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BOB ANN BRELAND

Between Friends

I first wrote about the great cyclone of 1908, after I talked to my father-in-law in 1979, who was still living. With all the spring storms lately and the recent tornado so close by, it needs telling again. Tornados aren’t frequent here, but spring weather can be very strong and violent!

“It was a terrible thing,” he said. “I can remember it as good as if it were yesterday.”

These were the memories brought back to my father-in-law, O.E. “Ode” Breland, as he watched on TV news the terrible storm destruction wrought on the people of Wichita Falls, Texas in April, 1979.

What he was remembering was the equally terrible storm which swept this part of the country on April 24, 1908, when he was a boy of six years, one month old, the son of Merediah and Selena Crain Breland.

“Daddy had been dead for two years and there were still 10 of us kids at home. I was too young to be working in the fields, but the rest of the family was in the fields scraping cotton,” he said. They were living in the family home in Pine which was nearly new, having been built by his father shortly before his death.

Barely made it to the house

“The storm came on so fast that they barely had time to get into the house from the fields. We all ran to one of the front rooms and shut the door just as the storm struck its fury. The pressure was so great that the door couldn’t be opened until the storm was gone. Luckily, we escaped injury.

“Nobody had time to put down the windows or to shut the doors. The hall was open and later somebody told us that was probably why our house was spared. Only our kitchen was torn loose from the rest of the house,” he said.

“But the field was a different matter. There was not a fence, not a rail left standing. Our cows all escaped injury as they huddled together in the field. “Later we found we were only on the north edge of the storm, which was at least one mile wide. It only lasted for a short time, possibly two to five minutes and we didn’t have time to get scared.”

From Franklinton to Purvis MS

He said the storm came through the edge of Franklinton, through Pine, through the Hilltop Community near Monroe’s Creek, through to Angie and across the river to Purvis, Miss., where great damage and destruction followed in its wake. Years later, he would talk to people in Purvis and learn of the many deaths there.

“We didn’t know the word tornado then,” he said. “We called them cyclones. So many of the things that happened I can recall vividly. A Wheat family ran and found shelter under a wooden packing crate. Their house was blown away, but they were all safe.

“In the Hilltop area, the Branch family, seven of them, all killed. That was the most amazing storm. It was so strong that their entire house was gone, leaving only a portion of the floor. Their big cast iron stove was found across the hollow from their house. Several other people were crippled by the storm, mostly children. One Martin child was killed, pulled from its brother’s arms and swept into the storm.

“It had been thundering all morning, but it hadn’t been raining. Miles of timber was twisted and felled in every direction. Hillsides were literally stripped of grass. I saw that with my own eyes,” he said.

Steady roar after it passed

“It was just a steady roar, even after it had passed. Apparently as it traveled, it intensified. There was almost no place in its path that was not destroyed. I know tornadoes dip down and up, but this didn’t. It was just a mile and a half swath, just as clean as if it had been cut with a giant mowing machine.

“Nobody saw it. It was there too fast and gone. After it was over, they rang a dinner bell. That was the custom, you know, when anybody was in trouble, to ring the dinner bell.

“The storm moved southwest to northeast. I’ve never seen anything to compare with it since. Not even the September storm that came the next year.” (Hurricanes were frequently called September storms.)

Timber clean-up took years

“Signs were visible for years. The Great Southern Lumber Company came in and started to clean up the damaged timber, just miles and miles of it. They ran a dummy line from Pine Cliff to Pine and loaded the best of the timber with mules and oxen on the cars and took them away. It took them a year or two just to get the best of the timber. Much of it stayed on the ground for years.

“I also saw oak trees completely pulled up by the roots with not a leaf left on them. Just twisted up out of the ground and thrown about. The pine trees were twisted off like you would twist broom straw.

“We had a late crop that year,” he recalled. “Everybody else did too. Everything had to be replanted. Everybody living in the path of the storm had damage, some of it unbelievable. But there were just not so many people and houses in those days,” he concluded.

Can one imagine a storm, a mile to one and a half miles wide, reaching from Franklinton to Purvis, Mississippi? The cyclone of 1908 was as fresh in my father-in-law’s mind then as it was that day in April some 71 years before. It stood out as one of the all time great moments in his life, although that’s about all it lasted…a moment or so, so fast was its passing and so great its destruction.

At that time in 1976, he was the only surviving child of a family of 14 children and one of the few people who still remembered that awful day. He passed away in 1980.