The Woman Whose Farm Became Dayton's Bathtub

In 1921, the Miami Conservancy District was midway through constructing five massive dry dams across the Great Miami River watershed in western Ohio, the largest flood-control project in the world at the time.¹ The system's innovation was also its cruelty: instead of permanent reservoirs, the dams would hold water only during floods, then slowly release it. The land behind each dam, tens of thousands of acres of working farmland, would serve as temporary storage basins. Farmers kept their fields. They lost the right to say no when the water came.

The legal instrument was a flooding easement: a perpetual right, recorded in county deed records, granting the district authority to inundate private land for weeks at a time whenever downstream cities needed protection.² No habitable structures could be built within the easement area. The obligation ran with the deed. Forever.³

Clementine Brubaker farmed 140 acres of bottomland in the basin above the Germantown Dam, constructed in 1920.⁴ Her husband Ansel died during the influenza pandemic two years earlier, leaving her to manage the farm with two teenage sons and a legal system that assumed she had a husband to manage it for her. By the fall of 1921, the district's Board of Appraisers had valued the easement on her land and the Conservancy Court had confirmed it. The check had been deposited. The dam was built. The question of what she'd actually agreed to was just beginning.

We spoke with Mrs. Brubaker at the edge of her south pasture, within sight of the Germantown Dam's earthen embankment. She is not, it should be noted, technically real, but the legal architecture she describes is, down to the statute numbers, and the situation she inhabits was shared by farming families across 35,650 acres of basin land.⁵ She asked that we not sit on the fence, as it may not be there much longer.

You can see the dam from here.

Clem: Seventy feet of packed earth where a creek bend used to be. My boys watched them build it. Twenty-nine locomotives hauling fill, draglines bigger than the barn.⁶ They thought it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Montgomery County. I looked at it and thought: that's the direction the water comes from now. Not from the sky. From the engineers.

What does the easement actually require of you?

Clem: It says the Miami Conservancy District has the right to flood my land. Not that it might flood. The river's always done that, and I never needed a lawyer to explain it. This says they will flood it, on purpose, by operating that dam to hold water back. My fields sit in the bathtub. Could be days. Could be weeks.⁷ I can't build anything permanent in the basin. No new barn, no addition on the house, nothing habitable. I can plant corn. I can graze cattle. I can watch the water come up and then watch it go down and then plant corn again.

And it never expires.

Clem: Perpetual. That's the word in the statute. The district has "perpetual existence," says it right there in the law.⁸ This isn't something that sunsets when the bonds are paid off or when the men who designed it are dead. My granddaughter's granddaughter will own this farm, if she wants it, and the first thing any buyer's lawyer will find in the title search is that the Miami Conservancy District can put three feet of water on her alfalfa whenever Dayton needs dry streets.

How much were you paid for the easement?

Clem: [pause] Enough that I couldn't refuse and little enough that I know what I'm worth to them.

Three men I'd never met walked my fields, decided what the right to flood them was worth, and the court confirmed it.⁹ I could have objected. You get thirty days to file exceptions, you can even demand a jury trial if you post bond.¹⁰ But here's what nobody explains to you at the courthouse: none of that stops the dam. The statute says no appeal "shall interrupt or delay any action or the prosecution of any work."¹¹ You're arguing over the price of something that's already been taken.

Did you have any real leverage in that process?

Clem: The district has what they call "dominant eminent domain." Dominant over railroads, over telephone companies, over the county itself.¹² So even the institutions that might have pushed back on my behalf were legally subordinate. I sat in that courtroom in 1916 when Mr. Morgan presented his plan and the opposition spoke. Other landowners, engineers who thought the design was wrong, local leaders who had objections.¹³ We were heard. Politely. Then the Ohio Supreme Court said the act was constitutional, and construction started five months later.¹⁴

So. That's the leverage.

You mentioned the 1916 hearings. Were you opposed to flood control?

Clem: I remember 1913. Everybody in this valley remembers 1913. Three hundred and sixty-one people dead in Dayton, the whole city underwater.¹⁵ I'm not a monster. I understand why they built the dams.

What I cannot get anyone to explain to me, in a way that makes honest sense, is why my land is the mechanism and I'm also paying for the privilege.

What do you mean, paying?

Clem: [leans forward] The district assesses property owners for the benefits of flood protection. That's how the whole thing is funded. You calculate the benefit each property receives, and you send a bill.¹⁶ Fine. Dayton gets enormous benefit, Dayton pays the most. But I'm inside the system. My land is the system. I accepted a permanent obligation on my deed so that the water stays here instead of going downstream, and then I get an assessment notice telling me how much I've benefited from the arrangement? People were already challenging those assessments in court by last year.¹⁷

What does this mean for your sons?

Clem: [long pause] It means they'll inherit a farm that works most years and drowns some years, by design, and they can't change that. They can't build on the basin land. They can't sell it to someone who wants to build on it. Every option that land might have had, every future use, was priced once, by three appraisers, in 1920, and that's the end of the conversation.

Ansel and I bought this place thinking about what it could become. Now I know exactly what it'll be. A field that floods when Dayton needs it to. That's the inheritance.

Do you think the system will work?

Clem: The engineering? Probably. Mr. Morgan hired good people and he isn't a fool.¹⁸ The question I keep turning over is different.

The flood of 1913 is still a wound right now. In fifty years it'll be a paragraph in a history book, and my grandchildren will be explaining to their neighbors why they can't put up a barn.

Is there anything that would have made this feel fair?

Clem: [almost smiles] Ask me again when the next flood comes and Dayton stays dry. I might feel differently. Or I might feel exactly the same, standing in mud, watching my corn rot, knowing it worked precisely as intended.

Footnotes

1. The MCD flood protection system was the largest civilian engineering project in the world at the time of its construction. MCD History, mcdwater.org/about-mcd/the-history-of-mcd ↩

2. MCD Flood Storage Basins, mcdwater.org/flood-protection/mcd-land-storage-basins ↩

3. Ohio Revised Code §6101.08 grants conservancy districts perpetual existence; §6101.28 governs easement acquisition. codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/chapter-6101 ↩

4. Germantown Dam was constructed in 1920. Wikipedia, Miami Conservancy District, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Conservancy_District ↩

5. The five retarding basins together encompass 35,650 acres. MCD Flood Storage Basins, mcdwater.org/flood-protection/mcd-land-storage-basins ↩

6. The district acquired 18 draglines, 29 locomotives, 20 dump cars, 80 trucks, 15 miles of railroad track, and 73 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. MCD Timeline, mcdwater.org/timeline ↩

7. MCD's current description states floodwaters can take "up to a few weeks" to drain from the basins. MCD Flood Storage Basins. ↩

8. Ohio Revised Code §6101.08. ↩

9. Ohio Revised Code §6101.27–28 established the Board of Appraisers process. ↩

10. Ohio Revised Code §6101.33 (exceptions) and §6101.35 (jury trial with bond not exceeding $200). ↩

11. Ohio Revised Code §6101.40. ↩

12. Ohio Revised Code §6101.17 grants the district "dominant right of eminent domain" over railroads, utilities, townships, counties, and municipal corporations. ↩

13. Purcell, Aaron D., "Reclaiming Lost Ground: Arthur Morgan and the Miami Conservancy District Labor Camps," The Historian (2002). go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|A135466492 ↩

14. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the Conservancy Act in late 1917; construction began January 27, 1918. Dayton Innovation Legacy, daytoninnovationlegacy.org/morgan.html ↩

15. MCD History page; ASCE Historic Landmark page, asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/historic-landmarks/miami-conservancy-district ↩

16. The assessment structure is established under Ohio Revised Code §6101.27–28 and the original Conservancy Act of 1914. ↩

17. Miami Conservancy District v. Ryan (Ohio, 1922) records an early property-owner challenge to assessments based on future flood-prevention benefit. Internal KB, historical-adaptation-cases.md. ↩

18. Arthur Morgan hired nationally recognized hydraulic engineers and oversaw construction of all five dams between 1918 and 1922. MCD History; ASCE Civil Engineering Magazine, Nov. 2023, asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2023/11/flood-protection-system-tamed-ohios-miami-river ↩