19 Dead, One Suspect, and Not a True Bill | Saltville, 1924

Nineteen people drowned on Christmas Eve. Not in water. In a flood the factory had spent twenty-four years building.

The papers called it a flood of mud. This is the story of what that mud was, of the one man ever charged with turning it loose — and of why the federal government guards it still.

Saltville, Virginia. Smyth County, in the far southwest corner of the state, where the North Fork of the Holston River bends through a narrow valley.

There is salt under this valley. People had boiled it out of the ground since before the Revolution. In the Civil War, this town salted most of the Confederacy's meat.

In eighteen eighty the painter Thomas Aykins photographed the family of his wife on the mountain above town. Below them, the salt works, and a valley of farms.

Then, in the eighteen nineties, a chemical company came for the salt.

The Mathieson Alkali Works built one of the biggest chemical plants in the South on the riverbank. Soda ash. Caustic soda. The raw material of glass, of soap, of paper.

And Mathieson built the town. The houses, the store, the school, the water lines. By the twenties, about twenty-two hundred people lived here, and the company was landlord, grocer and paycheck.

A state handbook from nineteen eleven called it an exceedingly attractive town. It was also, by then, a town with a waste problem.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

Making soda ash leaves behind a slurry. A thin, white, liquid lime waste. The trade called it muck.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

Across the river from the plant, the company had been pumping that slurry into a bottomland pool for twenty-four years. Engineering News-Record described it after the disaster. A refuse dump, held back by a rock-filled wall.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

The wall stood about seventy-two feet high, on a base a hundred and twenty feet thick. Behind it, a lake of white semi-liquid waste, pressed against the mountain.

Below the dam, on the riverbank, stood a settlement of company houses. The workmen who lived there called it Palmertown.

On the night of December twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-four, most of those houses had a Christmas tree in the front room.

About eight o'clock, the rock wall let go.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

What happened next was stranger than a flood. The engineers pieced it together afterward. The collapsing wall slid into the North Fork of the Holston and dammed the river itself.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

The river, blocked, rose into a pool, and the pool swallowed the houses on the bank. Then, around ten, the dam of waste burst too, and sent everything downstream at once.

A wire report put it plainly. The muck, a white, slimy substance, streamed in a torrent toward the north fork of the Holston river, carrying away everything in its path.

Those who lost their lives were submerged in the swift, flowing, thick white mass.

It came without warning, on families at home around the trees. In the first house below the dam, a Christmas party was under way.

Ten houses went. The bottomlands were buried in white sediment for six miles downstream, as far as Tumbling Creek.

The story went out over the wires that same night, and it was in print by Christmas morning, from Virginia to Alabama.

The first body identified was found four miles below the dam. The wires named her, in papers across the country, as Mrs. Harry Traitor. That was a garble. Her name was Prater.

The injured were carried into town and laid in an improvised hospital, over a drug store. Physicians and nurses rushed in from Bristol and Abingdon.

The day after Christmas, Roanoke's evening paper counted the recovered dead.

Four more bodies came out of the muck that day. They were children. The oldest was ten. The youngest was three.

A Maine front page called the thing itself by name. Muck avalanche. Two hundred men worked the white sediment in the bitter cold, probing for the missing.

Some of the dead had been asleep when the houses broke apart. Whole families went together. The Prater family alone lost six people.

Half the searchers were Mathieson men, sent by the company. The company also paid for the burials — about two thousand dollars in all, for the cleanup, the coffins, and the moving of the displaced.

The final count was nineteen dead. Over half of them were children. It is still the deadliest dam failure in Virginia's history.

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Bolt, Dammed If You Don't · Virginia Tech, 2016.

No family ever sued. A study of the disaster later put the arithmetic of a company town simply. Of all the amenities Mathieson provided, a lawyer was not among them.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

So everything came down to one question, and the engineers could not answer it. Engineering News-Record, two weeks after the collapse: The cause of the break has not yet been determined.

Three weeks later, the Commonwealth produced an answer. It arrested a man.

Roy Patrick. Twenty-seven years old. Held without bail in the county jail at Marion — charged with blowing up the dam with dynamite.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 29, 1925 · p. 206.

The theory, as the wires carried it: Patrick had asked the Mathieson works for a job, been turned away, and threatened vengeance.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 29, 1925 · p. 206.

Authorities said they had evidence of his guilt. Patrick said he could prove an alibi.

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Engineering News-Record · Jan. 8, 1925 · p. 91.

Consider what the charge asked a jury to believe. That one man with a grudge about a job brought down a wall that had been holding back twenty-four years of industrial waste.

L03B
Bolt, Dammed If You Don't · Virginia Tech, 2016.

On February twenty-third, nineteen twenty-five, a grand jury met at the courthouse in Marion. Its whole finding on Roy Patrick survives in one line of the county's order book.

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Grand Jury Report, Law Order Book 10, p. 65, Smyth Co. · quoted in Bolt 2016.

An indictment against Roy Patrick, for a felony. Not a true bill. No indictment. No trial. Released.

And with that, the story simply stopped. The historian who later studied the coverage found that the moment the charge died, the Palmertown disaster disappeared from the papers — local and national, all at once.

One week after the grand jury, the Associated Press moved a story out of Bristol about what was becoming of the wreckage.

Farmers were hauling the muck onto their fields. Botanists had declared it a good soil sweetener. A former lieutenant governor was among the first to prove its worth.

The waste that had buried Palmertown was being spread on gardens as lime, ten weeks after it killed nineteen people.

And the company rebuilt. The new muck dam went up over the ground where Palmertown itself had stood, and the pumping went on.

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Akers v. Mathieson Alkali Works, 151 Va. 1 (1928) · p. 5.

The broken dam did reach a courtroom once. Not for the dead. A farmer named Akers sued over muck creeping onto his seventeen acres, and Virginia's highest court recited the date. Up to December twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-four, the muck was deposited in Basin Number Two. On that day the dam broke.

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Akers v. Mathieson Alkali Works, 151 Va. 1 (1928) · p. 17.

The court held the company liable for the land. It did not matter, the judges said, whether anyone had been careless. If you store something harmless-where-it-sits, and it escapes, you answer for the damage.

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Akers v. Mathieson Alkali Works, 151 Va. 1 (1928) · p. 18.

For the resulting damage, the defendant is liable. Affirmed. For seventeen acres of farmland — not for nineteen people. No court ever said those words about the dead.

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Akers v. Mathieson Alkali Works, 151 Va. 1 (1928) · p. 5.

And there was money for muck when muck was the plaintiff's problem. While the Akers case moved through the courts, the company finished a new waste basin. It was built to hold sixty years of muck. It cost nearly half a million dollars.

Half a million for the new basin. Two thousand for the dead. Those are the numbers in the record.

For the next fifty years, the plant grew, and the ponds grew with it, layer on layer, spreading down the valley across from town. Mathieson became part of the Olin Corporation in the nineteen fifties.

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EPA Region III · Biological Monitoring, N.F. Holston River · 1974.

Then the state started measuring the river.

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VWCB order, 1970, per Turnage · quoted in Bolt 2016.

In nineteen sixty-seven Virginia adopted water quality standards. The limit set for the North Fork was five hundred milligrams of dissolved solids per liter. Olin's discharge was running at five thousand. Ten times the line.

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VWCB order, 1970, per Turnage · quoted in Bolt 2016.

The company spent over two million dollars trying to meet the standard, and could not. The state gave it a deadline. July first, nineteen seventy-two.

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EPA · Third Five-Year Review, Saltville site · 2007 · p. 8.

In nineteen seventy came something worse than chlorides. Mercury, from the plant's chlorine works, found in the river's fish. Virginia and Tennessee both banned fishing on the North Fork.

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EPA Region III · Biological Monitoring, N.F. Holston River · 1974.

In August of nineteen seventy-one, a federal biologist began sampling the river for the brand-new Environmental Protection Agency. Upstream of Saltville, he found clean water and a river full of life.

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EPA Region III · Biological Monitoring, N.F. Holston River · 1974.

Downstream of the plant, his report uses a phrase you do not often find in a federal document. The life of the river bottom had been almost obliterated.

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EPA Region III · Biological Monitoring, N.F. Holston River · 1974.

Mercury in the bottom sediments measured as high as sixty-two micrograms per gram. The report calls the readings exceedingly high.

LIFE magazine came to Saltville that winter and photographed the town waiting for the end. The article noted that the workers refused at first to believe the plant could close. The company had, after all, survived a dam disaster in the twenties.

Olin shut the works down on February twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-two. Leap day. A thousand jobs, in a town of twenty-two hundred. LIFE's last photograph looked over the hillside cemetery, its stones carrying the workers' names, to the plant below.

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EPA Region III · Biological Monitoring, N.F. Holston River · 1974.

That summer, the federal sampling crews recorded something they had not seen in a year of looking. Fish, back in the dead stretch below the plant. The river began to recover the same season the plant died.

The muck stayed. In September nineteen eighty-three, when the government published the first national list of the country's most hazardous waste sites, the Saltville Waste Disposal Ponds were on it.

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EPA · Superfund Record of Decision, Saltville Waste Disposal Site · 1987.

The Environmental Protection Agency has managed the muck flats ever since. Records of decision. A treatment plant that has run for decades, stripping mercury out of the water that still seeps from the ponds.

On the government's own map of the valley, the flats across the river carry a plain two-word label. Settling pond.

Nineteen people. Over half of them children. No court and no inquest ever named a cause. The only human being ever charged was a man who had asked the company for work, and the case against him did not survive the winter.

The company outlived the flood by forty-eight years. The town outlived the company. The muck has outlived them all. It is still there, under the grass, in the bend of the North Fork of the Holston.

If you want to see what this same industry did one valley over — the smoke that made a desert in Tennessee, and the court that finally answered it — that story is on this channel. It is called, Why Is There a Desert in Tennessee.