Natural Disasters and Family Stories - The Tornado Outbreak of 1894
I grew up hearing about a specific loss in the family. A devastating tornado that took the lives of Lincoln cousins in Minnesota [though my grandmother apparently got it wrong which cousin(s)]. I was scared of storms and it was, I think, meant to be, “Oh well, what are you going to do? These things happen but they haven’t to us yet.” Or maybe my grandmother was just using it as an opportunity to talk about it.
I grew up on the outskirts of Tornado Alley. We didn’t get hit all the time, but when we did, it was often a doozy. I was born a couple of years after the devastating Palm Sunday tornadoes (the 1974 Super Outbreak as it is now known). Luckily, in my 20+ years of living in northern Indiana, we didn’t get revisited by such a storm. Though, I did experience enough to scare me of high winds forever.
When I was a baby, a tornado traveled down our rural road and put a tree through the end of the house, which I’m told knocked over my crib. But I wasn’t in it because my dad knew better, having grown up in Indiana himself (he had planted mom, holding me, behind the couch and away from windows and trees - he later put an interior trapdoor to the crawlspace in their closet. I spent many scary summer days on that dirt floor yelling up to my brother to bring snacks since he stayed up in the house to watch the clouds). The tornado ended up causing damage at a campground a few miles down the road.
A little over a decade later, I spent a summer day in my grandmother’s basement with my baby sister and cousin, watching individual blades of grass turn in their own circles from the safety of the recessed windows at the top of the walls. This was before cell phones and we had no idea if everyone else, who had gone on an amusement park retreat (I was sick and the babies too little) was okay until they got back. And though I had been upset about missing out on the trip, I ended up being glad I had been safe at Grandma’s and able to help her with the little ones as the storm hit.
I also have a lot of stories about accidentally ending up driving through rotation and storms. And this has all been in the era of tornado warnings, sirens, and weather spotting. In 1894, they didn’t have these things. They could watch the clouds all they wanted, but they couldn’t truly tell what was coming until it was on top of them.
And that’s exactly what happened to my great-great-grandmother’s sister Ella Mabel Lincoln.
Ella Mabel Lincoln was born September 14, 1859, in Scott Co., Iowa, to Edward Henry Lincoln and Phoebe (O’Neil) Lincoln. She married Guilford Thomas Hicks (1849–1898) on August 13, 1884, in Sioux Co., Iowa.
She died in a tornado in Pipestone, Minnesota, June 27, 1894.
The tornado outbreak in Minnesota and South Dakota in June 1894 was reported as far away as New York. Ella’s death was published in newspapers from Wisconsin and Illinois to Indiana to Pennsylvania and New York as one tragedy among numerous tragedies of circumstance.
Some newspapers mistakenly reported that Guilford T. Hicks had died in the storm, but it was Mrs. Guilford T. Hicks, Ella, who had died. Her husband Guilford had been “seriously injured” but survived a few more years.
Guilford remained in Pipestone after the storm, appearing on the 1895 census, but he apparently died in Wisconsin before the turn of the century.
As far as we know, Ella and Guilford had no children.
For more of the Lincoln cousins’ lineage - Descendants of Thomas “the Miller” Lincoln: Through Jonah Lincoln to the modern era is available now as an ebook, digital download, or paperback.
The outbreak of June 27, 1894, is referred to now as the Cold Spring Tornado and was a rare early season storm. So the Hicks family and their neighbors likely weren’t prepared.
Though the loss of Ella was a personal one for the family, the tornado outbreak itself was extremely destructive to the entire region, particularly St. John’s University. However, I can’t say how it ranks among other outbreaks because the National Weather Service didn’t start documenting tornadoes until 1950. Later in 1894, another outbreak would hit the region again, this time including Iowa, where Ella’s relatives still lived. There was also a devastating outbreak in Illinois, including the Forreston area where some of the family lived, in 1898 - supposedly some of the Hackett cousins were caught up in one of those storms, but I haven’t found the evidence yet beyond a general description of the tornado occurring in Forreston: A 150 year history by Kathy Pasch.