The Fausts
William Faust lived with his parents, Bernard and Anna, and five siblings in a narrow, two-story house perched on Norwood Avenue in the North Side’s Perry Hilltop neighborhood. Bernard and Anna were both in their 50s. Their children still living at home ranged in age from 11 to 26. Anna’s 80-year-old father, Joe Wieseckle, lived with them. Wieseckle immigrated from Germany as a young man and had worked as a gravedigger.
On Labor Day in 1913, Ben Faust celebrated his 22nd birthday while workers paraded Downtown and authorities continued to search for Alice’s victims. William, just 23, was one year older than Ben. A few years earlier, Ben and William had worked as drug store clerks. Now both were sheet metal workers, as was their older brother, Michael.
The next day, Pittsburgh returned to work. The Alice disaster had disappeared from newspapers by Wednesday, Sept. 3. William stepped out of his family’s crowded house that day and headed to a construction site near the city’s border with Aspinwall. He worked there for a company contracted to build the Aspinwall Pump Station, part of Pittsburgh’s sprawling new water works.
On this day, he climbed to the building’s roof, high above telegraph and telephone poles and stepped along boards that served as scaffolding. He’d spend his shift covering seams with copper flashing.
A photographer arrived later in the day, using a bulky camera and tripod to take pictures of the construction site. This wasn’t unusual. The city was proud of its new water works and regularly sent photographers to document its construction.
After shooting a few images of the pump station’s interior, the photographer carried his equipment a few hundred yards east and snapped a picture of the entire building. In the photo, a tiny, solitary worker is perched near the roof’s peak. This may be William Faust. He worked alone that day, according to later testimony.
As 4 o’clock approached and the work day neared its end, a foreman called out to Faust and asked how much solder he needed for the next day’s work. Faust was hammering a nail into a support so he could climb from one scaffolding section to another, the foreman said. While he was hammering, the board supporting Faust broke loose. He skidded down the steep slate, over the roof’s edge and plummeted to the ground. Fellow workers rushed to his side.
The commotion caught the attention of the photographer. He got close to the accident scene, where he found Faust, his skull broken, his body already covered. After shooting a picture, the photographer backed off several yards and snapped a picture of the entire building. A scaffold board dangles at the top of the frame.
Authorities transported William’s body to the county morgue and informed his brother, Michael. At age 33, he was the oldest of the Faust children and lived with his wife, Anna, on the South Side. Michael had to identify his brother’s broken body.
On Norwood Avenue, Bernard and Anna Faust absorbed the news of their son’s death and experienced a familiar pain. An online family history indicates the Fausts lost at least three young children. All were born in the 1880s and died between the ages of 2 and 5.
More than a century later, Bernard and Anna’s granddaughter, Anna Faust Beck, would find the tombstones of a few of those children during a visit to a Pittsburgh cemetery.
“I can’t believe how my grandmother survived emotionally,” she said. “She lost a set of infant twins and a 5-year-old on the same day.” Anna was told the children died of diphtheria, a throat infection.
William Faust is buried at St. Mary Cemetery in Ross. (Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette)
As the day grew dark, Anna and Bernard planned a funeral in a house suddenly less crowded. A week that began with a celebration of workers quickly morphed into ceremonies burying them.
The Alice’s dead were mourned in homes on the North Side and in Knoxville, Elizabeth, Monongahela and Rochester. At a house on an alley in Lawrenceville, mourners gathered Sept. 4 for the funeral of Kate Mills, the cook and the only woman among the Alice’s victims. Her 17-year-old daughter Emily survived, but grief wrecked her. The explosion that tore her mother apart also killed her fiance, first mate Harry Mays.
On Saturday, the Faust family conducted a brief funeral for William at their home, then proceeded two blocks south to the Church of the Annunciation for a requiem Mass. Bernard and Anna buried William on a hillside at St. Mary Cemetery in Ross. His tombstone reads, “Our Son.”
William’s death lacked the horrifying violence of those killed aboard the Alice, so in the eyes of newspaper editors it warranted only a brief story among obituaries. Jurors at a coroner’s hearing in late September heard construction supervisors testify that William’s hammering jarred loose the scaffolding. Jurors ruled the death accidental.
A few weeks later, another jury considered the Alice disaster. A safety valve had been set to allow dangerous levels of pressure in a boiler, the jurors learned. They recommended that a grand jury look into charges of criminal neglect against the boat’s owner, W.B. Sand Co., as well one of the Alice’s surviving engineers.
Newspapers then stopped covering the story and moved on. So did the company that owned the Alice. On Nov. 1, the Pittsburgh Post published a classified ad that read, “Wanted — Cook for River Steamer, Rogers Sand Co., Wood and Water sts.”
