What's past is prologue - recalling the monstrous 1925 Tri-State Tornado

The "What's Past is Prologue" series, an homage to William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," looks at events of the past that seem to reoccur later with remarkable similarities. Frank Nickell of the Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation, previously a longtime faculty member at Southeast Missouri State University, is primary historian for these articles, which will be carried intermittently in the Southeast Missourian. This is the sixth in the series.

During the last tornado scene of the 1996 movie "Twister," a house drops right into the road in front of the film's two lead characters.

Weather scientists suggest this is not merely movie magic.

A violent tornado, described as EF-4 strength or higher with measurable winds of at least 166 miles per hour, can pick up a house completely off its foundation and destroy it, according to climate meteorologists, who point to preserved video evidence of such an occurrence.

Historian Frank Nickell, who taught 43 years at Southeast Missouri State University, indicated he has unearthed documentation and reviewed archived oral histories about the strength of the legendary Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which struck the states of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana on March 18, killing in all nearly 700 people.

"We interviewed a woman in Biehle in Perry County [Missouri] who was a teacher, and she talks about a colleague who was actually blown over the top of the schoolhouse and survived," Nickell said. "There were some ghastly stories from that 1925 tornado about people being impaled in their chest cavity by two by fours -- just incredible."

Unlike the tornadic activity of Dec. 10, which occurred after dark, the 1925 cyclone was in the middle of the day.

A website of the National Weather Service (NWS) recounts the timeline of the 96-year-old twister.

"It all started around 1 p.m. just northwest of Ellington, Missouri, in Reynolds County, where one farmer was killed. From there, the tornado raced to the northeast, killing two and inflicting $500,000 in damage upon Annapolis and the mining town or Leadanna. The storm headed across the farmland of Bollinger County, injuring 32 children in two county schools. By the time the tornado reached the Mississippi River bordering Perry County, 11 Missourians had perished."

Nickell encouraged readers to remember the era in which the 1925 tornado struck -- still the deadliest U.S. twister on record, reaching a top speed of 300 miles per hour and extending a mile wide in some spots.

"We now have an early warning system, but this simply didn't exist in the 1920s. We had warnings for a couple of days about the recent tornadoes but back then, they had none," Nickell said.

Data

The following figures about the 1925 tornado and its impact on Missouri are compiled by the NWS.

• Counties: Bollinger, Iron, Madison, Perry, Reynolds.
• Communities: Annapolis, Biehle, Cornwall, Ellington, Frohna, Leadanna, Redford.
• Length: 3.5 hours, from 1:01 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Strength: F5, with winds believed in excess of 300 m.p.h.
• Hardest hit community: Murphysboro, Illinois, with 234 deaths.
• Deaths: 695, a record for a single tornado.
• Injuries: 2,027.
• Homes destroyed: More than 15,000.

Nickell, who approaches the subject as a historian and not as a scientist, said he thinks late-in-the-year tornadoes will be more commonplace in the future.

"The weather is simply not as stable these days as it has been in the past," he opined.

Nickell recalled the careful research once done by a southern Illinois woman who catalogued the 1925 twister's destruction.

Angela Atkins of Fairfield, Illinois, interviewed 47 survivors and their statements led her to surmise the tornado had three vortexes within a larger funnel cloud -- essentially three little tornadoes inside a mammoth one, accounting for "the hideous amount of destruction" in the three impacted states.

Previous reporting by the Southeast Missourian is quoted in this article.