Cultural Landscape Report for Johnstown Flood National Memorial, National Parks of Western Pennsylvania, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, Site History, Existing Conditions, Analysis and Evaluation, Treatment, Record of Treatment, Lakebed Vegetation Management

Hanna, Jennifer; Little, Kelsey; Najera, Emelyn; Foulds, Eliot; Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation

This Cultural Landscape Report documents the history and existing conditions of the landscape of the Johnstown Flood National Memorial which was authorized as a unit of the National Park Service in 1964 to commemorate the tragic Johnstown Flood of May 31, 1889, when the South Fork Dam failed. The park is in south-central Pennsylvania, approximately eighty-two miles east of Pittsburgh and straddles the South Fork of the Little Conemaugh River, which was dammed in 1853 to supply water to a canal in Johnstown, twelve miles downstream. When built the dam impounded one of the largest artificial lakes in the nation. The dam failed in 1862 and remained abandoned until 1879 when the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club repaired the dam to create Lake Conemaugh, used until the dam broke in 1889 and killed 2,209 people in Johnstown and other villages along the Little Conemaugh River. The Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation undertook this Cultural Landscape Report to document the history of the landscape, and to create a treatment plan for the dry lakebed which serves as the largest tangible reminder of the 1889 flood. The 178-acre national memorial preserves the remains of the South Fork Dam, which consists of two trapezoidal-shaped earthen and rock abutments separated by an opening more than four hundred feet in length. Traces of the club’s carriage road extend across the top of the abutments to overlooks where visitors can view the dam’s breach, the river, and the former empty lakebed that stretches upstream from the dam. On a hillside meadow overlooking the dam and lakebed is the Lake View Farm and the Lake View House, the former farmstead and rehabilitated home of Elias Unger, the club’s president at the time of the disaster, as well as the visitor center. Additional historic resources are in two discontinuous parcels about one mile south of the dam in the village of St. Michael. They include the wooden balloon frame clubhouse, a double cottage, and two cottages, all associated with the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club’s tenure. This Cultural Landscape Report is organized into six chapters, beginning with a detailed site history tracing the landscape’s physical development. The history is followed by documentation of the landscape’s existing conditions and then an analysis and evaluation of the significance and integrity of the landscapes identified in the National Register of Historic Places documentation. The fourth chapter includes treatment recommendations to guide the rehabilitation of the historic lakebed and the properties associated with the national memorial’s period of significance. The fifth chapter provides a Record of Treatment for the National Park Service’s clearing of woody vegetation in the lakebed in 2019. Finally, the sixth chapter outlines a maintenance strategy for ongoing management of the lakebed’s low growing meadow and wetland vegetation. A Section-508 compliant PDF file is forthcoming

Cultural Landscape Report for Johnstown Flood National Memorial, National Parks of Western Pennsylvania, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, Site History, Existing Conditions, Analysis and Evaluation, Treatment, Record of Treatment, Lakebed Vegetation Management

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