"I was born in a tornado"...at least that's how my mother told it. My mother, Janet Runyan, was born in a hospital on the evening of June 8, 1924 in New Castle, Indiana. A tornado hit the area that night and her grandparent's farmhouse in nearby Spiceland was partially destroyed. Below is a series of photos of the home taken pre-tornado and after the damage.
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| Pre-tornado (note the balcony on the side) |
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| Roof torn off, balcony railing gone, considerable damage |
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| A view from where the barn stood, looking at the shed and side of house |
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| Another view of the damaged shed |
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| Surveying the damage |
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| Tree damage. What tree? |
My mother said she was told they later found a chicken feather embedded in a tree so deep it couldn't be pulled out. Imagine that! She said her mother told her there were chickens with their feathers blown backwards and the feathers remained like that until the chickens molted. Hmmmm...
The Spiceland farmhouse was rebuilt, with improvements, by my maternal great grandfather, Charles Lee Newby. I'll post those photos tomorrow.
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As a meteorologist (and amateur genealogist), I find this post so fascinating! By the way, these photos could prove to be quite important from a weather history perspective. Often meteorologists do case studies on past events and try to estimate how strong a storm was and usually all they have to go on is old photographs.
ReplyDeleteI would love to find a newspaper article about this storm Emily. That would be the icing on the cake for me!
DeleteWell, if you or any other meteorologist you know can learn anything cool from these photos, be sure to pass that information on to me....that would be the sprinkles on the icing on the cake, LOL!
Lisa, I'm sorry about the destruction, but still found the story interesting. I'm surprised you waited so long to tell us this. (I would have done it in my 1st year of blogging!) Looking forward to your next set of photos.
ReplyDeleteBarbara, I keep remembering things that I have not yet written about so I've started keeping a list. I have plenty more up my sleeve but not as much time lately to put it all in writing.
DeleteIt's great that you have the photos and the story. Maybe the New Castle Library or Henry County Archives has a newspaper article on the storm. You might try the Google Newspaper archive at http://news.google.com/newspapers.
ReplyDeleteI have tried Google Newspaper, the Genealogy Bank newspapers and the Henry Co. archives and possibly a few other online archives and so far have come up with zip. More articles get published every day though so I will keep checking back!
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