Carbondale, Ill., March 21—One of the grimmest stories of the tornado comes from the little town of Gorham, 10 miles south of Murphysboro where 90 persons were killed out of a population of less than 1,000. It was told by Mrs. Alice Tomure, 70 a paralytic, who escaped with her life, as did her son, while her husband, 71, died a terrible death. “It grew dark,” she said. “The rain poured down. When the wind struck us I could feel it lift the house. It must have been raised 10 feet from the ground and was whirled right around the big elm tree. The branches struck through the windows. Then there was a great splintering and cracking and the wall fell outward. I felt myself going through the air. I was stunned and when I came to, was lying in the corn field across the hill. Ther is a little creek there and my feet were in the water. At my side lay my husband. I turned over to him. A great spike had been driven through his lip. “I’m dying Alice,” he said to me. And we laid there and prayed together. “Then Paul came and carried his father back to where what was left of our home was hanging in the branches of the elm. He came for me. And by the time I had been carried to my husband’s side, he was dead.”
“It was like the whole world turning over and over, upside down,” said Edna Forsee, daughter of Louis Forsee, a coal miner. She is in the hospital with a wrenched back.
“Otis and Mabel (her brother and sister) were in school,” she said. “Papa came home at noon. It started to rain harder and then to hail Then the house swung around and the world seemed to just turn over and over. Everything was flying in the air. I didn’t know what to think. I just prayed.”
Baby Torn from Mother’s Arms
From the arms of Mrs. Wanda Mattingly, 21, the wind blew her infant son, Norman J., nine months, while the mother clung desperately to Charles Glenn, aged 3, and to the banisters of the stairs of her home from which the wind had blown the walls and roof away. “I was on the second floor of the house when the storm came and gathered up the babies and started to the first floor,” Mrs. Mattingly said.
“I was just on the stairs when suddenly the walls seemed to fall outward, one by one, and the roof fell, leaving the stairway standing exposed.
“The wind had such force that I had to take both babies in one arm and grasp the banisters to keep from being blown away. Then Norman was whisked from my grasp. I just sat on the stairs and bent over Charles Glenn to hold on to the baby I had left. Then the wind went down, and I went down stairs. I collapsed. Pretty soon along came the preacher, Lee Brown, with my baby in his arms. He found Norman crying in a pile of debris about 15 yards from the house.”
From page 3 of The Durham Sun, Sunday morning, March 22, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84020732/1925-03-22/ed-1/seq-3/#words=MARCH+22%2C+1925
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