TWISTER STRIKES JACKSON WITH LITTLE ADVANCE WARNING

JACKSON -- The tornado struck with little warning about 6:30 on an unseasonably warm Sunday night in March 1923. When it was gone only seconds later, some of the most important buildings in Jackson's business section had been destroyed.

They included the Episcopal Church at First East and First North streets, the Masonic Hall at High and First South streets, the Corinthian Baptist Church immediately south of the Masonic Hall and a number of residences, mostly in the business section of the city. But not a window was broken in the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse.

Mrs. Charles F. Brennecke was struck by flying timbers and suffered the only serious injury on that evening of March 11, a broken collarbone. The town's lights, telephone service and the telegraph were knocked out. When people awoke to the devastation the next morning they were amazed that no one had been killed.

Services were under way at the Baptist Church when the storm hit. Pastor C.B. Colter tried to calm his flock, but church members ran outside when bricks began flying.

The storm's path was two blocks wide, demolishing residences or ripping off roofs. The Milde building east of the courthouse lost its roof as did the nearby livery barn of Henry Gockel.

Plate-glass windows were smashed at McAtee Mercantile Co., Haupt hardware store and Jones Drug Store on the square.

James Garage in the ground floor of the Masonic Hall was another business temporarily put out of business.

The twister left Jackson as quickly as it came, but it plunged the town in darkness. A number of farm buildings were damaged as the storm headed northeast and out of town.

Richard Lewis had just taken his older brother to Millersville in a buggy that night and was walking toward his family's farmhouse near Route D and Farmington. "It was dark and hot and it felt like it was going to pour down rain any minute.

"But I did not know what was going on until I went to school the next morning," said the 90-year-old Lewis, who was in the eighth grade at the time.

The cyclone's quirks became known the next day. The Rev. Colter's garage was blown away, but the automobile inside was unharmed. Ernst and Lula Hoffmann of Jackson have in their house a kerosene lamp that was found the day after the tornado in the chicken yard of his cousin, Adam Hoffmann, at Georgia and Washington streets.

The lamp was blown off their back porch but was not damaged, not even the glass chimney.

Lula Hoffmann has placed a card in the lamp commemorating the event.

Clarence Schade was 8 years old, and his family lived two blocks north of the county courthouse in 1923. He remembers little about the storm striking but recalls that afterward he and some other kids cleaned bricks reclaimed from demolished buildings.

"They could use them again after we scraped the mortar off," he said. "They paid us something like a penny a brick for cleaning those."

Schade well remembers the devastation.

The initial damage estimate was put at $100,000.