Sunday Cemetery - Allegheny Cemetery

Published the 16^th of July in 1869 in the Philadelphia Inquirer out of Philadelphia, PA

STORM AT PITTSBURGH

A Cloudburst Does Nearly a Million Dollars’ Worth of Damage

CAR LINES BLOCKADED

The Water Reached the Second Stories in Same Secitons

SEWERS WASHED AWAY

Part of Allegheny Cemetery Wall Has Been Destroyed and Nearly Two Miles of Track Torn Up. No Loss of Life.

     PITTSBURG, July 13. – A heavy storm to-night, which was practically a cloudburst, did great damage throughout this city and Allegheny Estimates made from reports coming from outlying portions indicate a loss of nearly a million dollars. All street car lines have been stopped.  

     At Forty-eight street water is in the second story of the houses, caused washed away, and nearly two miles by the bursting of a large sewer. Part of Allegheny Cemetery wall has been of the Citizens’ Street Railway is torn up.

     Tones of earth and stone have been washed out to the Fifth Avenue and Duquesne Traction Company’s lines at Soho.

The sewers in Butcher Run and Woods Run, in Allegheny, are reported as having given way, flooding those sections.

No loss of life as yet reported.

     In Allegheny, Perrysville avenue was flooded from one end to the other, undermining the new street railway, rendering it an almost total loss. Seven miles of Saw Mill Run plank road is destroyed, the planks being carried away and the roadbed ruined. The water came rushing down Madison avenue and east streets for feet deep, when the sewer on Compromise street gave way. It plowed its way right through houses in its track and deposited boulders and gravel in front of the Twelfth ward school house eight feet high. 

     The soap factory of George Harley & Son, on Madison avenue, has three feet of gravel on ground floor and $6000 worth of soap was destroyed. The house of John Mueller, on Spring Hill, near Royal Street, was washed down the hill with three children in it. All were rescued, however by brave work of neighbors.

     A landslide on Toboggan street carried with it into the streets below 1000 tons of earth, rock and gravel. All the cellars on Howard street were flooded. This section is in the famous Butchers’ Run district, which was so disastrously flooded on July 26, 1874.