Skip to main content

Tornado

March 2023
1min read

I was a pupil in Miss Henley’s sixth-grade class in the Gorham Elementary School when history touched me. Gorham is and was a village located on the Missouri Pacific Railroad about fifty miles northwest of Cairo, Illinois. A substantial share of its five hundred residents were employees of that railroad.

The place hasn’t changed much since March 18, 1925—the day the most lethal tornado in recorded history came roaring across the Mississippi River from Missouri and devastated Gorham, the first town it hit in Illinois.

The school was a two-story brick building. A wide hall separated the grade school from the high school. We were into the afternoon schedule when, between two and three o’clock, the wind started blowing and Miss Henley asked me and some other boys to close the windows. As I looked out I saw the backboards tearing off the posts of an outdoor basketball court and the outside toilets tossing about. Most of the children ran out the door at the back of the room into a side hall where coats and hats were hung on a partition. The partition blew against the wall and became a partial shelter for some of them.

I remember seeing the high school wall crumble, the plaster turning to dust, before I was knocked unconscious.

Along with some of the larger boys, I ran out the side door into the wide hall that separated us from the high school. I remember seeing the high school wall crumble, the plaster turning to dust, before I was knocked unconscious. When I came to, I was a patient in the Catholic hospital in Cairo.

The wife and daughter of Mr. Brown, the principal, were killed, yet he, realizing that he could do nothing for them, went with his injured students to the hospital. The railroad donated a passenger train that was in the area to take the injured and their families there. There were hospitals closer by in Murphysboro and Carbondale, but those cities were in the tornado’s path and had to take care of their own injured.

Eight or nine of my fellow pupils and upward of forty townspeople were killed. My skull and jawbone were fractured. Two of my classmates were dug out from the same area of debris. One, whose last name was Murray (I forget his first name) was dead, and the other, Lee Casey, was crippled for life.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February/March 1995"

Authored by: The Editors

Hundreds and hundreds of letters have been left at the wall. This one carries a date that almost certainly is the day the event that haunts the writer took place.

Authored by: The Editors

Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific

Authored by: The Editors

George Wallace American Populist

Authored by: The Editors

The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry From Whitman to Walcott

Authored by: The Editors

The White House in Miniature

Authored by: The Editors

Soul in the Stone Cemetery Art From America’s Heartland

Authored by: The Editors

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Authored by: The Editors

Eastern State Penitentiary Crucible of Good Intentions

Authored by: The Editors

Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival

Authored by: The Editors

Forever Barbie The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.