Accounts of the 1949 Tornado

The tornado which ripped through the southwest, south and southeast portions of Warren, Monday night at 5:43 left a swath of 50 known dead and 275 injured, 120 demolished homes and another hundred dwellings beyond immediate use. Two hundred homeless families have been sheltered by relatives and friends. The Bradley Lumber company, in the section which bore the brunt of the storm as it entered Warren, suffered damage estimated in the millions when its power plant and sawmill were destroyed, throwing over a 1,000 men out of work. It will be six months to a year before the operation of the plant is entirely back to normal. Rescue workers searched through the wreckage by the gleam of flashlights and torches, helping the injured from the rubble of homes and removed the endless dead. Rev. Hal H. Pinnall helping to search out dead or injured in the Bradley section, told of hearing cries for help from masses of shattered homes, some of them coming from under girders impossible to move. He feels certain there are many more bodies to be found in the wreckage. Heartrending incidents were encountered in all parts of Warren. In the corridor of the Hunt hospital, Mrs. James Carl McKinney, her face lacerated almost beyond recognition and her legs injured, lay on a stretcher and begged news of her babies from those who passed by. "The house was blown down," she said. "I found my girl, 7, after I heard her screaming. But I looked and looked and never could find my little boy, 5, and my littlest girl, 3." Her husband's legs had been broken, she said. Later, at the morgue, the five year old boy and the baby girl were found. Jesse Hamilton, blood oozing from the bandage that enveloped his head, left the Hunt hospital afoot to go to the Crow hospital where he learned his daughter Evora had been taken. Mrs. Hamilton had been killed instantly when the house was lifted from the foundation and mashed to the ground some distance away. The miracle was that so many survived through the same sort of experience. Dipping first in the southwest corner of the area of greater Warren, just over the tops of trees beyond the Frank Pumphrey garage, the monster tornado picked up a Frank's Line bus parked by the garage and after twirling it about in the air, slammed it down dead center on a tree at the corner of the garage. Instantaneously another bus was overturned and the garage blown away, heavy rafters of it smashing down a new Chevrolet truck, in for repairs. Perry Herring, school superintendent, said today: "The destruction and the bodies piled in the Frazer garage is as bad as anything I saw at Chateau Thierry in World War 1." Some damage has been reported in the Lanark neighborhood south of Banks, where one Negro was killed. A straight swath of perhaps 200 rods extended to the sawmill of the Bradley Lumber company and only along the edge were parts of buildings left standing. The giant smokestack of the sawmill was bent as a sodden soft drink straw would bend over the rim of a glass. The power plant was demolished, huge Ross Carriers were knocked over. But just beyond the sawmill small piles of lumber on small carriers were left neatly stacked where they had been abandoned. The Red Cross set up headquarters in the old Cushing Piano store in the Southerland Hotel building. Local authorities have estimated the damage of the disaster, outside that to the Bradley Lumber Company, at well over a million dollars. From the Eagle Democrat