JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — To the Rev. David J. Beale, it looked like an avalanche: an enormous wall of water thundering down the mountain into the valley community, carrying building debris, barbed wire, livestock, train cars and people. "The dam, having burst, the water was upon us washing away all before it," Beale wrote just days after the 1889 Johnstown flood. Last summer, Beale's yellowing journals were found in an old Philadelphia carriage-house, shedding new light on a catastrophe that killed 2,209. A presentation on the diaries will be given this coming week, marking the 118th anniversary of the flood, before the collection is made a part of the Johnstown Flood Museum's permanent exhibit by 2009. Acquired just before Thanksgiving by the Johnstown Area Heritage Association and the National Park Service, the vast collection includes some 80 pictures and 60 journals written by Beale and his family. "Greatest calamity of the XIXth century took place at 12 minutes after 4 p.m. This book was submerged two weeks in my study," Beale wrote on the page dated May 31, 1889, personal testimony to a disaster that would mark his life and his writings until his death 11 years later. "In our Johnstown disaster not a few became insane from grief," he would write in early 1890. Historians say the journals are a rare, reliable firsthand account of the flood, the cleanup and the controversies that followed in this community about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh. "Oral histories 50, 60 years later are good to have, memoirs are good, but diaries aren't meant for an audience," said Paul Douglas Newman, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. "This really could be significant ... it could really shed some light." Dan Ingram, curator of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, said he had long looked for Beale's diaries, assuming that a minister would have kept journals and saved his letters. "It was just an amazing discovery because some of the material had been slated to be thrown away," Ingram said. "They were already in garbage bags when the person who was cleaning out the carriage house discovered them." Intent on gleaning as much information as possible from this account, AmeriCorps member Nathan Koozer is sifting through the diaries. Their maroon leather bindings are fraying, at times falling from the thin, blue-lined paper crowded with Beale's tight cursive handwriting. Koozer, a 22-year-old who graduated from Penn State University with a history degree, has spent the past few months bent over his desk, magnifying glass in hand, trying to read Beale's sometimes messy, grammatically incorrect and even, at times, incoherent writing. Reading the journals dated 1889 to 1899, Koozer has discovered that Beale was sitting in his parsonage study writing his Sunday sermon when floodwaters that had plowed through the poorly maintained South Fork Dam hit Johnstown, crashing into his home. The frightened minister yelled for his six children, his wife and visiting neighbors to run to the attic. That evening, piles of debris burned at the stone Pennsylvania Railroad Bridge that momentarily stopped the water only to send the torrent roaring through the town a second time. The Beales headed to Alma Hall, then Johnstown's tallest building. On the way over, one woman in the group fell into the water but was pulled out by her hair. Beale and his entourage finally made it to the hall, joining some 200 other people for what would be a "night of indescribable horror," the minister wrote. "One of the things that Beale tried to do was to remove alcohol flasks from people in the building and he also offered prayer to some of the people," Koozer said. "He could hear the people screaming, the dogs barking on the hillsides, not knowing where their owners were. Some women gave birth that night in Alma Hall. Children were crying for food, food that wasn't available," Koozer said. Later, Beale was appointed superintendent of the morgues, including one he established in his First Presbyterian Church. The minister's morgue books, part of the collection found, include lists of names and descriptions of what the dead were wearing. Including sketches with some, Beale wrote "unknown" for bodies that were not identified. In all, 700 bodies would never be identified. Beale, a prominent member of the community, has long been known to historians, largely due to a memoir he published a year after the flood. He also had a well-publicized conflict with John Fulton, general manager of Cambria Iron Works and a senior elder in his church. The New York Times ran news of the Johnstown flood on its front page for 10 days and covered the controversy, including a heated vote in December 1889, at which the church retained Beale as its minister. The diaries give a new perspective on the conflict, which was apparently the reason Beale left town almost a year later. The diaries reveal his bitterness, especially over accusations that his children stole jewelry from corpses in the church's morgue. "They do really give you a well-rounded sense of the person," Ingram said. "You get ... a sense of the personality, of the individual, and it just happens to be one of the more important players in the aftermath and the recovery effort in Johnstown after the flood."

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