathing after having decided that my physical self was incompatible with the cultural ideals and standards of beauty.

I can still see myself in the mirror, 27 years ago, catching the first glimpse of myself as a mother, embracing my newborn son. I recall taking a final glance of myself as a single woman before leaving the house on my wedding day.

The Great Flood of 1921 is widely regarded as among the most deadly in Colorado’s history and is perhaps one of the most deadly in the nation’s history. A century later, Puebloans still refer to the cataclysmic event—just as my father did—as the Flood.

Whether you are conversing with a nonagenarian or a millennial, every Puebloan knows of this defining tragedy and usually has a family story to share. Not unlike the stories of Noah and Gilgamesh, Puebloan flood narratives speak of resilience and perseverance in the face of life forever altered, and in my case, they also tell the story of an heirloom.

 

Marianna Gatto is the executive director and cofounder of the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA), a historian and author with more than a decade of experience in public history, non-profit leadership, museums, and education.

This article is dedicated to her grandparents and great-grandparents and to Calogera Cusumano Bacino. In memory of the lives lost and the many lifesavers, both known and unknown.

Copyright 2021; Permission to quote or reprint must be obtained from the author.

 

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