A picture of wild devastation in the path of Wednesday night’s cyclone in eastern Wake, near Wendell, was brought to Raleigh last night by Dr. S.V. Lewis, as a physician who attended many of the injured negroes on the farm of J.P. Richardson and brought the wife of John Debnam and one of the Debnam children to St. Agnes Hospital where they were declared to be in desperate condition, the woman with a scantling piercing her thigh and the child with a fractured skull, says the News & Observer.
“The only part of either house left on the side of the road on which they were located is a set of doorsteps,” declared Dr. Lewis last night at St. Agnes Hospital. “Timbers, in a shape absolutely unrecognizable for 250 yards.”
According to Dr. Lewis the cyclone reached its highest fury at the Richardson farm and here the ruin, apparently, was the most complete. The Debnams were eating supper when the blow struck.
“I think it’s going to be a cyclone,” the mother declared as she opened the door and peered at the sky. She went back to the supper table and that’s the last most of the members of the family recall until they came to their senses scurrying across the fields or picking themselves up painfully, far from the house.
“The neighbors were completely terrified,” Dr. Lewis declared. “They could not realize what had happened.”
Of the two tenant families, living close together, one of 12 members and the other almost as many, only two or three escaped uninjured. The woman and child with the fractured skull, however, were the most seriously hurt.
Answering the call for medical assistance Dr. Lewis found the road blocked a mile or more from the scene of the wreckage. It was necessary to walk this distance through the mud, and cross the ground littered with debris and later to carry the injured woman and the baby the same distance back to the automobile. The woman was borne on a cot while John Debnam carried his child in his arms.
Great oak trees were torn up by the roots on the Richardson place, tobacco barns were swept away along with pack houses and other outhouses. The most imposing house on the place, occupied by Will Cash, a white man, and his family, is in ruins. The roof was torn off and the chimneys were showered down into the house. As it happened, the family was not at home.
“The kitchen looks like a brick factory,” Dr. Lewis described it.
All the physicians in Wendell and the vicinity were busy last night, Dr. Lewis stated, but the 20 patients on the Richardson place were enough to keep him occupied. The remaining ones are being cared for in houses on the place which were left unscathed.
The road from Wendell to Raleigh, Dr. Lewis reported, is absolutely clear of any sign of the cyclone.
From the front page of The Monroe Journal, April 6, 1923
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