As the recent “Alberta Express” came barreling out of Canada and crashing into York County, we began yearning for those warm, sunny days we had earlier this month. Oh how we talked, nearly complained, that the unusual weather was just going to make everybody sick. And how we needed the cold weather to kill off the bugs. Well, if this latest blast of arctic air didn’t bump ’em off, they deserve to live! Still, it wasn’t as bad as the great freeze of February 1886, recalled by John Joseph Jefferson (“Three Js”) Robinson.
According to Three Js it was the worst in memory to have occurred in the Broad River area, even wiping out the bluebird population. “There were lots of bluebirds in this country then,” he said. “They were almost as plentiful during the winter as the English sparrows are now [but] it was several years after that winter before I again saw a bluebird.”
He continued, “Well, it was dreadfully cold from the middle of January, as I recollect, on into March, and there was but little to do for the greater part of the time except to stay about the house and look to the firewood. Also we had to draw water for the stock, for the springs and branches were all frozen. The [Broad] river froze from bank to bank and the ice got thicker and thicker. Bateaux [floating bridges or boats] went out of use, and people who had business on the opposite side of the river went across on the ice.
“When the breakup came, an ice gang [dam] was familiar in a bend a short distance below our house and the river was backed up for nearly a mile. The ice was piled up like a little mountain. People came from all about to look at it. When the ice began to break, it made a noise like the falling of forest pines and the like. Just how thick the ice was at the thickest I do not know, but after the breakup, I measured eleven inches thick.”
Winter is not the only time of year we have to be concerned about bad weather. Sometimes in the spring, Mother Nature gives her skirts a violent flutter to remind us not to take her for granted. And at 9:00 in the evening on May 20, 1859, she gave such a warning to Western York County.
It all began with black, threatening clouds gathering over Kings Mountain. Out of the bellowing darkness fell a storm that moved rapidly southward and widened out for a mile and a half. Wind, rain, hail, and lightning unleashed its full fury onto Western York County. Quickly, the storm stretched to a width of three or four miles, and the roar of its coming was described as “a thousand wagons and teams running away in a crowd.” Lightning was constant “… and the whole heavens appeared to be an intensely burning sheet of flame.”
Destruction stretched from Clark’s Fork, to Hickory Grove, Hopewell, Blairsville, just east of the Bullock’s Creek Church, and on into Chester County. Within 30 minutes the land that had been bursting with springtime shades of green became a desolated landscape.
A solid sheet of water and hail covered the area. Small branches and creeks were suddenly turned into rivers, and huge gullies yawned and swallowed the land. Whole sections of rail fences rose up and rode the crest before scattering their timbers for hundreds of yards over fields and forest. Scarcely a panel of fencing was left.
The hail stripped foliage from entire forests, and cedars were as bare as any elm or oak. Pines were so deprived of their needles and bark that they looked as if they had been swept clean with fire.
Wheat was beaten into stubble, and the straw was pounded into the soil. Corn and cotton suffered the same fate. Debris was piled as high as a two-story house in the bottoms and along creeks. The next day the land looked like the dead of winter. Hailstones the size of quail eggs drifted and stacked to the depths of two to four feet. One man told that while astride his horse that was 16 hands high, he could easily pick up a handful without dismounting. Along Bullock’s Creek hail piled up as high as 15 feet. Three weeks after the storm, Dr. Bond Feemster, James Guy, and Dr. William McNeel reported they were still finding hail in heaps.
The tornado-like winds lifted and carried away the roofs of houses, outhouses, barns, corncribs, stables, and tenant dwellings; and once deprived, their contents scattered for hundreds of yards. A farmer told that his wagon, braked and secured, was driven by the winds for 50 or more yards before smashing into a building. Both wagon and building were torn into hundreds of pieces and completely destroyed. Another farmer reported a rock more than three feet across in size was amazingly moved 60 feet. A wash pot, picked up at a spring, was tossed into a nearby field 400 yards away, breaking it into large fragments.
Following the storm many area farmers were faced with rebuilding and clearing the land as though they were new settlers. Houses, barns, fences, corncribs, and various outbuildings had to be built. Crops had to be replanted, with little hope of making a decent crop. The 30 minutes of destruction took years of hard work to restore the land, forests, and farms.
The only death reported came from a home near the Chester and York County line. There, a large log house was blown down upon its inhabitants, and an elderly lady, Nelly Alberson, was instantly killed. A younger Mrs. Alberson and her six children escaped serious injury, but the grandmother, Sarah Henderson, suffered a broken leg and a fatal, fractured skull.
There was no way of estimating the damage this storm wreaked upon that section of York County. It took years for farmers to recover their loss, and bad matters turned worse when, two years later, the Civil War began and men were called from their homes. It is likely much of the work was never accomplished.
About 130 years would pass before a storm of this proportion was reported again in York County; only Hurricane Hugo that struck the eastern portion of the county in 1989 is comparable.
J.L. West – Author
This article and many others found on the pages of Roots and Recall, were written by author J.L. West, for the YC Magazine and have been reprinted on R&R, with full permission – not for distribution or reprint!
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