When Sam Flowers rode off from his farm near Redford, Missouri—a tiny town in Reynolds County in the Ozarks—to the nearby market town of Ellington on March 18, 1925, the day was oddly warm and unsettled. Rain and “strong shifting winds” were in the day’s forecast. He had business to conduct in Ellington that Wednesday morning, but he hoped to make it home before any storms broke out to soak him on the way. Sam’s horse came home shortly after dark, but without Sam. By the time a search party found his body around four in the morning three miles ouside of Ellington, it seemed likely that he had been the first victim of what became known as the Tri-State Tornado. To this day, it is still referred to as the deadliest tornado in American history.
A Storm Brewing
Like all tornadoes, the Tri-State Tornado arose from the collision of two air masses. From the north, a deep low-pressure system, circling counterclockwise, descended from Alberta, Canada, across the Rockies and into the western plains, reaching its southernmost point near the Texas-Oklahoma border on March 17, 1925. Up to this point, it had been a dry front, but then it encountered warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico. The system turned northeastward. By the time it reached Arkansas on the morning of the 18th, it had developed into a full-blown supercell storm line, with a dramatic drop in temperature and air pressure from one side of the line to the other and intensifying rotation as it crossed its way into Missouri.
Why this particular storm became so deadly is hard to know. The difference between the air masses had to be a factor, along with the fact that the tornado developed behind the center of the low-pressure system, rather than in front of it, as is usually the case, allowing more and more unstable air to be drawn in. Add to that the incredible forward speed of the storm, which prevented communities from receiving any warning of its approach. Whatever the reasons, the afternoon of March 18 would become an unforgettable event for the residents of southern Missouri, southern Illinois, and western Indiana, when 695 people were killed.
After forming north of Ellington just before one in the afternoon and striking down Sam Flowers with “a hard lick on the back of his head,” as the Ellington Press reported, the tornado moved northeast into Iron County and quickly intensified into what we would now call an F5 tornado, the most severe classification. Directly in its path was the small town of Annapolis, Missouri.
An Annapolis Disaster
Founded in 1871 when the Iron Mountain Railway reached southern Iron County, Annapolis existed on two commodities: timber and lead. Although the timber industry had largely shifted from lucrative dimensional lumber to less profitable railroad ties by the 1920s, loggers could still scratch out a living in the surrounding hills. A mile east of town was the Annapolis Lead Company and the shantytown that had grown up beside it, known as Leadanna. Stores, hotels, and restaurants in Annapolis served both local residents and the commercial travelers who stopped off to do business in town.
Between the time a letter carrier sighted the tornado near Ellington and the time it struck Annapolis, only a few minutes had elapsed. Later calculations gave the tornado an astonishing forward speed of seventy-two miles per hour during this segment—little wonder that the residents were caught unprepared.
In 1997, Kimberly Gipson of the Wayne County Journal-Banner interviewed Alice “Peachy” Jones, who was a ten-year-old schoolgirl in Annapolis at the time of the tornado. “I can remember many of the children screaming and crying because they didn’t know what was going to happen. I don’t know if I was crying or not,” Jones recalled. Her mother and two younger brothers were at home. They all survived, though injured, when their house was blown into the woods. Her father and about 75 other miners were trapped 465 feet underground because the lift machinery had been damaged. They had to climb out through the mine shaft. “When he topped the bank near the house, everything was laying flat,” Jones told the interviewer. “He just about died right there because he thought we were all lost in the storm.”
The schoolhouse, a two-story building with only four rooms, was one of the few buildings left after the tornado swept through. An estimated ninety percent of all the structures in Annapolis were destroyed. The exception of the schoolhouse, with most of the town’s children inside, was a rare bright spot in Annapolis’s devastating afternoon. Incredibly, despite the major destruction of Annapolis and Leadanna, just two fatalities occurred in these towns.
A Telegraph Alert
Another ray of good fortune was the feat of W. C. Gunther, the stationmaster at the railroad depot, who managed to telegraph a warning message out before the quarter-mile-wide swath of ruination tore down the wires. Although the storm was moving too fast to allow any meaningful warning to be given to towns ahead of its path, the message alerted the outside world to the catastrophe, and the Red Cross in St. Louis swung into action, preparing a relief train.
By then, the tornado had left Iron County and moved into Madison County, traveling northeast at 67 miles an hour. Although this was slower than its initial speed, it was still twice the speed of a typical tornado. This track took the tornado between Madison County’s two main towns, Fredericktown to the north and Marquand to the south. The countryside through this region was heavily forested and sparsely populated; Fredericktown’s Democrat-News reported only property destruction, with no loss of life or serious injuries.
The Lixville Destruction
No such good fortune awaited the next areas in the tornado’s path. Instead of lifting into the clouds or dissipating, as would be typical (the average length of a tornado track is only six miles), the tornado intensified and grew wider, now a half mile across. The community of Lixville in Bollinger County, north of present-day Sedgewickville, lay ahead. Once again, the residents were caught unsuspecting, and this time the country schoolhouses were not so fortunate: two were destroyed by the tornado, and another was badly damaged. Four children were killed.
Tornadoes produce incredible stories, and one such story is what happened to a country school near Lixville. The entire building was picked up off its foundation and carried into the nearby woods with a teacher and 17 children inside. They were gathered up later by townspeople, all injured to various degrees, but none killed.
The River Twister
Today most Missourians know the town of Biehle, in Perry County, in one of two ways: as an exit on Interstate 55 between Perryville and Cape Girardeau, or as the origin point of Buchheit Farm Supply, the large and still growing agricultural supply company that originated there in 1934. But in 1925, Biehle was simply the next village in the tornado’s path. One resident was killed there. Three others lost their lives in Perry County as the supercell sliced through the southeastern part of the county to the bottomland on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. Once again, a school building produced a remarkable story. The school at Ridge, Missouri, just over a mile from the river, was reduced to scattered boards. The teacher and 14 children were flung down the hillside below, but none died.
As the tornado came out of the forest into the river valley, something became visible for the first time. Witnesses up to now tended to describe the storm as a “huge black shape” or a “boiling fog,” but in Perry County, the funnels appeared: not one, but two funnels, side by side. They chewed up everything in their path for three-and-a-half miles before crossing the river into Illinois. In an hour and a half, the tornado had killed at least twelve people across five counties of Missouri.
The Disaster Relief System
In Annapolis, the aftermath of the storm was chaotic. Although the world had been alerted to the disaster, the town’s remoteness meant that a four-car relief train from St. Louis wouldn’t arrive until 6:30 that evening. By then, people were cold, hungry, and largely without shelter, though many took refuge in the school building. At first, the townspeople mobbed the relief train, but order was quickly restored as doctors poured in from nearby towns. The Red Cross team set up tents for shelter. Soon, evacuation trains were taking the seriously injured to St. Louis, Poplar Bluff, and Cape Girardeau to receive medical aid while the able-bodied set about cleaning up the debris.
Since the rest of the death and destruction was scattered along an 85-mile track, and no governmental structure yet existed for organized disaster relief, the task of cleanup and medical aid fell to neighbors and volunteers. In Biehle, Rudy Buchheit (who would go on to found the Buchheit Farm Supply) lost his home and all of his farm buildings except for a chicken house. The family lived in the chicken house during their rebuilding and were aided by food and clothing from friends and neighbors, an act of generosity that has kept the business anchored in Biehle throughout its expansion.
Even the Red Cross didn’t stay long in Missouri and for good reason. After crossing into Illinois, the tornado hit Murphysboro, a working-class rail hub of some 12,000 people. The large population meant there were significantly more deaths and injuries compared to other affected areas, so relief operations were redirected there. The death toll in Illinois and Indiana ran into the hundreds. Ultimately, at least 695 people died as a result of the Tri-State Tornado, making it the worst tornado in US history.
The Future Of Tornado Forecasts
It would be comforting to say that the tornado resulted in an improved emphasis on tornado forecasts at the US Weather Bureau, but such was not the case. The bureau, then part of the Department of Agriculture, continued to avoid making emergency predictions and, in fact, until 1950, officially prohibited the use of the word “tornado” in its forecasts in a misguided effort to avoid spreading panic. Only after the widespread installation of radar facilities around the country could the Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service that is part of the Department of Commerce, begin its current practice of issuing watches and warnings for tornadoes.
This improvement in tornado prediction and warnings has saved many lives. In comparison with the Tri-State Tornado, the F5 tornado that struck Joplin in 2011 killed 158 people, despite hitting a much larger metropolitan area than any of the towns struck in 1925. It may be that the dreadful record set by the great tornado of 1925 will permanently remain.
Families and communities in Missouri will be observing the hundredth anniversary of the tornado this year, in public events and in quiet visits to the cemetery. Some of the towns struck by the storm have never fully recovered. But their legacy of self-reliance—and their tendency to keep an eye to the southwest during springtime—remains.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 edition of Missouri Life.
