Deadliest Hurricanes Then and Now, page 1
Sailors have long battled hurricanes. This 1869 illustration shows a ship in a severe storm. Ouragan is the French word for hurricane.
Galveston’s awful calamity. This 1900 illustration depicts the horror of the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900.
For Bonnie and Jamie in Texas
(and all the dogs)
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: Harry Runs for Home
Part One: Before
Chapter 1: Path of Confusion
Chapter 2: Friday: A Change in Direction
Chapter 3: Saturday Morning
Part Two: During
Chapter 4: The Cline Brothers: Like a Lighthouse on a Rock
Chapter 5: The Kitten and the Baby
Chapter 6: Harry to the Rescue
Chapter 7: Voices from the Storm
Chapter 8: The Cline Brothers: Drifting Out to Sea
Part Three: After
Chapter 9: Voices of Survivors
Chapter 10: Too Many Bodies
Epilogue: Hurricanes: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
The Great Galveston Hurricane Facts & Figures
More for Young Weather Scientists
Glossary
More Hurricane Activities
Sample Oral History Questions
Timetable of Major U.S. Hurricanes
NOAA National Hurricane Center List of the Costliest
Explore More: Internet Resources and Lesson Plans
Selected Bibliography
Source Notes
Photo Credits
Index
About the Author
Also by Deborah Hopkinson
Copyright
Harry Maxson struggled through flooded streets in Galveston on September 8, 1900, much like this scene in Providence, Rhode Island, during a 1938 hurricane.
Galveston, Texas
Saturday, September 8, 1900
Four o’clock in the afternoon
The storm had burst by the time Harry Maxson started for home. Rain fell in torrents, slashing his skin. Gusts of wind beat against his face. He had twenty-two blocks to go.
Harry was just fourteen, but he was big for his age and strong. His father worked for the railroad and had helped Harry land his first part-time job, hauling freight at the railroad yard for sixteen cents an hour. On Saturday, even as the storm grew worse, Harry and the grown men kept working until finally the boss said they could go.
Harry Maxson
By then, the water was already so deep that in some places Harry had to wade. But when he reached a street with only two inches of water, he began to run.
“I saw a roof being lifted off of a house. Believe me I sprinted as fast as I could as some shingles came toward me,” said Harry. “I threw up my hand to guard my head and a nail in one of the shingles struck me and cut the back of my hand. At that minute—the wind, the water—dodging the shingles, I finally slipped and fell.”
Harry’s face hit the water and he licked his lips. Wait! What was this? He could taste salt. All this water? It wasn’t from the torrential rain. No, this was the Gulf of Mexico itself surging over the city streets.
Harry struggled to his feet. The wind kept blowing. The water kept rising. His house was on M Street, close to the beach on the Gulf side. By the time he arrived around five o’clock, water in the yard was nearly a foot deep.
Saturday afternoon was just the beginning. The deadliest hurricane in American history had Galveston in its grip.
Not a soul was ready.
This book tells the story of a terrible disaster, through the words of survivors. Their accounts help us understand what it was like to experience the Great Galveston hurricane. And that’s possible because ordinary people took the time to share their stories in letters, oral histories, interviews, and journals.
Telling our stories is so important—even more than you might imagine. I wanted the accounts here to reflect various points of view and life experiences from both white and Black survivors. Yet, as I began my research, I mostly found accounts from white people. The voices of African Americans were missing. Luckily, I discovered a book entitled Island of Color: Where Juneteenth Started by Izola Collins (1929–2017). A Galveston teacher for many years, Ms. Collins was part of a family who had lived in Galveston for five generations. She was inspired to publish a history of African Americans in her city by seeing her grandfather Ralph Albert Scull (1860–1949) write in his own journal.
“I remember passing his bedroom late evenings, and seeing Papa (as we girls called him, since this is what my mother called her father) sitting at his little desk, writing in the green composition tablet,” she recalled. He spent years recording his observations and experiences as an educator and pastor in the African American community.
Thanks to Ralph Albert Scull and Izola Collins, we can read the story of Annie Smizer McCullough, Izola’s great-aunt, who was in her nineties when she shared her memories of the storm. We have insights and details that would otherwise be lost to historians, writers, and readers like you and me.
In addition to personal stories about the Galveston hurricane itself, throughout this book you’ll find special sections with facts about weather science and hurricanes. And in the back, along with other resources, I’ve included instructions for doing an oral history interview with a relative or friend. I hope you’ll be a history detective too!
We’re all part of history. Your story matters. I hope you will tell it.
—Deborah Hopkinson
❯❯ Clara Barton
Clara Barton (1821–1912) founded the American Red Cross in 1881, following her heroic efforts to aid battlefield soldiers during the Civil War. She created awareness of the Galveston hurricane disaster and traveled to Galveston to help organize relief efforts.
❯❯ Mary Louise Bristol (Hopkins)
Mary Louise (1893–1987), who went by her middle name, Louise, was seven when the storm struck. Her father had died when she was a baby. Louise lived in Galveston with her mother, two older brothers, and older sister. Her mother took in boarders to make ends meet. When she grew up, Louise worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and married Oscar Hopkins. She later visited schools to share her memories of the hurricane with young people. She died in 1987 at the age of ninety-four.
❯❯ The Cline Brothers: Isaac and Joseph
The Cline brothers were two of seven children originally from Tennessee. Isaac (1861–1955) moved to Galveston in 1893 to head the weather station. He lived with his wife and three children in a house near the beach. Joseph (1870–1955) worked for his brother as a weather observer and lived with the family.
After the tragedy in Galveston, the brothers continued in the weather service. While in later years they did not keep in touch, they passed away almost within a week of each other. Isaac died in New Orleans on August 3, 1955, at age ninety-three. Joseph died in Dallas, on August 11, 1955, at the age of eighty-four.
❯❯ Milton Elford
Milton (1872–1930) was a young man living in Galveston with his parents, John and Fanny Elford, and his five-year-old nephew, Dwight. During the hurricane, they took shelter in a neighbor’s house. He shared the terror of that night in a letter to his brothers.
❯❯ Harry Maxson
Harry I. Maxson (1885–1967) was fourteen in 1900. He lived in Galveston with his parents and younger sister. He had his first job, making sixteen cents an hour, at the railroad depot. His father worked for the railroad, and neighbors came to their house to wait out the hurricane. Harry’s gripping account was discovered among his papers after his death.
❯❯ Annie Smizer McCullough
Izola Collins recorded an oral history interview with Annie, her great-aunt, in 1972. Born in 1878, Annie died on February 14, 1974, just before her ninety-sixth birthday. She was twenty-two when the storm struck.
❯❯ Thomas Monagan
Thomas worked for an insurance company in Dallas and was among the first people from the outside world to arrive in Galveston following the disaster.
❯❯ Ralph Albert Scull
Reverend Ralph Albert Scull (1860–1949) came to Galveston in 1865 at the age of five. A pastor and educator, he taught for more than fifty years in Galveston public schools, inspiring his daughter Viola and granddaughter Izola to follow in his footsteps. His papers, including Black Galveston: A Personal View of Community History in Many Categories of Life, are preserved in the Rosenberg Library in Galveston.
❯❯ Katherine Vedder (Pauls)
Katherine Vedder (1894–1975) lived with her parents and older brother. She wasn’t quite six years old when the storm struck. She and her family survived. Katherine (sometimes spelled Katharine) married Peter Corlis Pauls in 1916 and stayed in Galveston.
❯❯ Arnold R. Wolfram
Arnold Wolfram (1858–1946) lived in Galveston with his wife and four children. As he made his way home during the hurricane, Arnold struggled to rescue a ten-year-old messenger boy who lived in his neighborhood.
This is a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather satellite image of Hurricane Maria over Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. In 1900, weather forecasters could look up, but not down, on storms and clouds.
“The hurricane which visited Galveston Island on Saturday, September 9, 1900, was no doubt one of the most important meteorological events in the world’s history.”
—ISAAC M. C
GALVESTON
WEATHER BUREAU
Just twenty-four hours before Harry struggled home, the sun shone on Galveston, Texas. There were few signs a monster storm was on the way.
Katherine Vedder, almost six, lived in the city with her parents and her older brother and sister. Her father had heard rumors about bad weather approaching. Yet when Katherine looked out the window at five o’clock on Friday, she saw no sign of trouble. “It was a perfect late summer afternoon, the day clear blue and cloudless.”
Isaac Monroe Cline, Galveston’s chief weather observer, was also scanning the sky about that time. In fact, he’d been staring at the waves and the skies all week. He was hoping to make sense of the pattern, the way you look at pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and try to figure out where they fit.
But so far, the picture wasn’t clear.
Isaac Cline was thirty-nine. He and his wife, Cora, had three children, with a new baby on the way. Isaac was a rising star in meteorology, the study of the atmosphere and weather. Since being appointed head of the Galveston weather station seven years earlier, he’d become a valued member of the community. Isaac had a lot in common with his adopted city. Both were ambitious and optimistic.
Today, just as in 1900, the city of Galveston sits on Galveston Island, a long finger of land, twenty-seven miles long and no more than three miles wide, that lies just off the coast of Texas. The brackish waters of Galveston Bay, an estuary, are to the north, and the Gulf of Mexico is to the south. Houston is about fifty miles inland; a railroad trestle across the bay was completed in 1860. (Today, a highway bridge connects Galveston with the Texas mainland.)
Founded in the 1800s, Galveston was a busy entry point for immigrants from Germany, Scotland, and Eastern Europe. Some called it the Ellis Island or New York City of the West. With its population of European immigrants, Latinos, and African Americans, Galveston was a multicultual port city. The city boasted a bustling waterfront. Trains brought cotton, wheat, and corn from inland farms to be shipped around the globe.
Grand mansions lined Broadway, Galveston’s main thoroughfare. The city boasted a host of activities for residents and visitors alike. People flocked to restaurants, concert halls, and hotels, including the beautiful five-story brick Tremont Hotel. Surrounded by sparkling water and festooned with white oyster shells, Galveston was a glittering symbol of success, poised for the new century ahead.
Galveston’s leaders had established a streetcar system and electricity services. They’d also built new houses. Isaac and Cora Cline lived in one of them, at 2511 Avenue Q, just three blocks north of the Gulf.
Not everyone lived in a new or sturdy home. As the population grew during the late 1800s, small structures sprang up on both the front streets and back alleys of the city. Some of these “alley houses” became rental housing for itinerant laborers who came to Galveston for short periods of time to work. Many became home to African American families and were built after the Civil War by Black carpenters, including Horace Scull, Ralph Albert Scull’s father.
Hoping for new opportunities, Horace Scull had brought his family to Galveston in 1865, when Ralph was just five. In June of that year, a momentous event took place.
Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army arrived in Galveston bringing official word to Texas that the Civil War was over and formerly enslaved people were free. President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation (which had freed any enslaved persons in Confederate states) had never been enforced in Texas.
Today, Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19 to commemorate emancipation. Juneteenth has been an official state holiday in Texas since 1980. In 2016, at the age of eighty-nine, activist Opal Lee, known as “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” first walked from her home in Texas to Washington, DC, in an effort to get Juneteenth recognized as a national holiday. And on June 17, 2021, the ninety-four-year old Lee was able to celebrate. On that day, President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday.
In the decades after the Civil War ended in 1865, formerly enslaved people faced prejudice and huge obstacles when trying to get an education, a good job, or to own a home. Horace Scull worked building alley houses on leased ground, meaning the landowner usually rented out the house. In 1867, Horace built a house for his own family too. But he was forced to move the house twice because the landowner either changed his mind or refused to sell the land under it to Horace because he was Black.
The small, simply built structures available to Black families weren’t as big or sturdy as the houses many white families were able to afford. These homes would not be able to withstand tremendously strong floods and winds like those of America’s deadliest hurricane.
Around 1900, African Americans made up about one-fifth of the city’s population of nearly 38,000. In addition to working in construction, some African Americans had jobs on the docks, thanks to Norris Wright Cuney, one of the most important Black leaders of his time. He served on the Galveston city council and helped create more job opportunities for African American workers on the waterfront. In 1889, he was appointed the United States Collector of Customs, making him the highest-ranking appointed Black federal official in the country.
Other African Americans began their own small businesses. Robert “Bob” McGuire ran a busy taxi service with a horse and buggy. He earned enough money to buy land near the shore, and built a bathhouse there that Black residents could use. He also served as a police officer.
The children of these early Black entrepreneurs went on to make a mark in their community. Horace Scull’s son, Ralph, became a teacher. In the same way, Jessie McGuire Dent, daughter of Bob and Alberta McGuire, attended Howard University and then returned to Galveston to teach.
In 1943, while teaching in the Galveston schools, Jessie realized that Black teachers were paid less than whites. She fought and won a case in federal court to require equal pay for African American public school teachers. To honor this family’s contributions to Galveston, educator and author Izola Collins became the driving force in establishing the McGuire-Dent Recreation Center in Galveston.
Before 1900, other Black-owned shops and businesses grew up in the area around Bob McGuire’s bathhouse between Twenty-Seventh and Twenty-Ninth Streets. In segregated Galveston, Black families often didn’t feel welcome elsewhere. Izola Collins wrote, “White owners of businesses on the sand did not want their patrons to be turned off by the presence of former slaves in the water with them. Such owners, and sometimes even police, told them to move on, that they were not allowed to swim in those areas.”
Despite facing many obstacles, Galveston’s African American community grew to include thriving churches as well as popular restaurants and clubs. Galveston’s Central High was the first African American high school in Texas, founded in 1885. However, there were separate sections for Black residents in theaters, on the beaches, and on the trolleys. Galveston was still a segregated city.
A Hurricane Hunter in action.
Hurricane forecasting has come a long way since 1900. NOAA’s “Hurricane Hunters” are specially designed aircraft that serve as “flying weather stations” and help forecasters and researchers make better predictions and learn more about dangerous storms.
In the photo, a NOAA P-3 aircraft flies in the eye of Hurricane Caroline. The circular hurricane eye is visible as a dark space in the clouds. This picture was taken on December 10, 2018.
Learn more at: https://www.omao.noaa.gov/learn/aircraft-operations/about/hurricane-hunters.
Hurricanes form over warm ocean waters in the tropics. The tropics are the regions of the Earth around the equator. These areas receive a lot of direct sunlight and are hot and wet, often with ocean temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or more.
Many times, hurricanes that affect the United States begin as a weather disturbance that scientists call a tropical wave, or an easterly wave. This is a special term for an area of clouds and thunderstorms that moves from east to west. If you hold your finger in front of your face and move it from right to left, this is how a tropical wave moves. (These waves are also known as African easterly waves. As you can see from the chart, hot winds blowing easterly from the Sahara Desert hitting the Atlantic Ocean help to create this weather pattern.)
