Great Tornado Outbreak of 1860 Camanche Cedar Rapids Lisbon

 

The outbreak started with twin tornadoes outside of Lisbon and Mount Vernon

June 3, 1860, was hot and sticky. Nothing unusual for an Iowa Sunday. Then the sky turned wrong.

 

The storm came out of nowhere. No warning. No time to think. Just a low, growing roar—like a freight train.

 

By the time it was over, over 150 people were dead. About a hundred in Iowa. Fifty more across the river in Illinois. The storm carved a 150-mile path from Cedar Rapids to Sterling in less than two hours. Entire towns—Camanche and Albany—were wiped out in minutes.

Around six that evening, two funnels dropped near Palo, just north of Cedar Rapids. They split and passed on either side of town, like something choosing its target. Five houses gone on the west side. Two more blown apart to the south. One man dead. Another hurt. Cedar Rapids got clipped.

Ten freight cars got picked up and tossed around like matchbooks at Lisbon Station

Out in the country, it was worse.

 The storm picked up Mr. Wooley’s house and rolled it end over end like a toy. His wife and daughter hid in the cellar. Didn’t matter. The whole place lifted off the foundation and dropped them twenty feet away in the brush. Wooley got yanked out of the house, thrown fifty feet, and somehow grabbed a stump. When the wind eased, he ran for his family. The storm grabbed him again and dumped him in a creek.

 

Another man clung to hazel bushes in the woods. The wind ripped him loose, threw him a dozen feet, and stripped the clothes right off him. One man hugged a beech tree as hard as he could. The storm lifted him anyway and smashed him into the ground. Killed him on the spot.

 

At Mount Vernon, people watched it roll in.

 

A witness said it sounded like “a hundred train cars.” Trees spun through the air. Clouds peeled off the sides of the funnel. Folks started running—some to cellars, some nowhere in particular. At the last second, the storm shifted and slid past the town. Close enough to see everything. Close enough to hear it. But it left Mount Vernon standing.

Houses were lifted up in the air, as people held onto bushes and stumps

The next stop wasn’t that lucky.

 

At Lisbon Station, the depot vanished. Ten freight cars got picked up and tossed like matchsticks. Warehouses, an eating house, lumber yards—gone. Chancy Lamb’s lumber pile got shredded into kindling. Four people died there. Another at Roger’s Settlement.

 

A reporter from the Mount Vernon paper said he saw “human bodies whirling in the air.”

 

That wasn’t the worst of it.

 

Seven miles south of Eldora, in Union Township, the storm tore through like it had something personal to settle. It leveled a two-story brick house belonging to a man named Devine. Nine people were inside. Four didn’t make it. The others were injured. Broken bodies lay scattered across the prairie. Mrs. Devine’s head was never found.

 

Next door, the Crist family tried for the cellar. All but one made it. She didn’t survive.

At Mount Vernon, people stood outside watching the storm pass over them

The tornado crossed the Iowa River and kept going. Near Sanderson’s Mill, houses lifted clean off their foundations. Trees and fences spun through the air. Mrs. Garrison was killed. Others badly hurt. Eldora saw hail the size of a hen’s eggs. One measured thirteen inches around.

Then it headed east—toward the river.

 

Between De Witt and Camanche, George Ames saw it coming and rushed his family into a root cellar. When they came back out, the house was gone. A horse lay nearby with a rail driven clean through its body. Other animals were just… pieces.

 

The Walrod family got swept away with their house. Five dead. One little girl—five years old—survived after being carried nearly half a mile.

 

At Hatfield’s place, sixteen people were killed. One man ended up pinned in a tree by a wooden rail that had been driven straight through him.

The tornado flattened most of Camanche in its three minutes on the ground

Then the storm hit Camanche.

 

Population around 1,500. Typical summer evening. Around seven o’clock, the sky turned yellow—almost brassy. The air went still. Then the tornado dropped into town “with the rapidity of lightning.”

 

Three minutes.Forty-five people dead. Seventy-five injured.

 

Search crews found a mother and daughter lying side by side. No marks on them. Just gone. Another woman was found with her two children. All three dead where they lay.

 

The Muscatine Journal said the town was “completely destroyed.” Hardly a building left standing. The Millard Hotel—flattened. The New York papers said it looked like the place had been blown up from the inside.

One man was blown through the house clinging to the door

One man tried to brace a door against the wind. The storm ripped it off its hinges, carried him through the house, and dropped him in the yard.

 

Two men in a buggy got lifted into the air. The horses went one direction. The men went another. Neither survived.

 

Eli Milliner shoved his wife and child into the basement. His waistband snagged on a floor joist. Before he could free himself, the storm lifted the house and dropped it eight feet away. Crushed him underneath.

 

The town’s postmistress, Mrs. Miller, got buried when her house collapsed. She crawled out alive. Her two-year-old daughter didn’t make it.

 

A grocer named G. C. Westphall got his wife and four kids into the cellar. He didn’t make it down in time. The building fell in on him. They found him the next day—barely recognizable.

 

Livestock took a beating too. Farmers buried seventy-six head of cattle between De Witt and Camanche. Others were never found. One man said he saw a horse flying twenty feet in the air, with a cow right behind it.

Coffins lined up at Camanche as the city stuggled to bury 45 tornado victims

Then the storm crossed the Mississippi.

 

It hit Albany hard. Five dead. Dozens injured. Almost every building wrecked. As it crossed the river, it turned into a waterspout and smashed a raft carrying twenty-seven people. Most of them didn’t survive.

 

South of Morrison, it killed another eight to ten people. Dozens more hurt. A woman was lifted from her bed and dropped 150 feet away.

 

Farms near Amboy were wiped out. Houses, barns, fences—flattened. Livestock killed. Families torn apart.

 

By the time it reached Sterling and nearby Lynden, it still had enough strength to kill four more and injure fifteen.

 

People in Davenport watched a little girl fall out of the sky and hit the mud. She lived. A four-year-old boy from Clinton was carried two miles before he came down—dead.

 

Then it was gone.

 

What the storm left behind made little sense. Entire houses erased. Others untouched right next to them. People were found far from where they started. Animals stuck in trees. Silence where towns used to be.

 

And in the hours after, something uglier showed up.

 

Looters.

 

They moved through the wreckage before the bodies were even cold, pulling valuables off the dead, stripping what little was left.

 

The storm didn’t just tear through Iowa. It showed how fast everything can disappear—and what some people will do when it does.

 

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