Flood of emotions

For many Nelson County residents who experienced the wrath of Hurricane Camille during the night of Aug. 19-20, 1969, it was a disaster of unmitigated horror.

During those awful hours of darkness, when rainfall was measured in feet rather than inches, entire families were swept away. The death count grew day after day as battered bodies were recovered and brought to Sheffield Funeral Home in Lovingston, and later to a refrigerated truck trailer.

By the time the last entry was made, the death toll in the county stood at 131. For survivors, the calamity that tore the rural county asunder became known simply as “The 19th.”

Nearly 40 years have passed since the remnants of Hurricane Camille caused the worst natural disaster in inland Virginia history. For some people it might have been yesterday.

“I’d say Camille is still pretty fresh in the minds of many people who were living here in Nelson County at that time,” said Woody Greenberg, vice president of the board of directors for the Nelson County Museum of History, which opened last August.

“Some people are very open and willing to talk about what they experienced, even if they suffered losses of members of their family. An example of that would be Carl and Warren Raines up in Piney River.

“On the other hand, there are some people who are still mighty sensitive about it, because their experience was so traumatic. I’m thinking of some folks who had to rescue a little girl who almost got swept out of a house by flood waters.

“A person involved in that told me the story, but others just don’t want to talk about it. We’re hoping to use the 40th anniversary primarily as a way to memorialize those who did lose their lives and recognize some of the folks who participated in the rescue and recovery effort.”

The museum is housed in Oakland, a stately antebellum red-brick house about four miles south of Lovingston on U.S. 29. It has been designated as the Camille Resource Center and serves as the repository for all things related to the disaster.

Oakland will be the site during the next six months for an ambitious commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Camille. A series of talks, each starting at 1:30 p.m., will be held each month at the museum leading up to the anniversary date.

The series begins March 21 and will feature a talk and presentation by photographer Brower York Jr. When Camille laid waste to the county, York was working as a reporter with the Waynesboro News-Virginian.

The journalist managed to get into Nelson County on Aug. 20 and took more than 200 photographs of the destruction with his personal camera. He will be joined by other Nelson County residents who will show photographs and home movies that they took after the storm.

“We’ve had several donations of pictures, including a home movie taken along Davis Creek and along U.S. 29 the day after the flood,” Greenberg said. “Beth Goodwin’s [president of the museum’s board of trustees] sister took a bunch of pictures in the Massies Mill area the day after the flood.

“We also have some pictures of Lovingston that have never been seen by the public before that have also been donated to us. We’re asking members of these families to come in and talk about their photos at the March 21st event as well.

“The Camille Resource Center is a dream we’ve had for quite some time. There’s a lot of material about Camille, but it’s not in any one place and can be hard to find. We want to design an interface for a computer system that will allow anyone to come in, sit down and quickly access material they’re interested in.”

Greenberg and others envision having two computer workstations in the museum that will allow visitors to access a database of videos, interviews, photographs and newspaper and magazine articles related to Camille and its aftermath. Grants have been applied for and a fund-raising campaign is under way.

It’s hoped that the workstations will be in place and operating by August. The series of talks will provide a treasure trove of eyewitness accounts of the storm’s fury that should prove increasingly valuable as years go by.

On April 18, the Raines brothers will talk about their harrowing experiences. The moderator will be Earl Swift, a Norfolk journalist who wrote about the flood.

Warren Raines was 14 when Camille swept his mother, father, two sisters and a younger brother to their deaths. The family home was in Massies Mill near the Tye River.

The family’s nightmare started with the ringing of the telephone at 2 a.m. Someone had called to notify them that the river was flooding.

When water reached the house, the father made the decision to move everyone to higher ground in the family’s station wagon. In a 1994 interview with The Daily Progress, Warren Raines described what happened next.

“We all piled into our station wagon, but before we got very far the water drowned out the engine,” Raines said. “The water was about two feet deep when we started from the house, but within just a few minutes the water came from everywhere and it was eight feet deep.

“The current was very strong, and we were just grabbing onto vines or whatever we could. The last thing I said to my mother was that I was losing my grip. Mom and my father were about 30 or 40 feet away from me, and she yelled for me to let go and they would catch me when I went by.

“I did, but they were gone when I was swept to where they had been. I never saw them again.”

On May 16 the series will explore the music and poetry inspired by Camille. On June 20 the subject will focus on the impact of the storm as described by schoolchildren, teachers and administrators.

The final installment of the series will be on July 18. During that program workers from the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative and the Virginia Department of Transportation will talk about their efforts to restore utilities and county roads.

One of the people who shouldered a great deal of responsibility during the restoration effort was Hughes Swain. He was Virginia Tech’s extension agent for Nelson County at the time.

“The night Camille hit I was at an extension training meeting in Petersburg,” said Swain, who continues to farm his land in Nelson County. “When I woke the next morning I could just look at the sky and tell it was a real bad storm.

“I tried to call home, but the telephone people said all the lines were down. I left the meeting about daylight and drove back.

“I noticed water in the road and things like that, but the first roadblock I came to was right at my driveway.

“There’s four streams on my farm that go into the Rockfish River. They had washed out all my fences, and my cattle were roaming around up in my yard. But even then I didn’t know how big this event was.”

The scope of the disaster began sinking in as Swain joined the effort to first rescue people and then recover the dead. As soon as a road was opened into Lovingston, he went there to see what more he could do.

“The county had no administrative officer or manager to take care of things related to the recovery,” said Swain, who will celebrate his 78th birthday in July. “They asked my supervisors in Blacksburg if they would be willing to assign me to the job of flood relief coordinator for a year.

“When they agreed to that, I essentially came out of my job and a retired agent came up here and took my job over for a year. My assistant was Mrs. Helen Gant, and we opened a small office in the courthouse and started distributing relief goods.

“Tons and tons of stuff was coming in from all over. Our job was to dole it out, take care of the bills that came in and so forth.”

Swain said one of the positive things to come out of the Camille disaster was the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 1969 there was no governmental agency to deal with natural disasters.

“We dealt with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, what they called HUD in those days,” Swain said. “They were the ones who helped us a lot.

“Basically, they kind of left us alone. They decided we probably knew more about handling things here at home than they did, and they agreed to pay some of the cost.

“One of my biggest challenges was trying to be equitable in the way we distributed the relief goods. I guess anybody who does that is bound to make some mistakes, but they didn’t amount to much.

“People were so thankful to get things, because there were many of them who didn’t have anything left.”

The commemoration will conclude with the Camille Remembrance Program scheduled for the evening of Aug. 20 at Nelson County High School Auditorium. What will occur during the program has not been finalized, but updates will be posted on the museum’s Web site http://www.historicnelson.org.

Within the next few weeks a point-of-interest map related to Camille will become available at the museum, the Nelson County Visitor Center and other locations where visitors are likely to drop by.

The map will provide directions to more than a dozen locations where particularly cataclysmic events occurred or where important recovery work was done. It will lead travelers to the Davis Creek area, which suffered the largest loss of life.

Another point of interest on the map is the command center site in Lovingston, where the rescue and recovery efforts were coordinated. From there visitors might go to nearby Green Acres, which was heavily damaged by landslides.

“Camille was definitely a turning point because of the effect it had on this county,” said Swain, who is a member of the museum’s board and helped plan the upcoming events. “It destroyed 101 bridges — I mean took them out.

“The streams were all filled in with sand. It was a tremendous rebuilding effort that took place. It’s one of the most outstanding events in the history of the county, and that’s why the museum is taking it on.

“I think maybe the biggest silver lining in all of it was the fact that the people here found out they could cope with a disaster of this magnitude and get back to normal living again.”

Admission to the series of talks will be $5. Children 12 and younger will be admitted for free, as will family members of flood victims. The Aug. 20 event is free.

For more information about the museum and updates on the commemoration programs, visit http://www.historicnelson.org.