Randall and Dana remember Ms. Agnes quite well. But then they made her acquaintance up close and personal. If you check the Wikipedia article, she went stomping right up the east coast.
Western NY and western PA didn't get the wind part of the hurricane (thank you Allegheny Mountains), but oh, did it rain... and all the rain upstream had to flow downstream, naturally.
The Army Corps of Engineers built dams across major tributaries of the Allegheny River to protect the steel mills in Pittsburgh, causing worse local flooding.
The dikes in Olean nearly broke -- there were crews of people putting sandbags on top of it in the most likely places, but in other places, the only thing holding back the water was the grass on top.
Allegany didn't (and doesn't) have dikes, so everything south of the railroad tracks flooded, as well as the back yards of the houses on Main Street. The Five Mile Creek contributed to the problem by flooding the first block and a half of 1st Street and Maple Avenue past the intersection with 2nd Street.
My brother's house had water lapping at the floor joists, and my uncle's house had a foot of water on the first floor. He and several other farmers had to dump several days of milk production, because the truck couldn't come to pick it up!
A barn that was built by my great-grandfather circa 1900 (near my uncle's farm) had its central supports washed out requiring it to be torn down. I'm sure my great-grandfather would have laughed at both concepts... that it would stand for 70+ years, and that a hurricane would take it down.