The 1913 Easter tornado outbreak
By Jared Shelton News-Press NOW meteorologist
The 2024 spring equinox has passed, and soon another milestone of the season will arrive with Easter.
More than a century ago, this holiday marked one of the worst severe weather outbreaks to impact Northwest Missouri, and the Central Plains region as a whole, when six F-4 tornadoes killed an estimated 170 people across parts of Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri on March 23, 1913.
Because the vast majority of documented U.S. tornadoes occurred after the 1950s, when NOAA began keeping records, the tragedy must be recounted using a piecemeal approach from multiple sources. The most local and direct source is archived articles from the St. Joseph News-Press. That’s paired with a scientific reanalysis conducted by well-published meteorologist Thomas Grazulis, who worked alongside the renowned Ted Fujita, inventor of the Fujita scale used to classify tornadoes today.
Similar to modern-day severe weather outbreaks, the 1913 event was generated by a deep low-pressure system originating in Colorado, which tracked over Nebraska and Iowa. The first and worst of the outbreak occurred early Sunday evening throughout the Omaha area, hit hardest as multiple tornadoes ravaged the populous region resulting in more than 100 fatalities. Unlike today, killer tornadoes could not be documented in real-time. In fact, the St. Joseph News-Press was cut off from details of the disaster until the next day when long-distance messages to Denver and Lincoln were relayed to St. Joseph via telegraph.
Northwest Missouri was struck by the system later that evening, the heaviest blow being a large F-4 tornado that ripped through Andrew, Gentry and Harrison counties. The assault was followed by a vicious line of storms, now known to be a derecho.
The News-Press writes on March 24: “Flag Springs, Albany, and Cameron were the Missouri towns that suffered the most. At the first, an Andrew county village, three persons were killed.”
One vivid account of this twister comes from an Andrew County farm where a husband and wife perished: “The Armfields were in their home at the time the storm came up. The house burned after it had been carried some distance, due to the overturning of a stove.” The write-up only lists these two deaths from the tornado, an unsurprising discrepancy given the lack of communication, with a source from nearby Whitesville declaring “the crippled condition of the telephone and telegraph service has made it impossible to get a complete list of the injured.”
Two other Andrew County residents were reported to have passed days later, succumbing to injuries sustained in the tornado. This “unofficial” death toll of four would make it the deadliest tornado in Andrew County and Northwest Missouri history.
Although a heavy subject matter ahead of Easter weekend, recounting the events that transpired on March 23, 1913, provides a glimpse of how far severe weather preparedness and recovery has come over the past century. More importantly, it can also serve as a reminder to avoid complacency, even after a relatively quiet decade of tornadic activity here in Northwest Missouri.
