A beast from the sky: The Tri-State Tornado of 1925
By Soren Powell
The winter of 1924–1925 had been unusually warm and dry, but the tendrils of winter tried to hold fast. In some states in the Midwest, from Nebraska to the Dakotas, past Minnesota and into Wisconsin, heavy snow fell. Even though the rest of the Midwest reached into the mid-50s, come nighttime, the temperature dropped back down into the 30s. Still, it was warm enough that some schools in Indianapolis prepared for outdoor sports and activities. Despite heavy rain that threatened to flood the rivers in Indiana, a cautious optimism prevailed. In March, meteorologist J.H. Armington predicted “fair and warmer weather” in the coming days, a boon for everybody. Something was brewing in the atmosphere. But neither meteorologists nor the general public were aware of it yet.
In the early twentieth century, weather analysis and forecasting were still in their nascent stages under the Weather Bureau. Weather forecasts weren’t widely available to the public until 1901, when the Post Office Department started delivering the Weather Bureau’s forecasts directly to everyone’s door, and forecasts reached the radio waves in 1921 thanks to the University of Wisconsin. Scientists hadn’t fully relied on planes to gather atmospheric data just yet, so “kite stations” still dotted the map. These stations had multiple box-kites tied to a piano-wire string and were flown thousands of feet into the air. The kites had a meteorograph to measure weather variables and an instrument that recorded temperature, wind speeds, humidity, and air pressure all at once. While forecasts were becoming more ubiquitous across the nation, the technology to fully understand atmospheric patterns had not been invented.
Originally, tornadoes were understood as acts of divinity — though the Puritans considered them an act of Satan created by God’s wrath against the people for their sins. Tornadoes fully entered American culture in the twentieth century, most famously in the film version of The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Since then, tornadoes have been a cultural icon of the American landscape that still captivates audiences. There have been films depicting tornadoes, such as Twister (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), as well as the television show “Tornado Chasers” (2012), and a constant stream of first-person survivor or witness accounts of tornadoes on cable television and online. Twister actually briefly takes a theological tone toward EF-5 tornadoes — the highest category on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which measures tornado damage — referring to the strongest tornadoes as “the finger of God.” The United States has more tornadoes than anywhere on Earth, and the phenomenon has become inseparable from the imagery of the Midwest and the Great Plains.
March 17, 1925, began relatively quietly. The Bismarck Tribune in North Dakota said “the weather is unsettled from the upper Mississippi Valley westward to the North Pacific coast…,” but did not elaborate. The Brownsville Herald down in Texas reported something similar, that “the weather was mostly cloudy and unsettled over the greater portion of the United States at the morning observation.”
Saying the weather was “unsettled” was about as far as weather reports could go. They could forecast clear skies, clouds, rain, thunderstorms, snow, heat, cold, and even hurricanes. But not tornadoes. Scientists were incapable of properly analyzing cyclones; the technology just hadn’t been invented yet. Consequently, the word “tornado” was banned from forecasts until 1950, “because of a fear that mentioning tornadoes may cause panic,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was believed that a tornado warning would cause more chaos than a tornado itself. They were a confounding, frightening force of nature that even scientists could not explain.
The forecasts for the 18th were much the same as the day before. From North Dakota, newspapers reported a low pressure area with precipitation and warm temperatures that stretched from the plains to the Ohio valley. From Connecticut, they reported an atmospheric disturbance from Colorado moving into the Midwest, bringing cloudy weather, rain, and mild temperatures. Radio weather forecasts would have likely said the same: rain; clouds; unsettled; maybe thundershowers and wind. People likely packed umbrellas that morning, thinking this Thursday would bring no more than showers.
The low pressure system coming in from the Rockies to the Midwest was the first ingredient for bad weather. When low pressure systems containing cool air, typically from the Rocky Mountains, collide with high pressure systems containing warm, moist air, often from the Gulf of Mexico, the atmosphere becomes unstable. Clouds billow up in size, growing dark and heavy with precipitation. Wind speeds increase as the cooler air forces itself underneath the warm air. When the moisture from the warm air reaches a certain altitude, it begins freezing, and friction between these frozen particles create a charge that transforms into lighting. When these particles start to fall, they melt back into precipitation and fall to the ground. If the wind speeds are particularly strong, the particles can clump together and form hail, which will continue to grow until the wind can no longer carry it. The shift from warm to cool air can cause rotation inside the clouds, and if a part of a storm has enough rotation, the air funnels down to the surface, and a tornado is born. Yet even meteorologists of the 21st century cannot say where or when it will happen.
This exact weather pattern appeared over the Great Plains, starting in Kansas and Missouri. In the morning hours of the 18th, Kansas experienced thunderstorms, damaging hail, and an unconfirmed tornado. Newspapers had underreported the potential severity of the conditions. Still, come the afternoon, towns across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana kept their businesses open; children in classrooms learned their lessons; and people casually strolled the streets and fields. The day went on as the storm moved east. No announcement about the threat of tornadoes was made.
Just before 1 P.M., one part of the storm, a supercell, carrying strong winds, heavy rain, and hail over Shannon County, Missouri, began to rotate. A cloud wall formed and a funnel poked its head out and began to descend. Before long, as it crossed into Reynolds County and passed a few miles north of Ellington, Missouri, the funnel had touched the ground, officially becoming a tornado.
This was the first confirmed tornado that would be produced in the outbreak. While not great in size, it was beginning to expand, and it became destructive, blowing down fences, flattening orchards, and tearing down barns.
Sam Flowers, a local farmer, was likely performing his mundane duties for the day. Come nightfall, he did not return home, and his family, worried, called for a search party. Soon, they found his body. He had suffered a blow to the back of the head. The tornado, early in its life, had a taste of blood.
The cyclone continued northeast and headed straight for the town of Annapolis. Before the cyclone arrived, heavy rain and potato-sized hailstones pummeled the town. People took shelter under balconies and porches or went inside. Those observing the storm’s power saw something in the distance. Some described it as “‘a column of black coal smoke,’” “black fog,” or “dark smoke rising.”
Alice Jones was in school with her classmates as the storm loomed. From the second floor they looked out the window and saw a column in the sky. They knew what it was. They ran down to the first floor and took shelter. Within a few minutes, around 1:15, the town took a direct hit. The children heard the freight train-like roar as the whirling mechanism of not steel but wind ripped apart everything in its path. Entire buildings, wooden and brick alike, crumbled under its force. When it was over, after clearing out some debris covering the entrance, the schoolchildren saw that nearly the entire town had been wiped out, save a couple of heavily damaged structures. Alice returned to her house to find nothing left. She learned that some members of her family had been thrown like ragdolls as their house was blown apart.
Just east of Annapolis stood an even smaller lead-mining town, properly named Leadanna. Alice’s father was in the mines, picking away at the Earth’s crust. Nell Kelly and her husband, Orso, were with their two daughters, Lucille and Wilma, in their house as the storm howled outside. Orso peered outside, saw dark clouds approaching, and feared the worst. The family gathered and took shelter in the central dining room. Hail began to smash in the windows, scattering shards of glass across the floor. Before they knew it, all of them were suddenly lifted off the ground and tossed into a small creek. Lucille and Wilma miraculously suffered only minor injuries, but Nell was in a critical state, and Orso had been killed. Meanwhile, Alice’s father and the other miners were still underground as the tornado destroyed all the machinery above, trapping them below. They escaped by climbing several ladders over 400 feet back to the surface. The tornado’s death toll had climbed to three.
By the time the tornado entered the next county, it morphed into a wedge shape. It tore a path through the rural sections, damaging some businesses, farms, and homes. Remarkably, only a few people were injured, and the storm swiftly continued east. Without any control over its path, it was about to come to two more schools in the next county over.
Conrad School and Garner School, both small and rural, were in session as the wedge-shaped beast approached. The same scenario as the Kelly family played out: the buildings were hit and the children and teachers were picked up and tossed, leaving nothing but rubble and injuries behind. Everybody survived in the Conrad School, but a child from Garner School died of their wounds the next day. Now the toll was four.
The twister, unstoppable, continued its blind pillage straight for the small town of Biehle. Two other schools, Biehle Catholic and Ridge Catholic, had their small classrooms filled as the crooked, 45-degree-angled column approached. At about 2 P.M., it attacked. Buildings toppled. Bodies were thrown, cattle effortlessly whisked away. After a few minutes, yet another town had been leveled.
The sky cleared. The sun shone across what little remained. This time, the tornado had taken ten lives, raising its toll to fourteen.
The lifespans of tornados vary significantly. The weakest last mere moments, but powerful ones can survive for as long as an hour. This particular virulent creature had already passed the one-hour mark, and, remarkably, it still had a long life ahead.
As it approached the Mississippi River, its base lifted up as it approached the flowing body, glided over, and rapidly settled itself down, now in the state of Illinois. Then, “like a huge wall of smoke,” it torn into the village of Gorham. With its exceptional wind speeds, it did not discriminate between objects of any size or sentience, as entire sides of houses and those within them were sucked into its vortex. A cow was hurled into a restaurant, and children in the local school were terrorized as they too were pitched from their shelter. After it was over, not a single structure was standing. Gorham was erased from the map.
The tornado transformed. It was no longer a beast. One newspaper described the carnage “as if death had stalked through the section with an enormous scythe, which he swung ruthlessly, shaving the face of the earth clean. In numerous places, not even a stone foundation can be found.” Full houses were lifted up into the clouds and flown like “box-kites.”
A local school was in session as the principal, J. E. Fisher, heard the rumble approach. He tried his best to get the staff and schoolchildren into shelter in time. But it was too late. With only half in the shelter, “the top of the building crumpled and came down in a shower of bricks and beams–right down on [the children’s] little heads.” With two-fifths of Murphysboro, Illinois, cut down, out of 13,000 people, approximately 250 lost their lives.
The Apocalypse continued. The bell tolled for the hamlet of De Soto. The hazy blade bored its force into the ground. A man saw his wife and kids whisked away while they were in an automobile. Amazingly, after being blown five blocks away himself, he recovered and found his family with only minor injuries. Fred Weaver, a rail conductor, saw the De Soto train station “lifted up in the air and carried across the street and smashed into pieces on the other side.” The local schoolhouse, packed full of men, women, and children, “was razed in the twinkling of an eye.” One hundred and eighteen people died, more than one in seven of the town’s population of 700.
Even after claiming the lives of almost 400 people, the nightmare wouldn’t end. Its path was at the mercy of the gale-like storm front, and West Frankfort, Illinois was the next accidental target. The nightmare recurred. Large trees were torn up by their roots. A tin can dump was “picked up from one side of the West Frankfort-Benton highway and transferred to the other side.” Eight hundred men were down in a coal mine when they felt the sky ransack the ground above them and they “flocked to the lifts and found that the lifts wouldn’t work.” Just like in Leadanna an hour earlier, the men had to climb to the surface by ladder. When they escaped, “…all was quiet and peaceful but for the pitiful debris strewn everywhere about the surface.” Later, in the same place, a rescue worker noticed a baby shoe in the debris of a house, pulled at it, and freed a baby, unhurt. The rest of the story was catastrophic. Over 100 more were killed, dozens of them children.
Death’s final stop in Illinois was little Parrish. The town took a direct hit. One newspaper days later blazed the headline “No Relief Work Needed Parrish No Survivors” and told its readers the town “was demolished by Thursday’s tornado” and “virtually all the inhabitants were killed….” Thankfully, the newspaper proved to be nothing but sensationalism, as hundreds of townsfolk did survive, but the reality was hardly less disastrous. Ninety percent of the town was destroyed, and two dozen were killed.
The twister had survived longer than any recorded to date, and had outlived other tornadoes that fully formed and dissipated to the south. Yet still it went on. For a full hour it pillaged rural Illinois as it lunged toward the Wabash River and Indiana. Griffin was the closest town.
It stood no chance. Every single building was swept up, leaving nothing but foundations — the second town to be utterly destroyed. Fifty victims were cut down. To make matters worse, the storm flooded the Wabash and smaller rivers surrounding Griffin, cutting all immediate aid off with the exception of one railroad. It made easy work of Owensville, the next town over, too. A dozen more were lost, including Clora Johnson, a few miles west outside the town. She, her husband Brady, and their son Walter, all saw the tornado approaching and got under their supper table. Then the walls around them toppled. Suddenly, the damage stopped, and Clora stood up. But the family of three were merely in the wide eye of the tornado, and almost immediately the damage resumed. Clora was then “blown out onto the road, landed on her head, and died.” Her husband and son stayed under the table and survived.
Its last stop was Princeton. With one final, freight-train-like roar, it charged and took a chunk out of the place, along with almost two-dozen more lives.
Around 4:30 P.M., it took its final steps, unwinding, fizzling out, then disappearing.
The tornado had set multiple records, many of which have still not been broken in nearly a century, including the longest tornado track (219 miles), longest tornado duration (3 ½ hours), and the highest death toll caused by a single tornado (695 confirmed). Its average traveling speed was 62 miles per hour. At one point it traveled 73 miles per hour between Gorham, Illinois and Murphysboro. While the wind speed was not officially recorded, it was easily categorized as an F5 tornado on the old Fujita Scale, and may have had speeds as high as 300 miles per hour, faster than a modern bullet train. This can explain how entire structures were plucked from their foundations and tossed into the air.
The sheer destruction and loss of life fundamentally shifted how tornadoes were perceived. Not only did the event permanently associate tornadoes with the American Midwest, but because so many children were killed in the storm, ministers “encouraged the faithful to to perceive the storm as an inscrutable event, not a judgment.” Historian Peter J. Thuesen reflects how it “was a tipping point ‘toward new ways of thinking about God, nature and American chosenness.’” Reverend Harold M. Corbell, in the first sermon after the storm in Griffin, Indiana, thought otherwise. “‘God visited affliction on the wicked and it was atonement for wickedness that caused the tornado to wipe Griffin off the map,” he preached. Those that had lost family members in the storm were among his audience, and “none of them joined him in the song sung by the preacher.” One newspaper responded fiercely, writing, “the preacher blasphemes the deity…” and that “such idiotic expressions hurt the ministry more than a thousand good sermons can make up for.” The Puritan explanation behind the devastation was no longer sufficient.
What could be done to prevent another tragic loss of life such as this in the future? Nothing. M. V. Robins, a local Weather Bureau meteorologist, informed the public, “it is almost an impossibility to predict a tornado…. Tornadoes may occur in the middlewest just as earthquakes may be prevalent in certain parts of the country but they are freaky things.” S. J. Mitchell from the national Weather Bureau said just as much. “One of nature’s most deadly and costly freaks–the tornado–will never be understood or investigated to the point where science can accurately forecast its beginning or its path…” the Imperial Valley Press of El Centro, California summarized. Weather experts were frustrated “on all sides” by this, but they simply did not have the means to understand how this weather phenomenon occurred, much less warn the public about it. Consequently, “because of the inevitable panics and riots, the weather bureau does not event [sic] attempt to forecast tornadoes.”
The public was left with few options in the wake of a tornado. They could rebuild. They could bury the dead, mourn the lost. But they could not predict, prepare for, or even understand random chaos from the sky. One suggestion from a weather propeller maker included “exploding high-powered bombs in its face” to stop a tornado in its tracks, to which the Indianapolis Times responded, “a tornado undefined is bad enough. It might become utterly infuriated if men threw firecrackers or bombs at its face,” and that “perhaps in time men will tame the winds. But not yet. Now, when funnel-shaped clouds sweep down with insensate fury, it’s time for prayers, cyclons [sic] cellars, sympathy, generosity and relief, not bombs.”
Despite the helplessness meteorologists felt toward the weather phenomenon, conversations surrounding solutions more practical than explosives were proposed. The first proposal — the most straightforward — was to warn people by radio of approaching tornadoes. Meteorologist W. J. Humphrey told the nation on March 27 that while it was scientifically impossible to predict tornadoes, “through a radio system of warning persons in the threatened sections could take to their cyclone cellars or get out of the path of a tornado….” Humphrey also proposed the use of telephones as a means of warning. “The time is now at hand,” he said, “when a comprehensive plan of action designed to sound the alarm should be worked out by the various states.” His proposal fell on deaf ears, however, as the first tornado warning would not be issued over the radio until 1948.
On March 29, The Evening Star of Washington D.C. expressed optimism at the idea of actually predicting tornados, mentioning how “much progress has already been made in determining their causes, and a little progress has been made toward their prediction. Science will not be content until this prediction becomes precise.” While the newspaper also suggested that science would later also be able to predict earthquakes, a feat not yet done, it was correct that science would be able to successfully predict when tornadoes might occur, albeit decades later.
On April 3, another newspaper, The Midland Journal of Rising Sun, Maryland, was more frustrated at the delay. “The lesson of the tornado,” it starts forebodingly, “would seem to be that science, instead of telling us how it will annihilate whole peoples in the next World war, might well turn its attention to these twisters, scarcely less deadly than battles.” If meteorology can explain tornadoes mathematically, “why then can it not forecast them? The weather bureau says it can never be done. It also says nothing can be done to counteract the whirls.” This was not enough for the Journal. It retorted:
‘Never’ and ‘Nothing’ are words which do not seem to obtain in these latter days of science. If man can annihilate time and space and a tornado takes more than four hours to run its course, cannot science at least do something to rob this visitation of ‘unmoral nature’ of its terror? Must man go back to his ‘cyclone cellar?’ If so, he would better begin digging. This last loss is too great–whether reckoned in human lives, time or hard cash.
Both man and science would still have to wait and go through another World War before it would successfully predict tornadoes.
The third proposed solution was to build windproof and tornado-proof structures. Some newspapers expressed their irritation that a fix hadn’t already been made, particularly in architecture. On May 2, The Bismarck Tribune of Bismarck, North Dakota states, “the country had an earthquake scare not long ago; now tornadoes seem to be getting chronic. If this sort of thing keeps up a revival of the once popular cyclone cellar of the middle west seems inevitable. Either that or a radical change in our type of architecture — something that will withstand the savage onslaughts of nature.”
The Casper Daily Tribune of Casper, Wyoming was equally annoyed. On March 25, it remarked, “the folly of building to burn and to blown down is man’s folly, flung in the face of well established facts that buildings can be built that will neither burn up nor blow down.” The newspaper also asserts that “firesafe and windproof buildings are easily built. Architects, engineers and contractors the country over will agree to build them, and in most cases at a cost no greater than types which are food for flames and playthings for the wind. How many more lessons must we have before we show that we know the answer?”
Decades later, science finally has been able to accurately predict when and where tornadoes will occur, or at least the conditions that make them, and tornado warnings have been saving lives since the ban was lifted in 1950. As a result, while the historical death toll is contested, the average deaths per year from tornadoes since 1925 has dropped from 1.8 people per million each year to 0.12 people per million each year, or from roughly 200 deaths per year (with a population of 115 million in 1925) to roughly 40 (with a population of 330 million in 2022). While tornadoes cannot be stopped with structures or explosives, their terrifying unpredictability has been cracked, providing some comfort and safety to contemporary populations. Even if the nation has forgotten the Tri-State Tornado, the land has not. To this day, there is a scar left in the ground following the tornado’s path that can still be seen, acting as a permanent reminder of the deadliest tornado in American history.
A Note on Sources
The majority of the sources used to write this paper came from newspapers found in the “Chronicling America” database. This includes the death toll and a large portion of the first-hand accounts of those who survived the tornado. The other source I relied heavily on was the secondary source “The 1925 Tri-State Tornado Damage Path and Associated Storm System,” a 2013 scientific investigation following the damage path of the tornado produced by Robert H. Johns, Donald W. Burgess, Charles A. Doswell III, Matthew S. Gilmore, John A. Hart, and Steven F. Piltz. This study included historical research and interviews from survivors and witnesses of the tornado to provide a comprehensive understanding of what the tornado looked like and its direct path through the three states.
