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History Through Headlines: Tri-State Tornado

By James Gray

Posted April 4, 2016

Our History Through Headlines segment takes us to March, 1925. Calvin Coolidge was president. The Great Gatsby was published for the first time, and a weather phenomenon would leave a trail of devastation across the Midwest.

The headline reads, "Horror and Tragedy in Wake of the Tornado."

The Tri-State Tornado is the largest tornado ever recorded. It touched down in southeast Missouri and traveled over 200 miles to the western edge of Pike County in Indiana. The storm reached speeds around 60 miles per hour, and stretched out over a mile wide at it's largest points.

"Witnesses have described this tornado as a big, black, boiling cloud. They'd never seen anything like it," says Dan McCarthy of the National Weather Service. "Well, you have to consider that back in 1925 it was a lot of farm houses, and mostly out of wood. And you considered that a tornado like that is picking up trees. It's picking up dust, and gravel. That's a lot of stuff traveling at 300 miles per hour through that tornado."

Nearly 700 people died and more than 2,000 were injured. It destroyed 15,000 homes before it finally slowed down and dissipated. It may have seemed unstoppable.

Indiana has seen many large tornadoes since 1925. The last fatal tornado was in 2012 in Henryville.

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