Last week, a friend was in Rolling Fork helping her family and friends deal with the horrible devastation of a deadly tornado. In the debris from the home of Sally Hunter Blackley, a former English teacher who passed away last year and had a passion for Mississippi writers, there lay a frameless but undamaged picture. It was a signed and numbered print of Tennessee Williams by the late Frank Swords of West Point.
Somehow it had survived the destruction of the home in which it had once hung. A family member told my friend to take it and find it a good home. Last week I received the print in the mail with a note asking me to give it a proper home.
With the Tennessee Williams association and the story of the miracle of the print’s survival in the midst of the deadly horror that was the Rolling Fork tornado, the print will be placed at the Tennessee Williams Home and Welcome Center in Columbus and its story will be preserved.
The story the print told led me to reflect on the Rolling Fork tornado and the tornadoes that struck Amory and other Mississippi towns that same day. I thought about historic Mississippi tornadoes and reviewed old area newspapers for accounts of the tornadoes of long ago. I found in the late 1830s and early 1840s issues of the Macon Intelligencer several interesting accounts of tornadoes from around the country.
One account reprinted from the Providence Journal was headlined “A Witch.” It seems that in Cranston, Rhode Island, there was “an old woman who has long earned an honest penny by telling fortunes and promising rich husbands and handsome wives to the inquiring damsels and swains.” In October 1838, a tornado roared through the town. The old woman was standing in her doorway with a broom in her hand watching the storm, and when it struck “she was borne aloft in the whirlwind.
“She was seen being carried in the air and appeared to be astride her broom as though she were flying. As the tempest subsided she was deposited back on the ground with her broom unharmed.” The article went on to comment that the suspicion long held about her true nature was believed to be confirmed.
Another account in the Sept. 5, 1839, issue of the Macon paper told of a tornado that had struck New Haven, Connecticut. A family there “had just sat down to dinner in the basement of a small house when the wind struck the house and carried it away, leaving the family and table untouched, though we suppose not undisturbed.”
Most of the articles, though, were not of a light nature. The Columbus Democrat on July 17, 1841, reflected on the Natchez tornado of the previous year. That was the most destructive tornado in Mississippi history and is considered the second deadliest single tornado in U.S. history. Estimates of the number killed ranged from 200 to more than 1,000, with 316 being the commonly accepted toll. In the Tupelo tornado of 1936, 216 lost their lives. Damage to buildings in Natchez was estimated a day after the storm at having been $2.26 million, but a later Natchez newspaper article estimated final total damage in the area at more than $5 million, which would amount to about $143 million in today’s money. News of the terrible disaster in 1840 first arrived in Vicksburg carried by a steamboat from Natchez. News quickly spread nationwide.
The Washington D.C. National Intelligencer of May 21, 1840, reprinted a lengthy article that has appeared as a Natchez Free Trader Extra on May 8, the day after the tornado. The storm was described as:
“About one o’clock … the attention of the citizens of Natchez was attracted by an unusual and continuous roaring of thunder to the southward, at which point hung masses of black clouds, some of them stationary, and others whirling along with undercurrents, but all driving a little east of north. As there was evidently much lightning, the continual roar of growling thunder, although noticed and spoken of by many, created no particular alarm.
“The dinner bells in the large hotels had rung a little before two o’clock, and most of our citizens were sitting at their tables, when, suddenly, the atmosphere was darkened, so as to require the lighting of candles; and in a few minutes afterwards, the rain precipitated in tremendous cataracts rather than in drops. In another moment the tornado, in all its wrath, was upon us. The strongest buildings shook as if tossed with an earthquake; the air was black with whirling eddies of house walls, roofs, chimneys, huge timbers torn from distant ruins, all shot through the air as if thrown from a mighty catapult.”
Natchez was devastated but the Mississippi River landing was even worse. Vicksburg had recently placed a tax on flatboats at its landing and the flatboats fleeing the tax had come to Natchez.
“Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters” (published in 1856) reported that of 120 flatboats at the Natchez landing, all except four were lost. The steamboat Prairie was wrecked with its cabin destroyed down to the deck. The steamboat Hinds also was a total wreck and its half-sunken remains floated downriver to Baton Rouge where 51 bodies were found in its wreckage. The steamboat H. Lawrence and a sloop were severely damaged. Also sunk was the steam Natchez-Vidalia ferryboat and the wharf-boat Mississippian, which was a floating hotel and store.
After describing the damage in Natchez, the Free Trader Extra concluded: “We are all in confusion and surrounded by the destitute, the houseless, the wounded, and the dying. Our beautiful city is shattered as if it had been stormed by all the cannon of Austerlitz (Napoleon’s famous victory over combined Russian and Austrian armies in 1805). Our delightful China trees are all torn up. We are peeled and desolate.” Those descriptions from 183 years ago again apply to towns across Mississippi.
The devastation found from Rolling Fork to Amory cries out for help from Mississippi neighbors. There are many organizations such as the Red Cross aiding in the cleanup and recovery efforts. We should contribute as best as we can to help our neighbors and when contributing always designate that the donation is for Mississippi (or town) tornado assistance.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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