Natural disaster in the Midwest...

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It was rendered in a thorough and understandable way.

I wasn't being sarcastic.

This is actually happening more and more often in the Tri-State area.....

“This city and vicinity were exceedingly alarmed, last Sabbath, about four o’clock, P.M. by a tremendous westerly tornado, which continued about 20 minutes, twisting off limbs of trees, unroofing houses, and tumbling down chimnies [sic] … Terrible was the havoc on the water….”

Sound familiar? Except for the unorthodox spelling, this newspaper account of wild weather reads like any published in recent months, but it ran originally on July 4, 1792:

Whatever its name, the 1792 storm was deadly. Thirty boaters drowned when their vessels capsized (note the broadside’s woodcut ships, printed upside-down). A whole family perished off Yellow Hook (present-day Bay Ridge), and a sloop carrying sixteen passengers lost all but one to the depths. They tempted fate by sailing on Sunday, or so clucked the anonymous poet of the maudlin “New-York Tragedy” that rounds out the broadside:

On the afternoon of July 13, 1895, a horrendous tornado — a “hellish wind” — ripped apart the New Jersey town of Cherry Hill. A New York Times reported that “nearly every building in the place bears evidence of the force of its power.” Some claim the village’s name became so associated with that destructive storm that it later had to change its name to North Hackensack.

That same storm swept into New York, whipping through Manhattan via Harlem, leapt across the East River and struck the village of Woodhaven. The rather unusual reaction of New Yorkers to this storm caught my attention, as reported by the New York Sun: “Yesterday was another eventful day in the history of Woodhaven, Long Island. The tornado on Saturday that killed one, wounded forty, demolished fifteen houses and partially wrecked thirty more, was followed by the largest crowd of sightseers that ever collected in town limits.” The paragraph ends, “Altogether it was a great day in the town.”

Throngs of locals from New York and Brooklyn took the newly constructed elevated railroads into Queens to witness the carnage, to help out the victims or, in very isolated cases, snag a souvenir of this rare event. The Sun reports that over 100,000 people visited the site over the next day, and while most were there to assist those in need — a genuine outpouring — still others came merely to witness the pandemonium.

The tornado tore up pieces of the village and redistributed them at random. One man had four roofs in his backyard; cows and chickens were deposited into new homes. The Sun reports the bodies of dozens of chickens, plucked of their feathers by the winds.

This being the days before FEMA and decent insurance plans, many families were left to beg. Many of the gawkers and sightseers began pulling money from their wallets. An enterprising lawyer took an empty beer keg and asked people to fill it with money for the needy. Soon volunteers carried signs saying “Help fill the barrel!” The throngs were directed past the money barrel as a man cried, “You’ve spent your lives emptying kegs. Fill this one!”

The scene took on the feel of a macabre carnival, with gory recounts of the storm and cries from virtual carnies driving more people to arrive and donate. “In the keg! In the keg! In the k-e-g!”

In the end, two people from Queens died during that storm — a pregnant 17 year old struck by a beam and a five-year-old boy. (Actually, the Times reports the boy lived; the Sun says he died. Such was the way of New York newspapers in 1895.)

One rather remarkable story of survival soon emerged — the ten-year-old daughter of the village milkman was walking her cow back to the barn when the tornado picked up both her, the cow and the barn. The barn was torn to splinters and the cow thrown into Jamaica Bay. The girl, thankfully, was deposited into an onion patch, only slightly bruised. [From the New York Tribune]

While examples of mass destruction and various observations came from a growing number of tornadoes by the early 1800s, a major scientific study of a tornado site did not occur until 1835*, when a significant tornado hit New Brunswick, New Jersey. The storm devastated the town and others in the area. It left five dead and is still New Jersey’s deadliest tornado on record.