As the 200th anniversary for the city of Fort Smith moves toward community celebration in 2017, the architectural face of the downtown area has survived a number of changes over the years.
From grand opera houses adorning dirt roads, Victorian houses dotting the surrounding neighborhoods” and a few surviving blocks of brick pavement adorning the area now known as Bell Grove Historic District were all part of the charm and ambiance of Fort Smith 109 years ago.
Several notable residences, such as the Darby House, the Vaughn-Schaap House and the Clayton House, are located in this 22-square-block area that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in the early 1970s.
But those that remain were among a few standing on a fateful night in 1898 when what has been described as “cyclone” unleashed devastation on a sleeping city.
Never in the history of this state had a weather-related event caused so much turmoil and for the number of deaths of property damage it inflicted.
Few weather disasters in Arkansas have matched it since.
The city of Fort Smith, for the most part, had been shut down for the night on Jan. 11, 1898. It was a Tuesday night, and even those that prowled the saloons and red light district on the far western edge of the city had headed home at around 11 p.m. on what had been a warm, but not untypical, winter day.
The atmospheric conditions that evening had been close to normal. Nothing in the barometric pressure readings gave weather observers encased in a dome atop one of the city’s better hotels cause too worry.
Literally out of nowhere, the first signs of the approaching storm system were noted just after 10 p.m. when the atmosphere suddenly shifted into what was described as “sultry and depressing” conditions along the Arkansas river just west of the National Cemetery, heralding what seemed to be just another thunderstorm.
Within 45 minutes, “the fury of Mother Nature’ turned Fort Smith into a pile of horrific rubble, resulting in the death of 55 people and doing over $1 million worth of property damage.
Adjusted for inflation over the years, that figure would represent $28.57 million today.
The tornado first showed itself at the National Cemetery, where the five-foot stone wall surrounding the memorial grounds was “flattened like it was made of tin” according to one newspaper report.
Over a mile of stone wall was reduced to rubble in an instant, century old trees were ripped from the ground and massive headstones were turned over in the wake of the storm.
The Belle Point schoolhouse and cotton yards were next to feel the wrath of the cyclone and a local newspaper report said, “it seems to have displayed a most wonderful peculiarity by literally blowing the entire contents of bales of cotton out of the hoops which held them, and leaving the empty shells of the sacking and ties to represent a bale of the fleecy staple.”
The winds then struck the business portion of town between 12th and 8th Streets and two blocks of Towson Avenue, roughly the area that is now bordered by Wheeler to one block past Towson east to west and the Courtyard by Marriott and the “new courthouse north to south.
It was in this 12-square block area where most of the fatalities occurred.
Shifting slightly on its course to a more northwest track, the raging storm moved into the more densely populated area slightly west of Immaculate Conception Church and reaching its deadly tentacles to an area just north of the new high school, which took the brunt of the storm head on.
“Although not so many fatalities, this portion was left in utter ruins; pianos, furniture, buggies and everything were strewn as tough so much chaff had been thrown into a summer’s breeze,” said a memorial book published by Thrash-Lick Printing Company of Fort Smith.
The Central Methodist and Baptist church were “as complete wrecks as it is possible to make them” and Brownscombe Methodist was “badly damaged.”
The new high school, built at a cost of $50,000 and opened just a few months prior to the storm was unable to open for the remainder of the school year. Historic homes, including the one that had been the home of Judge Issac Parker for over 21 years, were reduced to firewood.
The storm continued to track east to an area just a few blocks short of where the current fire station on north Greenwood now sits, and then as quick as it had come, it was gone.
The entre ordeal had lasted a little less than four minutes.
“Men, women, and children, asleep in their homes, were without a moment’s warning awakened to meet death under falling walls or in the flames which soon engulfed many of the wrecked buildings,” said the Fort Smith Elevator.
Because of the torn and twisted electric poles and lines and ruptured gas mains, the fires proved to be almost as deadly as the actual storms.
Power had to be shut completely off in the downtown region, leaving rescuers and volunteers to battle not only the rains that followed the fury of the storm, but an accompanying pall of darkness that enveloped the stricken area.
But been in 1898 and in the face of such a disaster, Fort Smith did what it has always done. It picked itself up, dusted itself off and set off on the task and rebuilding the city within mere hours of the carnage.
“The morning of the 12th broke upon the unfortunate Border City with cloudless sky and the loveliest of spring weather, and but for the suffering and desolation within it limits, one would have thought it was the brightest and happiest city in the south. The mayor and his assistants, the chefs of police and fire department did everything in their power to render aid and protect the citizens from further damage. At 10 o’clock a mass meeting of citizens was called to provides means for the relief of the unfortunate. Here was shown the magnanimity of Fort Smith’s citizens by the raising of a large sum without even leaving the building where the meeting was held.”
Death was indiscriminate.
Rich and poor, young and old, black and white were counted among the 55 confirmed deaths. The interred bodies of those killed by the tornado are represented in just about every cemetery that existed at the time. The historic Oak Cemetery on Greenwood road is the final resting place for at least 14 of the victims.
The event still stands as one of the two deadliest tornados in the history of Arkansas when it comes to loss of life.
