'We will not forget'
Survivors recall devastation, changes 70 years after Gainesville's killer tornado on April 6, 1936
By RICK LAVENDER
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Scott Rogers The Times Roy Cromartie, Doris Herrin, left, and Annie C. Whelchel, right, all survived the 1936 tornado that destroyed downtown Gainesville. Cromartie was working inside the Piggly Wiggly on Bradford Street while Herrin weathered the storm at her home on Myrtle Street. Whelchel and her mother held onto a headboard while most of their Prior Street home was blown away. All three survivors are gathered in front of a mural photograph of the destruction in downtown Gainesville from the 1936 twister at Brenau University's Northeast Georgia History Museum.
Scott Rogers The Times Isabel Crow was buried in rubble at the Gallant-Belk store in downtown Gainesville in 1936 as the tornado struck.
Scott Rogers The Times George "Buddy" Austin Jr. was 14 in 1936 when the tornado ravaged downtown Gainesville and rode the storm out inside the Imperial Pharmacy. Austin and friend Jim DeLong were walking on their way to school located at the time near the Gym of '36 office building.
Also today
Click on the links below to read more about the Tornado of '36.
Black community rebounded from disaster
John Burl Hulsey: A survivors's tale
Storm is topic of Sardis school project
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Isabel Crow was trapped underneath the rubble at the front of the Gallant-Belk store. A beam pinned her in a sitting position. A man's face, likely the man who ran upstairs to warn her and others on the store's second floor to get out, was pressed into her back.
But Crow could see daylight. And in it, the flames of the hardware store burning next door.
She thought she was going to die.
More than 200 did die in the storm that crushed downtown Gainesville 70 years ago.
The April 6, 1936, tornado slammed into the square, killing 203, injuring some 1,600, destroying 750 buildings, racking up millions in damages and leaving the Queen City of the Mountains looking like a bombing range.
Crow survived. Now 99, she is part of a dwindling group that experienced the nation's fifth-deadliest twister.
John Jacobs Jr. is aware of the attrition. Jacobs was in the Tornado of '36, too. As president of the Northeast Georgia History Center at Brenau University, the Gainesville native also helped organize an upcoming forum at the Academy Street museum featuring storm survivors, the center's second such event.
"I know a number of (survivors) who have passed away in the last year," Jacobs said this week.
The history told in the April 11 forum might surprise newcomers who are unfamiliar with Hall County's tornado tendencies. Yet, the firsthand accounts highlight seconds in a city's history that changed it forever.
A county of 30,000
In 1936, Hall had about 30,000 people, three textile mills and no Lake Lanier. Gainesville was much smaller and more compact.
Businesses lined streets where the Georgia Mountains Center, Roosevelt Square and the Joint Administration Building sit. There were no parkways. E.E. Butler was Athens Street. Atlanta Highway was the main route to Atlanta for those who didn't go by train.
The city's boast as "Poultry Capital of the World" would crop up within a decade, spurred by entrepreneur Jesse Jewell. But then, Gainesville was a mill-based town burdened like hundreds of others by the Great Depression and the boll weevil's ragged fallout.
The city already had a footnote in history, though: A tornado in 1903 had left more than 100 dead.
The morning of April 6 was brewing a larger tragedy.
A deadly storm front was surging east. It had spawned a twister in Tupelo, Miss., that killed more than 230 the day before. Other twisters spun off along the system's edge as it moved through Alabama and points north.
The destruction and death outran any warnings that might have alerted Gainesville.
Day became night
That Monday dawned dull and warm, too warm for early April.
Thirteen-year-old George "Buddy" Austin Jr. was walking with a friend, Jim DeLong, to Gainesville High School. The school sat beside what's now the Gym of '36 office building at the corner of Washington and West Academy.
The teens passed up a friend's offer of a car ride. Then the sky began to change. Some said it turned black as night.
Austin and DeLong reached Maple Street before they saw the storm rolling up Washington Street, rising toward them.
Trees bent in the wind. Some went down, Austin said. The boys turned and ran for Stringer Bros. drug store, a favorite hangout where milkshakes cost a nickel. They made it only to Imperial Pharmacy, a closer store also on Washington Street.
"Jim went over the counter," said Austin, 84. "I went down on the floor alongside a steam radiator."
The front door blew out as the tornado roared past.
'The roof fell on us'
What Austin and DeLong had seen were actually two twisters merged into one. They joined southwest of the square just before 8:30 a.m., according to witnesses.
The combination has been rated an F4 tornado, a designation that packs winds of 207-260 mph. The storm would suck up parts of a large mill sign and drop them more than 85 miles away in Easley, S.C., according to W.M. Brice, a survivor and journalist who wrote the definitive "A City Laid Waste."
Crow can attest to the power. From a front window at Gallant-Belk, a store at Main and Spring streets, the 29-year-old knitting instructor saw a building across the square "absolutely explode."
Crow and two women working with her ran for the stairs. The storm caught them there, flinging them and two men toward the front door.
"The whole roof, all of it, fell on top of us," said Crow, of Gainesville.
Three in the group died. Rescuers had to push one of the dead women off her feet to free her.
"It was horrible," Crow said.
Church demolished in air
Roy Cromartie, 89, can map the tornado's path by memory.
Cromartie, who worked in 1936 as assistant manager of the Piggly Wiggly grocery on North Bradford Street and later spent a career at Chicopee Mill, said the tornado came across West Academy in the gap near Harrison Oil & Tire Co.
That's where Saint Paul Methodist Church was, on Grove Street, the Gainesville resident said.
A witness said the tornado lifted the church into the air and splintered it like a firecracker, Brice wrote. In all, five of six large Gainesville churches were destroyed or damaged.
The scope of devastation was numbing. The business district lay in shambles. Flames stirred to life in the tangles of timber and bricks. Rain began to fall, hard.
Austin walked unhurt out of Imperial Pharmacy to a surreal scene.
"The only thing I saw on the square was a pig, right out in the middle ... by the (Confederate) monument," he said.
"... Then I began hearing people crying for help in the buildings."
Homes turned to splinters
Many died in the fires that poured through some buildings. The death toll in the Coopers Pants Factory near what is now Hunt Tower is estimated at 70.
Debris from City Hall blocked fire trucks in the fire station. Possibly, more buildings would have burned if a quick-thinking Georgia Power Co. employee hadn't run to a substation and turned off current to the area.
The destruction wasn't limited to the square. Residential areas had been hit. So had Brenau University, the New Holland community and what was then Pacolet Mill, as the tornado continued east.
Annie C. Whelchel, 89, lived with her parents off Prior Street. She taught in a Chestnut Mountain church school for blacks. Whelchel was home that Monday because the children of sharecroppers had been given the season off to work in the fields.
She and her mother saw the two funnel clouds form one and "things flying in the air."
They rushed inside. Her mother grabbed a bedpost and began praying. Whelchel grabbed her and closed her eyes. When she opened them only her mother, the headboard and part of a wall remained.
The rest was gone.
"As far as we could see, there was nothing. Just ... splinters and splinters. No houses," said Whelchel, who now lives on Mill Street.
Charles Morrow, 81, and his siblings may have dodged injury or worse because their mother was late with breakfast, but didn't believe in sending her children to school without it.
The school they would have walked to, Summer Hill school for blacks on Fair Street, was hit, though not leveled.
Search for the living
Confusion fed fear in the tornado's wake.
Doris Herrin of Gainesville and her mother weathered the storm sandwiched between a mattress and bedsprings in their Myrtle Street home. But afterward, they couldn't immediately find her father, who feared that they had walked to the square to shop.
When the family reconnected, Herrin, then 5, said her father "looked like a ghost, he was so white.
"He just knew we had been killed."
Austin's parents were in Winston-Salem, N.C. They heard early reports of thousands dead and assumed he was among them.
"They sent word through the Red Cross to take my body to the funeral home," said the retired Army colonel and Gainesville Public Works director.
Neither Austin nor DeLong was hurt. But the man who offered them a ride was injured when a brick wall collapsed on his car. A passenger in the car died.
The rumble seat where Austin and DeLong would have sat was crushed, according to a Times report in 1986, the disaster's 50th anniversary.
An army of aid
Aid poured in as news of the destruction eked out. The Red Cross, National Guard, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration sent workers, as did utility companies and police and fire departments.
Yet volunteers, including Riverside Military Academy cadets, came first, digging through rubble, pulling out bodies. Local doctors worked days without sleep.
Downey Hospital had been damaged. With flames crackling nearby, patients were hauled to the Riverside infirmary, Alto Sanatorium (now Lee Arrendale State Prison) and homes.
Central Baptist Church, the only downtown church not damaged, became part morgue, part sanctuary for the injured. Surgery was done on the Lord's table, The Times later reported.
Funeral homes offered their ambulances, which also doubled as hearses at that time. Thousands of others pitched in with muscle, money and goods.
Cromartie had found refuge from the storm in Piggly Wiggly, even pushing a woman searching for her husband to safety in a meat locker before the tornado hit.
The next morning, after keeping all-night watch over the store, he heard a buzz "like a bunch of bees" near the federal courthouse. The hum was workers talking.
"I've never seen so many laborers," he said. "They had brought them in to help."
City pulls together
The destruction drew attention en masse.
Gawkers packed Atlanta Highway. Brice cited a "conservative" estimate of 300,000 visitors the Sunday following the storm.
But the Thursday before, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had stopped briefly in Gainesville on his way to Warm Springs.
From his train car, Roosevelt praised the city's spirit. "I hope to come back some day at a less tragic time and when I come back to be able to see a greater and better Gainesville," he said.
The president returned in March 1938 to praise a city reborn.
Indeed, even within a month of the tornado, photographs show streets cleared of debris and business fronts refaced.
City leaders capitalized on the destruction to map out a new courthouse and City Hall. Streets were widened and the electrical system upgraded, according to Brice. Emergency officials coordinated a flow of financial aid, with loans totaling about $1.5 million by late May, Brice wrote. Bank deposits soared.
The wreckage led to construction, which preceded the rise of the poultry industry and then the global draw of World War II. The tornado also brought the community together, as tragedy can, John Jacobs said.
"Just good folks pulling together," said Jacobs, who had ducked into Gainesville High to dodge the tornado.
'We will not forget'
Crow remembers her husband, W.A., frantically trying to pull her out of the crumpled Gallant-Belk. One rescuer "said he was going to have to murder Bill to get him out of the way," she said.
Crow suffered a back injury. When her husband took her home, her mother, whom they were living with on Riverside Drive, didn't know there had been a tornado.
"My mother said, 'Oh, did she get sick?'
"Bill said, 'Get sick? The town's blown away!'"
Crow's mother later urged her not to return to work when the store reopened. But Crow did.
"I said, 'If I don't go back today, I'll never go back.'"
"It was a horrible experience," she said of the tornado, "but I conquered it."
Jacobs planned to have Crow videotaped for the April 11 History Center forum.
He will also make some comments. In part, he'll quote the Rev. Roland Leavell, the First Baptist Church pastor who preached a community memorial service sermon on May 5, 1936.
Leavell promised the mourners, "Out of the wreckage we turn to our beloved dead and say:
'Gainesville, we will not forget.'"
Contact: rlavender@gainesvilletimes.com, (770) 718-3411
Originally published Sunday, April 2, 2006
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