Author’s note: this is a preview of an early draft, but not the first draft. It will likely change and be expanded upon.
Chapter 1: God stomping all around
—1—
Sam Flowers thought nothing much of the unseasonably warm weather on Wednesday, March 18, 1925. Flowers walked outside to fifty-five-degree air and bright gray skies in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Only just before daybreak did a few light showers amble across the Ozark Foothills. Indeed, it seemed it might have been clearing off some.
The forty-nine-year-old Redford, Missouri farmer had just celebrated his birthday two days earlier with his wife, Mary Adaline. Married for twenty-six years, the couple had four sons and three daughters ages six to twenty-four.
As Sam began his journey home from town in the drizzle, a low-pressure system was skidding west out of Kansas and Arkansas. It had been a warm winter in much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. A brief cold spell the first two weeks of March had lost its grip, signaling winter’s last gasp. Now it was feeling like spring again. Sam and farmers all around Reynolds County felt uneasy about the dry year so far and were looking forward to plentiful rain to get the ground ready for tilling.
Gazing out of her farmhouse window, Mary and the rest of the Flowers family expected Sam home from Poplar Bluff, sixty miles south, later that day. Duller rain clouds gathered overhead and the day’s damp work tending to the cows, hogs, chickens, and the rest of the homestead remained.
Reynolds County was booming in 1925. More people lived in the county than at any other time in its history. Over ten thousand people called this area of the Ozark Foothills home, including the Flowers family, who moved north from Kentucky in search of prosperity. The area’s fertile soil and plentiful jobs in the lead mines seemed full of possibility. Redford was still no more than a few dozen scattered farms in the orbit of Ellington, the largest and proudest town in the county with several hundred residents.
So proud were Ellington’s leaders they had recently decided they would be prepared for any emergency if and when one should come. Fire being the primary safety concern and without waterworks or fire hydrants, it was decided that everyone should buy a fire extinguisher and keep it loaded and handy “for instant use”. And so they did. Nearly half the men in the city purchased a chemical extinguisher and declared themselves a volunteer fireman.
“Ellington has the most unique fire department in the State of Missouri,” wrote one journalist visiting from Poplar Bluff in early March 1925. The journalist dutifully reported to his readers at the other end of the county that fully half of the town’s men were part of the brigade and just as many automobiles were, too.
When the two-story home of Tobe Fitzgerald caught fire earlier that month, the reporter assumed it was doomed when the local mill sounded the fire whistle. Hearing the call, men dashed to their automobiles and rushed toward the smoke billowing in the sky. The roof of the house was a roaring furnace when the first volunteers arrived. Standing nearby, the reporter watched in awe. “In less than three minutes the fire brigade—in automobiles—was on the scene and the blaze was extinguished in the proverbial three shakes of a lamb’s tail”, he wrote. Another fire that threatened the Woolworth building in town was extinguished in an equally impressive time.
The story was later re-published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, giving the people of Ellington much to be proud of. Things were looking up for Ellington, where jobs were plentiful and soil and mines were rich and bountiful. People were taking to cars and telephones and all sorts of new technology. Taxes were low, the town had $500 in the bank, the county was growing, and everyone in Ellington was hopeful for the best and prepared for the worst.
Unlike half the people in Ellington, however, Sam Flowers did not have an automobile. His journey home on horseback would take most of the day. Leaving Poplar Bluff at daybreak, Sam’s horse Babe trotted up and down the rolling hills past the big oak and maples lining the dirt roads. Still leafless from the winter, the tree’s bare limbs tussled back and forth, rubbing against one another in the gentle breeze and rain. Familiar with the roads, Sam kept his blue eyes sharp with concern as an occasional car passed along the road. He expected to arrive home by supper.
The rain started to fall more steadily through the morning. Sam reached Ellington around noon just as his horse needed a drink. L.W. Sanders, the town’s barber, had just moved his shop behind the Post Office and was busy cutting hair when Sam hitched up nearby. People milled around the Grant Hotel, which had just been sold to new owners the week prior. The town’s bankers and mineworkers headed to lunch. Women caught in the rain and short on groceries hoisted their dresses in a vain attempt to keep clean from mud.
His black hair and muscular shoulders soaked from the day’s fine rain, Sam figured he could probably make it home faster by forging his own path that went directly through the open fields and grass rather than sticking to the muddy roads. Looking around town as Babe drank from a trough, Sam noticed the temperature kept rising. Buoyed by a warm front pumping warm air up from the south, the temperature averaged about sixty degrees across the Mississippi and Ohio Valley. As Babe drank from the trough overflowing from the morning’s rain, the atmosphere’s ingredients of warm, cold, dry, and wet air roiled together to spawn a supercell thunderstorm over the horizon.
Sam knew all the telltale signs from the sky and terrain from his time growing up in Kentucky. The air smelled like spring rain. If the rain came down hard enough it would be too difficult to see the path ahead on horseback. It was still nothing too ominous, but certainly all the better to stick to the roads and get a move on to get out of the rain.
—2—
With darkening clouds chasing Sam northeast, he went whirling northward again on horseback. Sam crested a hill at a clearing, moving out of town and along the country road near Logan Creek. Glancing over his shoulder, hundreds of acres of trees and woods in the distance began to sway aggressively under an aggressively blue sky as the wind picked up speed. The trees started flailing back and forth as if to wave for help.
It was around 12:30 Wednesday as the raindrops increased in size and intensity. Sam and Babe were only about twelve miles away from home. The temperatures swelled to about seventy, and the rain began moving in intermittent sheets across their path.
Sam’s neighboring farms usually laid a helpful quilt of recognizable fence posts and neat hedgerows for easy navigation. But now they were barely visible around him through the rain. A low cloud descended behind him, whistling and urging Sam and Babe onward. Nearby pine trees all around Sam brushed against the sky’s darkening canvas. The rain advanced like a tremendous wall of water, slamming against Sam’s face and drenched clothes.
Sam was confident he could make it home to secure his horses and shelter from the pending storm alongside Mary and his children. He gripped tight on the reigns and raced Babe onward at full gallop in hopes of getting ahead of the storm.
Riding Babe as quickly as she could go after already riding a rigorous fifty miles, hailstones the size of quarters began falling from the sky. The force and fury of God’s thunder, rain, and hail rumbled directly over them, turning the road into a thick slurry of mud and ice.
The rain wrapped sideways in the air around them. Looking back, nothing about the ominous black sky seemed worth hunkering down for or stopping at a neighbor’s farmhouse. Sam had seen countless storms in his life and knew the signs of a tornado. Still, the clouds dropped lower, the thunder boomed, and lightning forced the sky to flash black and white.
Sam didn’t know it, but the storm had already spawned several tornadoes across Kansas and Arkansas. Rain and hailstones large and small had pelted the western Missouri countryside all morning.
Back at the farmhouse, Mary brought the children in from the rain for lunch. The skies darkened. The stove that kept the house warm overnight now simmered at a low heat as the family looked out over the hillside, wondering if Sam was caught up in this mess or if he had taken shelter somewhere around Ellington. With no phone or telegram at the farm, Mary couldn’t ask anyone in town if they had seen her husband.
Around 1:00 pm, the signs from the sky were brimming with anger. Looking behind him, Sam still couldn’t see much. The rain was everywhere and hailstones forced his gaze down. Above the rumbles of thunder and whirr of the storm’s wind, posts and timber joined the hail and rain thrashing down on the ground. Barely able to open his eyes against the prickly raindrops, the wind pushed hard against his whole body. He dismounted off Babe and walked a short distance alongside her. Without any place to go and nowhere to shelter, Sam and Babe inched along the road one step at a time, holding each other close, hail crunching under their shoes.
The sky was now so dark it looked like nightfall. Knowing Ellington was still closer than his farm, Sam considered turning back to wait out the storm. He recognized he was caught in a far more dangerous storm than he anticipated. But he still couldn’t make out the shape of a funnel cloud. The wind blew so furiously the grass laid down in complete submission. Before he could think about his situation any longer, a piece of debris hurtling through the air clubbed Sam in the back of the head, killing him instantly and throwing his body a short distance from the road.
At the farmhouse about ten miles away, thunder boomed around Mary and the children like a cannonade, rattling the doors and windows. Not taking any chances, Mary and the eldest scooped the kids down into the cellar. The wind vibrated the doors while they anxiously waited for the storm to pass. The rain kept slamming down as the sky turned black, stretching in every direction for miles. For a while it must have felt like God himself was stomping on the ground all around them.
Then, almost as quickly as the sky turned dark, it lightened up again. Still raining and with an occasional small hailstone rolling along the ground, Mary and the children opened the doors and stepped out of the cellar to find debris and timber all around them. While the farm itself appeared to suffer only minimal damage, there was still no sign of Sam. Fearful but trusting in Sam’s ability to stay safe, the family retreated back inside the home to wait out the rain.
Later that evening, Sam’s horse Babe—soaked, exhausted, and riderless—strode home onto the Flowers farm. Worried and fearing the worst, Mary and her eldest sons Orval, Harley, Thomas, and Marvin set out door-to-door to organize a small search party of neighbors.
Ten miles southwest in Ellington, people came out of their homes to assess the damage. Except for some wind damage to roofs, fences, and fallen timbers, most people’s properties came out unscathed. Wondering where the damage came from, volunteer firemen jumped into their automobiles and set out in all directions, curious to see if a tornado had touched down and if they could offer help.
All afternoon and evening, volunteers and neighbors checked on each other, cleared roads, and checked on their farms. As daylight dwindled, reports from around Reynolds County of barns, fences, orchards, and timber that had been felled and strewn around began to spread. As nightfall demanded the use of headlamps and lanterns, the parties learned Len Rayfield’s house in Spring Valley, just a short distance from Sam, was thoroughly blown away.
Meeting up with search party members from the Flowers farm and family, word spread about the search for Sam. Driving slowly up and down roads and carefully walking through the area between Redford and Ellington, a search party discovered Sam’s body around four o’clock the next morning.
He was still a short distance from the road where the storm had tossed him. The opinion of the family and searchers was that there was definitely a tornado and Sam Flowers, along with Len Rayfield’s house, were directly in its path.
They didn’t know it yet, but Sam was just the first casualty of a killer tornado.
