These people are likely sightseers who came to see the devastation rather than survivors from the May 31, 1889, Johnstown Flood. After a day of heavy rain, the neglected dam of Lake Conemaugh failed at 3:10 p.m., pouring 20 million tons of water into the valley and killing 2,209 inhabitants. Other photographs and artifacts of the flood can be seen at the Johnstown Flood Museum, which opened in 1973 in the building that was once the town's library.

Most towns have a historic event or two that defines them. Butler County history, for example, features a visit from George Washington and the invention of the jeep.

For Johnstown, about 75 miles southeast of Butler, perhaps the single most defining moment came on May 31, 1889, after a day of heavy rain.

That day, a mountain lake poured an inconceivable 20 million tons of water into an area of 30,000 inhabitants, killing 2,209 — a third of whom were never identified before burial.

Three years after the cataclysmic event, a memorial was erected to the unknown dead, but essentially the townspeople had moved on, said Shelley Johansson, marketing manager for the Johnstown Area Heritage Association. The residents had rebuilt, including the library — which would eventually become a flood museum.

The museum is one of several sites that stand testament to what happened in Johnstown so long ago.

"There's no one alive now who is suffering from the flood, so we can look at it in a different way," Johansson said.

Simple and straightforward, this museum presents the facts surrounding that fateful day in 1889.The setting for the disaster actually began with a storm in the Midwest that moved in, bringing deluging rain beginning the day before. The valley residents were already moving belongings to upper floors because of water in the streets. The rain that was making rivers rise also swelled the private Lake Conemaugh, 14 miles up the valley.The 2-mile-long and up-to-a-mile-wide lake was the playground of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, whose members included some of the most rich and famous names in Western Pennsylvania: Carnegie, Frick, Mellon and Phipps. The families had second homes around this reservoir, a getaway from the grit of city life.The lake's neglected dam, however, held back as much water as flows over Niagara Falls in 36 minutes.The dam failed at 3:10 p.m. on May 31, 1889.The museum tour starts with a model reminiscent of a miniature railroad and village. A timeline of flood events, illuminated as the day progresses, begins with the sound effect of crackling lightning overhead.On the model, the water's trail lights up as each chronological report comes in.• 11:30 a.m. — Warnings that the dam may fail start to come in.• 3:10 p.m. — The dam fails.• 3:30 p.m. — A river bend divides the floodwater.• 3:45 p.m. — Woodvale destroyed.• 4:07 p.m. — Johnstown hit.• 4:20 p.m. — Stone Bridge holds.Telegraph offices hummed where the wires were still up, predicting possible disaster. A train engineer ran his locomotive backward, blowing a long whistle blast as a warning.The town of South Fork, the first in the flood's path, sat to the side on a small hill and escaped complete destruction. The small towns of Mineral Point and Woodvale were obliterated.A railroad viaduct held back the floodwaters momentarily before seeming to explode. Then the water plowed the wreckage in front of it. A wave traveling 40 miles per hour hit the city, crashing against Westmont hill and washing back again.The water-borne mounds of debris met with an immovable force: the Pennsylvania Railroad Company's Stone Bridge, which is still in use today.Industrial explosions set the wreckage on fire, killing at least 80 people who had survived the flood but were caught in the debris. The fires burned for three days.

In 1989, the short film "The Johnstown Flood," commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the flood, was produced. The movie won that year's Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject."It would be easy to tell you how you should feel, but it does a good job at just presenting it as it was," Johansson said.In the film, Johnstown is described as a place where the industries of coal and steel came together. Immigrants surged into the area in search of work. The town had 27 churches, three newspapers, telephones and up-to-date fire departments.The flood simulation looks quite realistic in the 25-minute black-and-white film, shown every day in the museum's 75-seat theater.Still photographs from the aftermath appear without comment. A piano. A school desk. People disheveled and looking defeated.They were down but not out. The ironworks had survived, and within days the employees had fired the furnaces again. The great task of cleaning up began, without the heavy equipment available today.Residents formed work crews, elected leaders, established a hospital and a morgue. Construction advanced quickly on a new railroad viaduct, the crucial artery for bringing in supplies.Pittsburgh sent its first shipment of goods and volunteers to the area the day after the flood. Life went on.The survivors were people of few words. Amid the many obelisks and Civil War veterans' markers, a mass grave site in the public Grandview Cemetery high on Westmont hill bears a stone stating simply, "In memory of the unidentified dead from the flood May 31, 1889."The survivors didn't look back.

With the passage of time came renewed interest in the 1889 flood, most resurgent in the 1960s, Johansson said. That's when historical writer David McCullough published a book on the subject.The Johnstown Flood Museum opened in 1973 in the building that was once the library, built to replace the one washed away in the flood. It was constructed with funds from Andrew Carnegie, one of the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club.Though the leap to believing he was trying to assuage his conscience is easy, there was never any indication he or any of the 61 club members felt responsible for the devastation, said Johansson.No one was ever held liable, but the flood was one of the events that helped to bring about tort reform, she noted.Artifacts accumulated by the museum include many items reclaimed from the mud, such as buttons, utensils and the key ring of Hettie Ogle, the telegraph operator who sent her last message at 3 p.m. the day of the flood."The dam is becoming dangerous and may possibly go," it said.Ogle did not survive. A photograph of her keys can be seen on the museum's Web site, www.jaha.org. What the Web site doesn't say, however, is that the keys were found attached to Hettie's arm — just her arm."There are a lot of stories like that, 'Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not' stories," Johansson said.One of the items encased at the museum is the dress of the 5-year-old daughter of the ironically named Waters family. The child and her sister, mother and father retreated to the rafters of their attic as the flood waters rose.When the 5-year-old and her sister fell into the water, their father grabbed two feet sticking up, not knowing if he had just one or both children. He pulled out both daughters; the family survived, related Johansson.In one display case, the hospital book in which were recorded admittances and discharges at the time concedes in large letters at the bottom of one page, "Great disaster occurred," and on the facing page for discharges, "Impossible to keep track of."Victorian-era stereographs were popular at the time, and the museum displays many examples visitors can examine through the toylike lenses. Someone even bottled up some of the flood water.The disaster quickly made its way into popular culture, with the first books coming out just weeks afterward. Atlantic City in New Jersey even advertised an attraction called "The Johnstown Flood."Recently added to the museum, but outside because of its size, is an example of an Oklahoma house, so named because it was a pre-fabricated dwelling used by homesteaders going West. The Oklahoma houses arrived to put roofs over the heads of the newly homeless."Habitat for Humanity here found it as an outbuilding of a house they were working on," Johansson said.Johnstown also was flooded in 1936 and 1977, the latter year marking a Pittsburgh flood as well. Smaller displays deal with those events, since the loss of life and property was not on the same scale as the flood of 1889. The museum also maintains archives.

About a mile or so from the flood museum, the interactive Frank and Sylvia Pasquerilla Heritage Discovery Center explores the environment immigrants would have faced around the turn of the last century, not touching on the flood much at all."School children really like it here," said Paulette Mangiafico, a museum staffer working on a recent Saturday at the center. "Yes, I think every school child around here comes here at one time or another."Upon entering the reclaimed light-industrial building, visitors to the permanent exhibit "America: Through Immigrant Eyes" are encouraged to take a card with a bar code on it that will allow them to travel through the exhibits as a 19-year-old unmarried woman from Italy or as Josef, a 12-year-old Polish boy, or one of six other characters representing the immigrant population.This hugely interactive arrangement deserves visitors' attention at each station, yet the circuit can pleasantly be finished in less than two hours.Formerly the location of the Germania Brewery in 1907 and other businesses since then, the center encloses a neat, open-air courtyard. The center's address is 201 Sixth Ave. in the Cambria City section of Johnstown, but the actual entrance to the parking lot is at the corner of Broad Street and Seventh Avenue.

Not far from the Heritage Discovery Center, the newly opened Wagner-Ritter House and Garden beautifully complement the two larger tourist destinations.Called a house museum, it tells the story of the Wagner and Ritter families, who inhabited the historic Cambria City home from the time it was built in the 1860s through the 1980s.A flood survivor, the house is situated just on the edge of the mud flat that resulted from the flood water."The family was able to lean out of the second story and rescue a woman floating by," Johansson related.The original house was two rooms downstairs and two rooms above them. The addition of a kitchen downstairs meant two more rooms for the upstairs. The top of the chair rail downstairs reveals where better than an inch of wallpaper was stripped off to expose the very first wallcovering, a taupe-based pattern.In the garden out back are planted vegetable varieties that would have been seen in the 1800s, not modern hybrids, Johansson noted."The rosemary planted in the middle means the family was Catholic," she said.A garden club maintains the plot, and all the produce is donated to a local food bank."The great thing about this house is I've heard grandparents here with their grandkids say, 'This reminds me of my mother's house.' To the grandkids, it's like the Middle Ages," Johansson said. "It makes for some interesting conversations."Future plans include reconstructing the bake house and eventually exhibiting in the barn items found during the archaeological dig on site, including soda pop bottles from when the Wagner family's sons had a soda pop bottling business in the backyard.

Cars can drive right up to the Johnstown Inclined Plane, several blocks from the Flood Museum. Why? Because the incline can carry automobiles as well as passengers, making it the steepest vehicular inclined plane in the world.One a recent Saturday it hoisted a pickup truck — a big one — no problem. Other passengers included a black-and-brown dog for the 1½-minute ride.About 10 vehicles can park at the bottom of the incline, more on the sides of the road at the top, if the riders plan a two-way trip. The parking area at the bottom is a bit tricky to exit.The incline was built in 1890, just after the flood, so workers could live in the new suburb of Westmont, high on the hill above the devastated area.Now operated by the local transport authority, the incline runs every 15 minutes for transportation and tourism. A recorded message points out prominent sites during the ride.On the same Saturday in the afternoon, three bridal parties competed for picture time on the scenic overlook platform. The Hummer limousine for one of the groups, however, definitely did not arrive by incline.Johnstown's historical sites have gathered together the facts of the flood of 1889, put them in context and reported how the town moved on.

Six people were in the Schultz House at the time of the flood. Despite the tree and other damage done to the home, all of them survived. Sighseers took pictures in front of the home, even climbing out on the trunk to be photographed. The disaster quickly made its way into popular culture, with the first books coming out just weeks later.

The Wagner-Ritter House survived the May 31, 1889, Johnstown Flood. On the flood's anniversary this year, it became one of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association's historical sites. This room belonged to one of the original owners' daughter, Anna Ritter.

The many historical sites in Johnstown are just a short day trip from Butler County locations.