While watching the weather and storm reports Wednesday night, a tornado warning for Natchez and a tornado being reported just south of Natchez caught my attention.

It struck a chord, but I couldn’t figure out why. Then I noticed the date and recalled that 186 years ago on May 7, 1840, one of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history struck Natchez. While not as bad as the 1840 tornado, Wednesday night’s storms left a horrible trail of destruction from south of Natchez to near Laurel.

Though not in our neck of the woods, the story of the 1840 Natchez storm is a fascinating but horrific tale of death and destruction.
Reports of the storm, including first-person accounts, appeared in newspapers across the country. In 1856, “Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters” provided a three-page illustrated account of the storm’s destruction of boats on the Mississippi River. Lloyd even told of the ghostly wreck of the half sunken steamboat Hinds.

The first detailed account in a Columbus paper I found was in the May 19, 1840, Southern Argus. It reprinted an article from the Natchez Courier after saying, “the scene must be more than awful: a whole city tumbled down – scattered by the winds, and its inhabitants buried beneath the ruins; besides the hundreds that found a ‘watery grave.’”

The first newspaper account of the disaster appeared the day after the storm in a May 8, 1840, Natchez Free Trade “Extra.” 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 … and then such an awful scene of ruin as perhaps never before had met the eye of man became manifest. For about five minutes it was more like the explosive force of gunpowder than anything else it could have been compared to. Hundreds of rooms were burst open as sudden as if barrels of gunpowder had been ignited in each…”

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. Our delightful China trees are all torn up. We are peeled and desolate.” (Austerlitz was Napoleon’s famous victory where he crushed a larger combined Russian and Austrian army in 1805.)

Natchez was devastated but the Mississippi River landing was even worse. “Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters” provided details of the destruction along the Natchez waterfront.

“Several steamboats were destroyed at the wharves of Natchez, and many persons who had embarked in them as passengers were drowned.”

Vicksburg had recently placed a tax on flatboats at its landing and a large number of the flatboats fleeing the tax had come to Natchez. Lloyd further reported that “of 120 flat boats, which were at the landing all but four were wrecked by the tremendous gale, A number of boatmen, supposed to be two hundred or more, in aggregate, perished.”

Lloyd told how the upper works of the steamboat Prairie had collapsed and been swept away with all of the passengers and crew.
However, Capt. Freligh of the Prairie survived and later wrote a letter describing what had happened to his boat. The steamboat H. Lawrence and a sloop had some shelter and though heavily damaged survived. Also sunk was the steam powered Natchez-Vidalia ferryboat and “the wharf-boat Mississippian, which was used as a hotel, grocery store &c. The steamboat Hinds was blown into the stream and sank and all the passengers and crew, except four men, were lost … the wreck of the Hinds was afterwards found at Baton Rouge, with 51 dead bodies on board.”

In a letter published by the Albany New York Argus on May 28, Capt. Freligh of the steamboat Prairie told of his experiences during the Natchez tornado and how “the steamboat Hinds was carried away from her moorings, just ahead of us, Careened (some accounts said capsized) and sunk. Only one person out of her full crew escaped.” Another account said that the wreck of Hinds drifted downstream, “was caught and towed to Baton Rouge” where 51 bodies were recovered from the wreckage.

The Natchez tornado of 1840 was the most destructive tornado in Mississippi history and is considered the second most deadly single tornado in U.S. history. Though estimates of the number killed ranged up to more than 1,000, the Natchez Courier reported 48 died in Natchez and 269 were known to have died on the river and at the landing for at total loss of life of 317. Damage to buildings in Natchez was estimated a day after the storm at having been $2.26 million. A later Natchez newspaper article after reviewing damage reports, estimated final total property damage of more than $5 million a value that today would exceed $200 million.

In 1841 the Columbus Democrat reflected on the Natchez tornado of the previous year: “It may not have been forgotten that the tornado which swept over the lovely city of Natchez last year like a besom of destruction hurrying hundreds of souls unwarned into eternity.” (“Besom of destruction” is a Biblical reference to the destruction of Babylon in Isaiah 14:23)

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].