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Show HEPPNER DISASTER Page 8 others slept in barns and haystacks. Tom Ayres, one of the county's richest men, suffered a large property loss but felt no remorse: "When I found the members of my immediate family safe I was so rejoiced that money never entered my head." Roughly 160 buildings including forty businesses were destroyed. The flood cleared a swath through the middle of Heppner two blocks wide and a mile long either destroying or moving every building in that path. Many houses, built without cement foundations, simply floated away. More than two hundred survivors deserted Heppner in the months following the flood. Although a local minister assured them otherwise, many undoubtedly left feeling the little town, which kept six saloons and the "Chateau de Joie" in business before the disaster, had suffered a judgment of God. Others left fearing future floods. Only the determination and courage of those who chose to remain kept Heppner going in the first years after the flood. Soon, buildings which had been destroyed or damaged were replaced with better ones. Seventy-six years later the only visible reminders that the flood ever occurred are deep gashes on the sides of Willow Creek and Balm Fork, and numerous tombstones on cemetery hill. But Heppner still remembers. It is hard to forget how the elements combined in such fury on that sultry June day in 1903. ####### |
