Published: July 08, 2007 12:02 am            

Bantly Hardware rebuilt after catastrophe

For Robert M. Bantly, the most vivid recollection of the 1977 Flood was seeing the raging waters sweep Bantly Hardware’s merchandise out the front of the store.

At the time, Bantly was an employee of the hardware store. He now owns the business.

Bantly Hardware is at 701 Von Lunen Road in Dale Borough, where Bantly said it has been since about 1901.

The business was founded in 1861 by Gotleib Bantly.

It operated in downtown Johnstown and then for several years in East Conemaugh Borough before moving to Dale.

The company’s building in the 500 block of Main Street in downtown Johnstown, where it operated for a time, withstood the 1889 Flood. The 1936 Flood did not damage the Von Lunen Road operation.

Not so in 1977, when the Johnstown region was inundated with rain the night of July 19 and into the early morning hours of July 20.

The hardware store then was owned by Robert A. and Chalmer Bantly, Robert M.’s father and uncle, respectively.

When Robert M. rushed to the hardware store after receiving word of flooding by telephone late July 19, water was running out the front door. He went inside and began moving stock from the ground level.

He subsequently was joined by Terry Reesey, who later was a store employee for a time.

When Robert M. Bantly looked into what was the warehouse section, he saw a delivery vehicle floating in water at the rear.

“We could tell the door to the warehouse was going to give way,” he said.

He and Reesey no sooner escaped from the building when the door succumbed to the pressure from the water.

“Everything came through the opening,” Bantly recalled. “We just got out in time.”

He said the store’s entire stock gushed onto a flooded Von Lunen Road.

Conditions continued to worsen and the waters kept rising, he said.

Robert M. Bantly and Reesey made their way to the Dale fire hall, where they spent the remainder of that fateful night.

By daybreak, four of the store’s five buildings were gone, along with all of the merchandise and fixtures.

The main part of the store somehow remained standing, miraculously surviving the torrents of water that gushed through it.

Robert remembers the men, women and children who were out walking through the flood-ravaged borough when the sun rose on July 20 in a bright blue and cloudless sky.

Looks of disbelief were prevalent on most faces.

But Robert had very little opportunity for inspection or reflection.

“We didn’t have time to think that much,” he said, noting he and his father and others immediately began cleaning out the flood-ravaged store property.

“It was so overwhelming,” he said of the flood’s aftermath.

He said the family received help from so many in the more than a year that it took to get Bantly Hardware operating again.

A grand re-opening was held in September 1978

Robert, now 59, purchased the business in 1981.

His father continues to work at the store.

        

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