The Town That Washed Away
A sudden deluge destroyed nearly the entire county seat of Okanogan County, leaving survivors homeless and struggling.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The town of Conconully, the county seat of Okanogan County, was almost totally destroyed by flood about 1 o'clock Sunday morning, and but three or four houses remain in the main part of the village. A sudden rush of water from the gulch west of town brought down a mass of trees and logs which crushed and swept away house after house, leaving the town covered with debris from three to ten feet high. Few people saved anything of value, and the greater part of the inhabitants are utterly cleaned out of houses and personal property. The courthouse and schoolhouse being on higher ground, were untouched. The Elliot hotel is standing, but is being undermined by a current of water ten feet deep, which has cut its way through the main street. The mass of logs and broken buildings piled against the hotel reaches to the second story. One life was lost, Mrs. Keltk, and several persons were more or less injured by being jammed among the timbers.
“A sudden rush of water from the gulch west of town brought down a mass of trees and logs which crushed and swept away house after house.”
Conconully is one of the many Washington towns that has faced multiple cycles of boom, destruction, and reinvention. While modern dam management and flood control have significantly mitigated the risk of such catastrophic events today, the vulnerability of rural infrastructure to natural disasters remains a recurring theme in the state's geography.
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