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Story Archives: The Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 -- Part 2
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The Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 -- Part 2
 THE STORM THAT LEFT EVERYTHING HERE 'PEELED AND DESOLATE'; F-5 TORNADO LEFT CARNAGE AT EVERY STEP; DID GOD 'FROWN' ON NATCHEZ?
(Second in a two-part series)
Just before the monster tornado hit Natchez shortly after 2 p.m. on Thursday, May 7, 1840, the captain of the steamboat Hinds was seen walking along the river bank under -the-hill.
No one saw him board his docked vessel before the storm hit, but both he and the boat vanished.
The "upper works" and the deck of another steamer, the Prairie, which was partially loaded with lead, were destroyed by the tornado and this boat sank. Four women were seen on board just before the twister hit, but they and the other passengers, the total number unknown, were presumed drowned.
The steamboat Lawrence was severely damaged but didn't sink while the Mississippian, a wharf-boat which served as a hotel and grocery, did. The Vidalia steam-powered ferry loaded with passengers and horses was crossing the river when the twister cruised into town from downriver. All on board, human and animal, perished.
Many of the men aboard the estimated 60 flatboats on the Mississippi drowned, too, as the swirling winds push the river level up seven feet and tossed the vessels about like a cork at the end of a fishing line.
Two weeks later, a tattered, half-submerged ghost ship was seen floating down the river at Baton Rouge. It was the Hinds. Found onboard were the bodies of 51 passengers and crew members, all men, with the exception of three women and a three-year-old girl. Four survivors had previously been found safely on shore in Natchez.
Strange things happen when nature's fury is unleashed.
AFTERMATH OF A GREAT CATASTROPHE
The Natchez Free-Trader reported that in the aftermath of the storm almost everything under-the-hill -- dwellings, stores, hotels, boats, the Mississippi Cotton Press -- was destroyed, leaving only a "few torn fragments."
The Steamboat Hotel under-the-hill was leveled, too. Timothy Flint and his son James were there when the storm hit but survived along with a handful of others, including the hotel owner, Mr. Alexander, and his wife. The couple's two children died while being cradled in their mother's arms.
Some of the victims were visiting or passing through town, such as the Flints. The travelers came from New York, St. Louis, Illinois, Cairo, Pittsburgh, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and Alabama. Many of the dead were never identified.
Natchez was at the time of the twister a great river port and trading center and under-the-hill was a bustling place where goods were loaded and unloaded onto flatboats from several wharves, and where travelers debarked one steamboat to board another on their journeys. On any given day, reported a New Orleans newspaper, under-the-hill merchants and traders were well stocked with "pork, bacon, butter, lard and vegetables," in addition to many other goods.
Upper Natchez was also in "utter ruin." The towers at the Presbyterian and Methodist churches were "thrown down, their roofs broken, and walls shattered." The Episcopal church suffered roof damage, Parker's "Great Southern Exchange...leveled with dust," both the City Hotel and the Mansion House "unroofed" and "upper stories broken in." The Natchez Theatre and Andrew Brown's showplace home near the sawmill were both leveled.
Sheriff M. Izod's house "had not a timber standing," and "hundreds of other dwellings are nearly in the same situation."
Even the office of The Natchez Free-Trader was "crushed in and much shattered." But the paper, which during this period was led by talented editors, managed to continue printing. Its coverage of the tornado, in fact, was an example of journalism at its finest, especially considering the absolute physical and mental devastation in the city.
Wrote the Free-Trader: "We are all in confusion, and surrounded by the destitute, the houseless, the wounded and the dying. Our beautiful city is shattered...We are peeled and desolate." It even reported that the town's "delightful" chinaberry trees "are all torn up."
One man said that as he "walked over the ruins, I passed the dead and the wounded at every twenty paces..."
REBUILDING LIVES AND A COMMUNITY
Almost immediately, efforts to bury the dead and care for the survivors began. More than 50 victims were interred the day after the storm.
In the wake of the disaster, a public meeting was held at the courthouse led by Col. James C. Wilkins, a cotton merchant well known for his charity. His obituary a few years later noted that "to the widow and orphan he was always a fast friend."
Committees were appointed to lead the clean-up effort and care for those in need. The City Hotel survived the storm and its owner, Noah Barlow, opened it "to the wounded." The Tremont House, on the northeast corner of Main and Wall, was used as a hospital under the direction of Dr. Pollard. Stephen Duncan, a wealthy planter and businessman and owner of the Auburn mansion, "generously offered to be responsible for the rent."
Slaves were brought in from nearby plantations, including those of "Col. Surget and Mr. Crossgrove" to "assist in clearing the streets and digging the dead from the ruins." In fact, most of the clean-up work, including the burying of the dead, was done by slaves.
News of the disaster was passed up and down the river by steamboat captains and spread inland. When a reporter from the New Orleans Bee talked to the captain of the steamer Vicksburg, he wrote it was difficult to determine "how many were killed, as the streets were filled with large piles of timber, rendering them impassable, and the work of extricating the bodies from the fallen houses was not completed when the Vicksburg left....large ox carts were uplifted and thrown hundreds of yards from the original positions...every house under the Hill, except five or six, was blown down, and the river filled with floating fragments of houses and boats."
When Tennessee citizens learned of the disaster, they collected $1,500 for "the sufferers" in Natchez. Horatio Eustis, a visitor at Somerset, Henry Chotard's home east of Natchez, said contributions "are arriving for the relief of the distressed, but years must pass before the town can be rebuilt as before..." Relief teams came from many places, including Vicksburg, Grand Gulf and Rodney. New Orleans sent money and a group of surgeons.
Twenty days after the tornado, the 26th Congress passed a joint resolution to assist Natchez in the "calamity" by backing up to $300,000 in loans at three percent interest. A committee was appointed to scrutinize the applications for approval and included the U.S. Marshal, District Attorney, the mayor of Natchez and the president of the town's two banks.
Total economic losses to Natchez in residential and commercial property, merchandise, etc., was estimated at $5 million. An inflation calculator translates that figure to $100 million in today's dollars. But the figures are misleading.
TERRIBLE RAGE OF THE TEMPEST
"There is no telling how widespread has been the ruin," wrote the Free Trader. "Reports have come in from plantations 20 miles distant in Louisiana, and the rage of the tempest was terrible. Hundreds of (slaves) killed, dwellings swept like chaff from their foundations, the forest uprooted, and the crops beaten down and destroyed. Never, never, never, was there such desolation and ruin."
In Vidalia, the courthouse was "utterly torn down," as were the homes of Dr. McWhorter, the banker W.A. Dunlap and attorney David Stacy. The parish jail was "partly torn down." The twister claimed the life of Judge George Keeton, but David Stacy, who was dining with the judge, crawled out of the rubble alive. There were many such stories.
Forming over Concordia Parish, the storm hit the river at Natchez Island, just below Peter Lapice's Whitehall plantation, crossing over into the Mississippi at the point opposite the plantation of David Barland on the Adams County side at a location now known as Carthage Point.
The economic destruction to Concordia, which at that time included present day Tensas Parish, isn't known but there was an awful human toll on a segment of the slave population.
Agricultural losses were great and around this time the Concordia/Tensas region, with a population of 9,416, mostly slaves, produced about 40,000-plus bales of cotton a year. Some 60,000 acres were under cultivation with cotton, corn, oats, potatoes and wool. Livestock production included 4,321 horses, 13,613 hogs, 14,681 horned cattle, and numerous poultry and dairy operations. Lumber was a big business, too, with nine sawmills abuzz, many utilized to rebuild those homes, cabins, fences and other structures destroyed by the tornado.
Concordia plantation owners like Stephen Duncan of Natchez, which had a population of 4,800, didn't recover from the disaster over night. His cotton and business losses were so great that he was forced to sell some of his Pennsylvania property to pick up more than $12,000 in much needed cash as the Natchez economy was wrecked.
In the days after, a Free-Trader reporter walked along the bluff near the location of the light-house, destroyed in the disaster, and looked across the river to "the storm-rent woods of Vidalia," and saw "a gleaming segment of the romantic lake Concordia, which never could be seen before the tornado from that point
"The deep and heavy woods which shaded...Vidalia...now resemble a stubble field — twisted, torn, bent, wrested and splintered..."
From the bluff looking upriver, the reporter saw the debris of the Little and Linton mansions, the Eagle coffee house, Raby's fine stables, the railroad depot, two commission stores and many smaller buildings.
ENORMOUS TOLL OF HUMAN LIFE
Newspapers put the death toll at 317 and 109 injured, the only tornado where the dead outnumbered the injured. But there's no doubt that the death toll was much, much higher.
According to the Natchez Courier, most of the fatalities were on the river, an estimated 269, including 200 flat boatmen, most of whom drowned. There were 47 deaths in upper Natchez and one in Vidalia. But the statistics compiled back then took into no account the deaths of slaves on the plantations.
Why? Because slaves were considered property, not human beings. The name of only one slave -- Moses -- is mentioned but apparently not included in the death toll. He was pulled from beneath Parker's Southern Exchange and remembered as "a most valuable servant."
The Courier reported that 74 persons were injured in Natchez and 35 aboard boats on the landing and river were hurt. Again, no official count of the number of blacks injured was made.
There's no question that this tornado was at least an F5 on the Fujita scale with wind strength of 207 to 260 miles per hour.
In an F5, strong frame houses are lifted off foundations and disintegrate. The Natchez Free-Trader gave an excellent description of tornado's strength by noting it had the "explosive power of gunpowder." The storm was fierce enough to pick up small boats on the river and sail them through the air like missiles, some carried more than 300 feet.
Horatio Eustis said the "force of the wind was incredible. Iron spikes were borne by the blast with such force and direction as to be driven up to their heads into the walls of houses...Men who were able to clutch hold of something...were stripped perfectly naked."
Dr. Henry Tooley, a meteorologist from Natchez and instructor at Jefferson College, said the tornado sucked moisture from leaves, herbs and grass, leaving them "crisped" and withered.
A flat boatman told a newspaper that lead shot from a store above the bluff was propelled and scattered by the wind to a boat on the river where it "lodged in the bacon hams...with so much force that they were imbedded out of sight."
Only one tornado -- the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925 -- was deadlier than the one in Natchez but it covered a much larger region. Also an F5, this twister traveled through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, killing 695 and injuring 2,027.
In Natchez, the Free Trader advised survivors 16 decades ago to respect and accept the great forces of nature and the uselessness of questioning why. "Twas the voice of the Almighty that spoke...," said the paper, adding, "All have suffered...."
Survivors never forgot it. Timothy Flint and his son James were rescued from the ruins of the Steamboat Hotel under-the-hill. Flint, a 60-year-old writer and historian, was in poor health and journeying to visit family at his birthplace in Massachusetts.
He boarded a steamboat the day after, suffering severe chills from exposure in a drenching rain in the aftermath, and finally arrived at his brother's home in Reading, Mass., in June. As he rested one day he wrote a friend and told him about the storm. He wrote: "You will, probably, be one of my last correspondents." By mid-August he was dead, 15 weeks after the tornado.
In the months before, Natchez' thriving economy had been weakened by several factors, including a yellow fever epidemic, a national depression in 1837 and a fire in the commercial district. Upon hearing news of the tornado at her home in Philadelphia, Stephen Duncan's sister, Emily, exclaimed: "Natchez appears to be a doomed place." She wanted her brother to move back to Pennsylvania, far away from a country "so evidently under the frown of God."
William Johnson, a free black man in Natchez, who was a businessman and a slave owner, lamented in those days of despair:
"Oh, what times. No one ever seen such times." |
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