# South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club Exclusive lakeside retreat for roughly 60 of Pittsburgh's wealthiest industrialists and financiers, founded in 1879 by Benjamin Ruff on the abandoned South Fork Dam above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Members included [[Henry Clay Frick]], [[Andrew Mellon]], [[Andrew Carnegie]], [[Philander Knox]], Henry Phipps, and Pennsylvania Railroad executive Robert Pitcairn. The club's negligent modifications to the dam — lowering the crest to make a carriage road, screening the spillway with fish guards that trapped debris, never replacing the drainage pipes a previous owner had sold for scrap — caused the dam's collapse on May 31, 1889 and the [[Johnstown Flood of 1889]], which killed 2,209 people. No member or the club itself was ever held legally liable; the club was thinly capitalized and quietly dissolved. The defense was run by Knox & Reed, the law firm of members Philander Knox and James Hay Reed. Canonical case study for [[Elite Impunity]]. ## Open threads - Full member roster and how membership mapped to Pittsburgh's interlocking steel/coke/rail/banking networks - The 1880 Fulton engineering report warning of failure, and Ruff's dismissal of it