America's Deadliest Twister: The Tri-State Tornado of 1925

1. Genesis, 1 p.m.: Annapolis, Missouri, to Gorham, Illinois

1 1 Genesis, 1 p.m.: Annapolis, Missouri, to Gorham, Illinois T he official National Weather Service forecast for Wednesday, March 18, 1925, issued for the southern reaches of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana called for “rains and strong shifting winds,” a prediction that was a tragedy of understatement. The tempest that formed in the Missouri Ozarks that afternoon became the most lethal tornado in the history of the United States and the third deadliest in the recorded history of the world, forever altering the economy of southern Illinois. With Easter just three weeks away, the Tri-State Tornado dropped from the sky during the era of the Charleston, flappers, Charles Lindbergh, and Prohibition. Calvin Coolidge of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, was president, and the Ku Klux Klan was at peak membership. That year, Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf, blue-eyed Paul Newman was born, and Chrysler Corporation was founded. In small-town Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow squabbled over evolution in the Scopes Trial. Bryan was born in Salem, a central Illinois city that would later send troops to help the dispossessed. Spring training that day saw the St. Louis Browns whip the Brooklyn Dodgers 3-0, and the Cardinals, under the immortal Branch Rickey, with the franchise on the cusp of its forty-fourth season in St. Louis, lost to the Oakland (California) Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. That season the Cardinals’ player-manager, Rogers Hornsby, hit .403, belted 39 home runs, 2 Genesis, 1 p.m. and delivered 143 RBIs. The stats earned Hornsby the National League Most Valuable Player Award. This, too, was the era when ubiquitous local newspapers carried endearingly folksy sections like “The Talk of the Walk,” “Our Neighborhood,” or “All around the Town,” the latter being the case in the Daily Independent in Murphysboro, Illinois, a town squarely in the crosshairs of the tornado. Usually found in the interior pages of an edition, the columns chronicle the comings and goings of townspeople. The day of the tornado, it was reported in Murphysboro that “Attorney. L. R. Stewart went to St. Louis on business Wednesday morning. . . . Reverend Marion Wilson of Pinckneyville passed through the city Tuesday enroute to Willisville where he is holding a revival meeting.” Such was the quiet world in the path of a historic storm that no one had any inkling was on the way. Children went off to schools that morning whose administrations were unprepared for the tragedy about to occur. Fathers and brothers traveled to work in the coal mines, farms, and stores of the region. A long winter had given way to the dangerous gift of the first warm day of the year. In Murphysboro, DeSoto, and West Frankfort , some of the very people mentioned in “The Talk of the Walk” and columns like it throughout the region would not live to read about their neighbors again. Before the sun set, 695 people were to die. D. W. Griffith’s silent screen classic Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s best-selling novel The Clansman, was released in 1915. A classmate and social friend of Dixon at Johns Hopkins University, Virginia-born President Woodrow Wilson quipped after a private showing in the White House that the movie was “like writing history with lightning.” The movie rekindled the horror that was the Ku Klux Klan. A decade after its first release , Birth of a Nation was still playing at the Barth Theatre in Carbondale, Illinois, a business owned by I. W. Rogers and his Gem Theatre Company of Cairo. Adults got in for forty cents, children fifteen. The quarter-page advertisement in the Free Press that Wednesday called the movie “a story of epic proportion, not to be missed,” but few events can compare before or since to the epic that was on its way from the Missouri Ozarks. On that early spring day, southeast Missouri and the southern-most parts of Illinois and Indiana were awash in welcome warmth. In Carbondale, a proximate town to DeSoto and Murphysboro, the high temperature was 69°F. The Alton Evening Telegraph the day after the storm said, “A violent snowstorm fringed the tornado on the north when it struck Wednesday. [The] Weather Bureau predicts freezing or [slightly] above in the devastated Genesis, 1 p.m. 3 region tonight.” The bureau was right about the cold but woefully inaccurate in predicting the possibility of tornadoes. Indeed...