December Storms

December weather must have offered Camden, Arkansas, one heck of a ride in 1931. December can bring snow mounds or storm debris; it’s ever so chancy in Arkansas.

Under a tornado watch at the moment, I sit in my comphy writing and reading chair at home in Clay County, thinking of how many warm Christmas seasons I’ve witnessed. The December of the Smurf Car is one, the pedal-car gifted to David by Thomas one hot Christmas Day, I recall. We opened the windows rather than turn on the air-conditioner in Memphis.

During another fateful December, we out-distanced a tornado outbreak, driving from the Pyramid’s showcase of the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team toward home with sirens blaring around us. The tornado tracked east as we drove that same direction, but paralleled our Walnut Grove Road to the south, headed for the Dogwood subdivision and Houston High School in Germantown rather than Walnut Grove Woods in Cordova.

It’s not a new thing, this unsettled, warm weather. Mid-South Decembers are volatile, to say the least.

In one of the chapters in The House on Harrison Street, a December tornado tears up the Methodist Church and the Ouachita County Court House in Camden, Arkansas, both situated across the street from the house where Mother and her brother Gordon huddled with their parents, their grandmother, and their aunt, Janie:

“Get up! Get the children. Downstairs! Quickly.”

Ella Gordon must have been startled awake as the wind howled with a deafening roar. Her daughter and son-in-law awoke, also, and Claude bounded out of bed, sensing what was just out the front window roaring toward Harrison Street. As he approached the bedroom door, he heard his mother-in-law, “It’s a tornado! Everybody downstairs! I’ll get Janie.”

            Claude must have grabbed Gordon, age six, and Mildred jostled Margaret, age 8. A mid-December storm, December 12, 1931, surprised everyone.

            Shaken awake by fear and the roar outside, both Margaret and Gordon hurried with their parents and grandmother down the stairs, most likely toward the back hallway, the lowest point in the house, the smooth concrete, cold storage area used to keep all the jams and jellies, peas and beans the family canned and preserved. They could have stolen a peek outside as they were hustled past the windows in the stairway; they might have gaped at the hundred year old trees being whipped about, their naked branches reaching toward the ground.

            The storm didn’t last long. It jumped and hopped neighborhoods, picked up, set down, wrecked havoc through any area it touched. What must have been an especially violent tornado, the first ever for Camden, tore up the downtown area; the beast reigned destruction wherever the funnel landed. Damage was significant throughout the incorporated area, even in a south neighborhood around Chestnut and Maple Streets. One child was killed in the outskirts of Camden where the storm made its exit. Many residents of Ouachita County close to Camden City Limits were severely injured, and property damage registered in the tens of thousands of dollars, hugely devastating in that era.

            Tornados usually form in volatile air masses and follow a southwest to northeast path, carving a trail of destruction where they choose. Camden, positioned on the Ouachita River bluffs, experienced this tornado that must have moved about indiscriminately because it arrived from the north and traveled south, hitting Greenwood Cemetery located in the north part of the city, inflicting wind damage on its trek to downtown.

Photo: Ouachita County Historical Society archives. First Methodist Church, December, 1931. Visible is Jefferson Street. Harrison Street runs perpendicular at the center of the photograph. The fencing surrounds the Court House property. (According to church records, the Board of Trustees had debated renewal of storm coverage just two weeks prior. They voted to renew the policy and dodged the bullet of financial devastation.)  

It dropped on top of the Methodist Church, gutting it west to east, threw debris onto a car dealership and garage behind the church on Jefferson Street. After smashing cars and caving in the dealership, the massive storm jumped across Jefferson and demolished the “pride of Ouachita County,” the gorgeous, massive, red brick court house built in 1888 and completed the following year.

            The children and their parents, their grandmother and her sister and ward, their aunt, lived across the street from this devastation and their home suffered only roof damage, wind damage, and took scattered debris from the rampage into the yard. The Courthouse was gutted; only a few of the outer walls remained standing. The bronze statue of Justice which stood atop the courthouse pergola was found near the river, south of town.

            The Methodist Church suffered the same fate with the sanctuary completely blown apart. The communion table inscribed IHS was lifted by the wind, removed from the altar, and transported to the court house lawn. There it was set down, intact, with little damage whatsoever. The steeple somersaulted down Jefferson Street.

From their shelter inside the house on the corner of Harrison and Jefferson, this huddled family watched the devastation. They knew they had escaped injury and possible death, left to ponder how such disaster could occur immediately across the street and their home be left virtually untouched. How the house must have shuddered and ripped, yet bravely stood against the horrors of the rampaging wind.

It withstood other horrors, too, including a fire ten years later. But that’s another story.

The House on Harrison Street will be available in early 2016.