Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of a destructive tornado that ripped through the town of Alexander.
The tornado, which produced F3-rated damage, destroyed roughly 30 homes on a Thursday afternoon in 1925. Roy Arends is a longtime Alexander resident whose father was 10 years old at the time of the event. Arends tells RadioOnTheGo News his father lived three miles west of the town and recalls the first time his father’s family visited Alexander after the twister hit.
“Three days after the tornado, they came to town and they were surprised. They didn’t even know there had been a tornado in Alexander. Communication isn’t what it is today, and they tried to help clean up and do other things, but they were living their own lives. But they did see the devastation. There were five churches in town at that time, and three of them were severely damaged or destroyed. And the railroad depot, my dad recollected that, that the depot agent, had hid behind a stove and broke his leg, if I remember right. At that time there was a stockyards in Alexander. They had just loaded hogs on the rail cars and the rail cars blew over and the hogs were running around Alexander. It was quite a devastating event for the time.”
Among the churches completely destroyed was the Congregational church, the largest church in town. Arends says that while emergency responses to severe weather are a lot different today than they were 100 years ago, there were still volunteers that flocked to Alexander to help clean up that night.
“There were some volunteers from Belmond that came to help clean up after the tornado. But again, communication and equipment wasn’t like it is today. It probably used hand saws to cut the trees down across the streets and pick up stuff. There wasn’t the mechanization that there is today. So if you think back, they had to pick it all up by hand, or any sawing that was done for the trees was done by hand. That was a lot of manual labor.”
About five people were reported as severely injured but no lives were lost during the tornado that left roughly $150,000 worth of damage to Alexander which equates to over $2.7 million today.
More information on the 1925 tornado, courtesy of Alexander City Clerk, Aimee Frohling, can be found below.
