HORRIBLE STORM!! NATCHEZ IN RUINS!!!
Our devoted city is in ruins, and we have not a heart of stone to detail while the dead remain unburied and the wounded groan for help. Yesterday, at 1 o'clock, while all was peace, and most of our population were at the dining table, a storm burst upon our city and raged for half an hour with most destructive and dreadful power. We look around and see Natchez, yesterday lovely and cheerful Natchez, in ruins, and hundreds of our citizens without a shelter or a pillow. Genius cannot imagine, poetry itself cannot fill up a picture that would match the ruin and distress that every where meets the eye.
'Twas the voice of the Almighty that spoke, and prudence should dictate reverence rather than execration. All have suffered, and all should display the feelings of humanity and the benevolence of religion!
"Under the Hill" presents a scene of desolation and ruin which sickens the heart and beggars description- all, all, is swept away, and beneath the ruins still lay crushed the bodies of many strangers. It would fill volumes to depict the many escapes and heartrending scenes; one of the most interesting was the rescue of Mrs. Alexander from the ruins of the Steam Boat Hotel; she was found greatly injured with two children in her arms and they both dead!
The destruction of the flat boats is immense; at least sixty were tossed for a moment on a raging river and then sunk, drowning most of their crews. The best informed produce dealers estimate the number of lives lost by the sinking of flat boats at TWO HUNDRED! No calculation can be made of the amount of money and produce swallowed up by the river. The Steamboat Hinds, with most of her crew, went to the bottom, and the Prairie from St. Louis, was so much wrecked as to be unfit for use. The steamer St. Lawrence at the upper cotton press is a total wreck.
There is no telling how widespread has been the ruin. Reports have come in from plantations twenty 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.
THE TORNADO Description of the Storm - Dreadful Visitation of Providence
Natchez, MS - Friday, May 15, 1840
About one o'clock on Thursday, the 7th inst., the attention of the citizens of Natchez was attracted by an unusual and continuous roaring and thunder to the southward, at which point hung masses of black clouds, some of them stationary, and others whirling along with under currents, but all driving a little east of north. As there was evidently much lightning the continual roar of growling thunder, although noticed and spoken of by many, created no particular alarm.
The dinner bells in the large hotels had rung, a little before two o'clock, and most of our citizens were sitting at their tables, when, suddenly, the atmosphere was darkened, so as to require the lighting of candles; and, in a few moments afterwards, the rain was precipitated in tremendous cataracts rather than in drops. In another moment the tornado, in all its wrath, was upon us. The strongest buildings shook as if tossed with an earthquake; the air was black with whirling eddies of house walls, roofs, chimnies, huge timbers torn from distant ruins, all shot through the air as if thrown from a mighty catapult. The atmosphere soon became lighter, and then such an awful scene of ruin as perhaps never before met the eye of man became manifest. The greater part of the ruin was effected in the short space of from three to five minutes, although the heavy sweeping tornado lasted nearly half an hour. For about five minutes it was more like the explosive force of gunpowder than any thing else it could have been compared to. Hundreds of rooms were burst open as sudden as if barrels of gunpowder had been ignited in each.
As far as glasses or the naked eye can reach, the first traces of the tornado are to be seen from the Natchez bluff down the river about ten miles, bearing considerably west of south. Sweeping low the plantation of David Barland, Esq., opposite the plantations of P.M. Lapice, Esq., in the Parish of Concordia. It then struck the Natchez bluff about a mile and a half below the city, near the mansion called the "Briers," which it but slightly injured, but swept the mansion late of Charles B. Greene, Esq., called the "Bellevue" and the ancient forest in which it was emblossomed into a mass of ruins.
It then struck the city through its whole width of one mile and included the entire river and the village of Vidalia on the Louisiana shore - making the path of the tornado more than two miles in width. At the Natchez Landing on the river the ruin of dwellings, stores, steamboats, flat boats, was almost entire from the Vidalia Ferry to the Mississippi Cotton Press. A few torn fragments of dwellings still remain, but they can scarcely be called shelters.
In the upper city, or Natchez on the hill, scarcely a house escaped damage or utter ruin. The Presbyterian and Methodist churches have their towers thrown down, their roofs broken and walls shattered. The Episcopal church is much injured in its roof. Parker's great Southern Exchange is level with the dust. Great damage has been done to the City Hotel and the Mansion House, both being unroofed and the upper stories broken in. The house of sheriff Izod has not a timber standing, and hundreds of other dwellings are nearly in the same situation. The Court House at Vidalia, parish of Concordia, is utterly torn down, also the dwelling houses of Dr. McWhorter and of Messrs. Dunlap and Stacey, Esqrs. - The parish jail is partly torn down.
The above is taken directly from The Free Trader, on file at the State of Mississippi Archives in Jackson. From Thomas P. Grazulis' book Significant Tornadoes 1680-1991, "... The most reliable death toll listed 48 on land at Natchez and 269 on the river, most of those in the sinking of flatboats and steamers. It was noted at the time that the death toll on the river was probably high because of the "large number of transients and itinerant boatmen on the river that day." A piece of a steamboat window was carried 30 miles. At least one person died at Vidalia, Louisiana, on the opposite shore of the river. Reports that "hundreds" of people were killed on plantations in Louisiana were never confirmed, but it is quite possible that there were many more deaths in areas away from Natchez." Total damage estimate in 1840 dollars... $1,260,000.
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