The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1865-07-25 00:00:00

DREADFUL TORNADO IN THE NORTH-
WESTERN STATES OF AMERICA.

The most dreadful tornado known to the
American people passed over several of the
North-Western States on Tuesday and Wednes-
day June 27 and 28. The cyclone Nernst° have
first shown itself in Southern Missouri, below
Jefferson City, late on Tuesday afternoon. Its
track was slightly north-east, and nearly parallel
to the line of the Mississippi River. Central
and Southern Missouri, the effects of the storm
were not of an extraordinarily disastrous nature.
In lowa, however, the tornado made itself
known in an unmistakable manner. The central
portion of the State, over a belt some twenty
miles in width, was entirely covered with water,
in some places to the depth of two feet. Rail-
road travel was completely interrupted, the
roadways becoming in many instances the beds
of rushing streams. The city of Dubrique was
visited by the storm. Several buildings were
blown down ; the corpses and skeletons in a
public cemetery were washed into the streets.
The sewers were torn open. All the canal and
river bridges in the city were swept away. All
the telegraph wires were torn down. Oars
were lifted from the railway tracks and thrown
into the fields. A church-steeple was whirled
away into an adjacent lot. So far as heard,
from 137 bridges of iron, stone, and wood were
washed away in that State. The village of
Rochdale was under water, and many buildings
were floated off. The crops in the great Catfish
Valley are wholly ruined, and fields of standing
corn elsewhere covered with water and so
destroyed. How many lives were lost in lowa
is not at present known.
Passing from lowa, the great clycone crossed
the Mississippi near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin,
and swept on into the latter State. Its area
here narrowed down. It was in this State that
the tornado effected the most appalling damage.
The village of Virogna, in Vernon county, was
virtually wiped out. In this little town 17
persons were killed and 100 wounded. The
attention of the citizens was first excited by a
howling and rumbling in the air, and casting
glances aloft they discovered two enormous
black clouds, one sweeping from the south, the
other from the south-east. Long, tremulous
skeins of what seemed to be a deep black vapour
trailed after these. They swept so near the
earth that the people could discover in their
embrace a chaotic mass composed of rails, stonm,
leaves, branches of trees, the debris of field and
forest, as though the earth had been swept of
all loose fragments. These two cirrose clouds
impigned upon each other, just above the village
of Virogna. At the instant of junction a
tremendous crash, as though heaven and earth
had come together, was heard ; and at the next
moment the farm-house of a Mr. Vought,
standing on the outskirts of the village, was
picked up by the agency of the storm and
smashed into kindling wood. In five minutes
the entire southern portion of the hamlet was
transformed into a mass of shapeless ruins, and
the storm-cloud was seen, by those who could
see, passing away to the north—a dreadful
conglomeration of crushed and tattered houses,
barns, out-buildings, fences, waggons, trees,
horses end their harness, stones, farming
utensils, well sweeps and keoba, leaves,
clothing, bedding, dry goods of all sorts
(swept from the little village stores), earth, iron
bolts and bars, threshing and mowing machines,
hay stacks, granaries with their contents,
several shapeless masses of human flesh—in
short, almost everything that could be detached
from the earth by the tremendous power of this
awful electric storm. One lady who had gone
into the cellar of her house for protection at the
appearance of the storm, ventured to the top of
the cellar stairs at the instant that the storm
burst over her dwelling. The how* was swept
away as though it were a feather, and with it the
poor woman, whose body was found in a field
half a mile distant. A farmer seated in a wagon,
and driving his team across afield, was picked up,
with his horses and the heavy van, and thrown
into the neighbouring road, a distance of nearly'
forty rods. He was not seriously injured; but
while endeavouring to extricate himself from the
mine of his wagon, another horse, taken frons
another portion of the same field, was thrown
upon him. Little children were snatched tip,
and deposited in the tree tops and ploughed
fields. A school-house, occupied by the teacher'
and twenty-four pupils, was lifted up bodily into
the air to a height of 40 feet, and carried a dis-
tance of nearly seventy rods. It had barely
touched the earth when it was again picked up
and tossed still farther on. As it struck the
ground the second time it flew to pieces like a
shell. Eight of the children were killed out-
right, and the remainder received injuries of
greater or lesser importance. The finest house
in the village, that of a Mr. Gardner, was
snapped up, carried above the tree.tops, allowed
to graze the ground, and then thrown higher
than before, making the second descent roof
first, when it went to pieces and was carried off
in the tornado. Strange to say, the occupant
was not badly injured. Two barns, belonging to
Herman Greene, together with his house, were
ground to powder. One of these barns contained
2,0001b5. of wool, and this wool tufts the trees
and shrubs for miles in the track of the storm.
In this same barn were several mowing, reaping,
and threshieg machines, of the sort so generally
used on the Western prairies. These were dieinte-,
grated, the heavy iron bolts and bars twisted like
tow, and swept away on the wings of the wind, to
be scattered over the surrounding fields. The resi-
dence of Colonel Pierce, a wealthy gentleman,
was utterly ruined. Mansion, barns, outhouses,
conservatory, and garden became a wreck, The
wife of the colonel was fatally injured. The
heavy saw logs in a mill pond in the neighbour-
hood were whisked from the water as though
they had been feathers, some of them carried a
distance of half a mile and deposited in the
forest. A large boulder, known as Table Rook,
was lifted from the earth and thrown twenty
rods. A wagon and a pair of fine horses were
thrown over a barn and safely deposited upon
the earth. A board was taken from a fence and
shot straight through the walls of the only brick
dwelling-house in the village, and now protrudes
into the parlour. Timbers 16 inches square and
30 to 40 feet in length were tossed up and then
forced into the earth. Some of them penetrating
the soft loam to the depth of twenty feet. A
heavy "railroad spike" was driven into an oak
tree, as neatly as though the work had been done
with a sledge. The only printing office in the
village—that of the Times—was reduced to a
wreck; "cases" and type borne aloft or scat-
tered over the fields, a large hand-press thrown
across the street, and the material generally scat-
tered in all directions. A little boy, Willie
Mosely, was carried up into the bosom of the
cloud and afterwards gently deposited in a hazel
thicket, one hundred and fifty rods from the
point of his departure on his unwelcome trip.
Log-chains were twisted apart, and the du-
severed links sown over the neighbouring fields.
In the forest, or "timber," a mile away, the
tree tops were covered with household goods,
bedding, furniture, and the like; and the body
of a little child was taken from the topmost
branches of an oak. The carcases of horses,
cattle, sheep, swine, doge, cats, and poultry were
thickly strewn through and upon this "timber,"
and many living animals were found in the trees
or upon the earth, hundreds of rods away from
the point of their departure. Heavy boulders
were smashed to pieces, as though beneath a
steam-hammer. The operation of the tornado
is likened to that of an enormous circular saw,
spinning its way through the village at frightful
speed, and ripping, tearing, smashing, crushing,
and disintegrating everything in its track. A sin-
gular circumstance—if one may use such a term in
referring to an event where all the circumstances
were extraordinary—was noted. The tornado
seemed, at irregular intervals, to split in half,
each portion whirling on its individual centre,
and as frequently to form a new junction. Its
appearance might be compared to that of two
dreadful shapeless demons of destruction, lead-
ing a dance of death over the smiling meadows
of that fertile state, alternately joining hands
and separating, ever whirling about in a maze of
destruction. Twenty-five houses were ground to
atoms aud whirled away in the embrace of the
cyclone; forty buildings of various deeerip=
were demolished, rent, or scattered.
leaving Wisconsin the storm passed across Lake
Superior, and probably spent itself somewhere
in Upper Canada. It should be remembered
that the track of this cyclone was over prairie
land, so that it had an unobstructed field for its
fearful operations,