Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

As I sit at my kitchen table writing this column, we’re right in the middle of a tornado warning. We’ve had a lot of them lately. I think I just saw a squirrel blow past the window. And it’s a funny coincidence, because I’ve been meaning to write about tornadoes.

Not the current ones. Those are way too recent to be considered history. No, these are from an article I found in the Clinton Democrat in 1907.

It happened around this time of year—Monday, July 8, 1907. The headline on the Democrat was “Small Tornado Hits Lock Haven.” It began around four PM, and only lasted half an hour, but managed to work in a lot of damage during that time.

The storm came from the west, and did several thousand dollars worth of damage. It hit the whole community, but especially hard in the Hill Section. (My neighborhood, which is a comforting thought as I sit here writing this.)

A lot of trees were damaged, including some in apple, peach, and plum orchards, which were plentiful at the time. There was no damage to homes, and no fatalities, which was fortunate. Or perhaps I should say no human fatalities—On Fairview Street, at the home of William Hamilton, a tree blew over and landed on twenty-one chickens, killing them all.

Down the street, witnesses claimed to see two cows belonging to dairy farmer Hutch McClintick blow into the air and over a fence. They couldn’t have taken shelter in the barn—McClintick’s barn was blown forcefully by the tornado, and was taken off its foundation and twisted.

W.I. Harvey had recently moved into a new house on South Fairview Street, and had a willow tree in his yard.

Unfortunately, the willow didn’t last long—It blew over onto a trolley cable, taking down the cable and causing the need for repair.

On the Flemington bridge, a trolley had been parked for the duration. Even with the power turned off, the trolley was blown across the bridge by the force of the high winds.

The Clinton Democrat took note of how much damage was done to glass windows during this time. Short answer: A LOT. “The elements seemed to have had a fancy for windows, for hundreds of panes of glass were broken,” the article said. On the corner of Fairview and Peach Streets, the Dennehy Grocery Store lost practically every window they had.

Right down the street, the paper mill took considerable damage, as well, losing almost every window they had to wind and hail.

And various objects were blown around by the wind, to turn up later. Frank Kidd of South Fairview lost a lounge chair when it was blown into two piers of his porch, breaking them and demolishing the porch itself. There had been a washing machine on the porch, and it was blown clear into the back yard. Another washing machine, belonging to city councilman William Rathgeber, was blown off his property at the corner of South Fairview and Linden Streets. According to the newspaper, it was “Carried through the air by the storm and deposited on the street from where it started on a record-breaking roll in the street for half a block, until it came in contact with a tree.”

This whole thing happened in my neighborhood, and I even recognize a lot of these locations. Which makes it kind of unnerving to sit here, looking out my window during another tornado warning, with the wind and lightning outside. Interesting to write about something that happened so long ago, right here in my area. If you have any questions, go ahead and e-mail me. It’s not like I’ll be getting any sleep tonight.