Camille's survivors haunted 40 years later

Special Report

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Looking at Davis Creek today, it is hard to reconcile the little waterway with the monstrosity that raged over one night in August 1969.

During a recent weekday visit, children playing at vacation bible school at Oak Hill Baptist Church could be heard over the barely babbling creek. In many places, you can hop over the creek without a running start.

In the Oak Hill cemetery at Davis Creek rests more than 20 members of the small community who died overnight on Aug. 19-20, 1969, as the remnants of Hurricane Camille dumped an estimated 31 inches of rain into the valley in a six-hour period.

Fifty people who lived along Davis Creek were killed in the flood when the downpour turned the stream into a crush of water, boulders and timber. Of those, 19 were never found, contributing to the official list of 33 county residents missing. Some believe the number is higher.

Russ Simpson, who now owns the Apple Shed nearby on U.S. 29, lived 1½ miles east of Woods Mill on Buck Creek the night the floods claimed the lives of generations of his relatives on Davis Creek.

Simpson, 14 years old then, said he could have shared their fates. That night, a landslide missed his home and went into a neighbor’s house. At his grandmother’s insistence, the family had moved to higher ground above Buck Creek just a little more than two weeks earlier.

“Had we been living where I was, we would have been washed away, big time,” he said. “A lot of times, by the grace of God, things happen for a reason.”

Five miles away the torrential rain turned Davis Creek into a raging river. Photos taken just days after the flooding show landslides caused by the rain at the creek’s headwaters in the mountains clawed the earth down to bedrock.

“The water got under the layer of dirt and created major landslides,” Simpson said. “They picked up such force, when they hit a building or a house, they just exploded like a stick of dynamite.”

Simpson’s uncle, aunt and their five children who lived on the creek died. His uncle, Robert Simpson, aunt Nora and cousin Robert Jr. are buried across the highway from his business at Ridgecrest Baptist Church.

“Every time I mow their graves, that’s the reminder I’ve got,” he said. “But I can’t go to that grave thinking about the ones they didn’t find.

“It’s the not finding your family. When you don’t find them, it leaves you a little empty.”

Among the 19 missing from Davis Creek are four of his cousins — 13-year-old Jimmy, 10-year-old Michael, 9-year-old Brenda and 4-year-old Paul Edward, the children of Simpson’s aunt and uncle.

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The task of identifying bodies recovered after the flood fell mainly to three local physicians, a pathologist from the state medical examiner’s office in Roanoke and a dentist.

Rockfish Valley physician Dr. Robert Raynor had to be taken by helicopter to the command center in Lovingston for the first few days after the flood because Virginia 6 along the Rockfish River was impassable.

A refrigerated trailer donated by Morton Foods was set up in town behind the Sheffield funeral home to store the bodies. Autopsies were conducted in an Army tent set up behind the funeral home, Raynor said.

Lovingston Dr. Harry Gamble signed 40 death certificates, nearly half the number identified.

“He knew a lot of them because they were patients of his,” said his son, Judge Michael Gamble.

Raynor, now 79, said many were identified either by doctors from the county who had recognized victims as their patients, or by family members.

Ultimately, 30 unidentified bodies remained in the trailer, he said. Most needed autopsies for identification, either through medical or dental records.

The bodies were battered and most had no clothing, he said.

“The current they had been in was so strong that it had even taken off their rings, high school rings and wedding rings,” Raynor said. “Any means of identification they had was gone.”

Dr. Walt Gable, the medical examiner from Roanoke, autopsied the bodies. Lovingston dentist George Criswell worked with dental x-rays to help with the identification.

Criswell, who is now 84 and lives in Amherst, said the work was awful.

In spite of the refrigeration, he said, he started smoking cigars to cover the smell of the decaying corpses.

“When I came home, I took off all my clothes outside in the breezeway and left my shoes out there and went into the shower,” Criswell said.

All but eight were identified, Raynor said.

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Thirty-three county residents were never found, though the number has ranged from 32 to 37. The majority of those were Huffmans, Perrys, Martins and the Simpson children from Davis Creek.

Judge Michael Gamble was 20 at the time of the flood, home for just a few days from military service and headed back to college. Gamble helped his father in rendering medical aid in the early hours of Aug. 20, but worked on search-and-rescue teams while his father, the doctor, worked to identify the bodies the teams retrieved.

Gamble said it was likely that many of the missing were buried in the silt and debris that washed out of the mountains and into the creeks and rivers.

“If you ever saw those piles of lumber, they were two, three, four stories high,” he said. “If you try to move a wet log without a piece of machinery, it’s almost impossible to do. Even though almost all those piles were moved or buried over eventually, if you got on the bottom of one of those piles and the body was pressed into the mud, you’d almost never find them.”

According to the book, “Torn Land,” at least one body was found 80 days after the flood, buried not very deep and preserved in the mud.

Others likely washed away, Criswell said, noting that the Roseland post office sign was found in Hampton Roads and that trucks and other large pieces of equipment from Nelson County were pulled out of the James River in Richmond.

“At Rockfish Depot, they heard people yelling and screaming from the river; ‘Save us!’ and so forth and so on,” Raynor said. “Most of them just washed right on down to the Chesapeake Bay and were never heard of.”

Criswell said he keeps the dental records he collected in 1969 of the dead, missing and unidentified, in the hopes that they would help, should anyone be found. But in the 39 years since the missing were declared dead, no one has come for them.

The reminders of the missing are never far away, Simpson said.

“When I farmed the Johnson farm 20 years ago, I was really leery about it,” he said. “It was the first time it had been plowed since the flood. I found rubber boots, toys and shoe soles mostly. But I didn’t know what I’d turn up.

“And when you see it rain hard, I don’t give a damn who you are, you’re going to remember ’69.”