The Cash Register Company That Saved Its Flooded City

In March 1913, three days of rain sent the Great Miami River over its banks and buried downtown Dayton, Ohio under as much as 20 feet of water. The city's mayor was trapped in his own house. The National Cash Register Company, the company that dominated the cash register business, put its factory to work on something else entirely.

A Factory Becomes a Boatyard

NCR's president, John H. Patterson, effectively took charge of the city while civic leaders were cut off by the floodwaters. He ordered his workers to build boats.

They built nearly 300 flat-bottomed rescue boats, working inside the same buildings where the company normally assembled cash registers.

Patterson organized rescue teams to carry the boats out into the flooded streets. They pulled thousands of Daytonians off rooftops and out of upper-floor windows.

The Factory That Became a Hospital

NCR's complex on Stewart Street sat on high ground above the flood line. Patterson turned it into an emergency shelter, feeding and housing anyone who reached it.

The factory became the local headquarters for the American Red Cross and the Ohio National Guard. It held a makeshift hospital, a morgue, and a campground for people who had lost their homes.

When the presses of the Dayton Daily News flooded out, the paper ran off NCR's own printing press instead, keeping the story of the disaster on the national wire.

The Executive Who Was Also on Trial

Weeks before the flood, Patterson and 27 other NCR executives had been convicted under the Sherman Antitrust Act and sentenced to a year in prison for anti-competitive sales practices.

One of the men convicted alongside him was a young sales manager named Thomas Watson, who Patterson would fire from NCR the following year. Watson went on to run the company that became IBM.

The flood rescue turned public opinion sharply in Patterson's favor. In 1915, an appeals court overturned the convictions, ruling that key defense evidence should have been allowed at trial.

What Came After

Patterson used his standing after the flood to push for permanent flood control. His campaign led directly to the creation of the Miami Conservancy District in 1915, one of the first flood-control districts in the United States. The district's five dry dams and 55 miles of levee, finished in 1922, still protect Dayton and the cities along the Great Miami River today.