Tornado!
1929 Montgomery County Tornado Disaster (Aftermath)
At about 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 2, 1929, northeastern Montgomery County was struck by an F3 tornado, part of a large storm system that caused devastation from Florida to Ohio. The weekly Montgomery County Sentinel reported on May 10th that the “wind storm of cyclonic power ... was of limited width and serpentine on its course. Everything in its path met with destruction.” These photographs were taken by Lewis Reed in the immediate aftermath of the 1929 tornado.
The damage in Montgomery County was limited to the rural Unity area, north of Brookeville. An article in the Sentinel detailed each affected farm, noting that “thousands of persons from far and near visited the scene for several days to look upon the indescribable wreckage.” Seen at left is wreckage at the Benson farm, which was unoccupied, but furniture belonging to “a prospective tenant” was destroyed. From the Sentinel:
"The storm showed its first violence upon the farm of Mr. J. William Benson. There it destroyed every building – the dwelling house, large barn, 117 feet long, including an attached shed, and all other outbuildings.”
Mr. Benson’s apple orchard was also significantly damaged, and the article claimed that “many [trees] were lifted into the air, carried over woods and landed several miles away.”
At left, spectators survey the wreckage at the Benson farm after the storm had passed.
According to an oral history from Mildred Burroughs, the farm of her father-in-law in Unity was also demolished by the storm.
"Our big stone house... [the tornado] just crushed it in. My husband's sister had gone to bed, and it just took the roof off of her head, and blew all of the furniture out of the front bedrooms out in the hall... when she got down to the foot of the steps, there was the living room furniture all out in the hall downstairs, and she had to climb over that just step by step as the lightning flashed. She opened the dining room door, and there sat her father reading the paper.
And she said to him, "Pappy, don't you know your house is blown in?" And he says, "Well, I knew the wind was blowing hard, and I've been getting up and opening the door when the wind blew it closed. But I didn't know there was any damage being done." And she said, "The whole front of our house is blown in. There's been a tornado!" So they went outside and they had no barn left. They had no buildings whatsoever. They had trucks and automobiles that were upside down. Chickens everywhere and killed. They had one gorgeous lawn with very expensive trees but they were all uprooted.
Ms. Burroughs went on to describe the devastation as the tornado tore a path through the county, destroying the Hobbs farm, the Childs farm in Laytonsville (where four people died), and the home of Charles Haight, whose mother was killed in the wreckage.
"I should have told you about the Hobbs farm... it blew his barn away and uprooted his whole orchard and turned over buildings. It picked up his tenant house and whirled it around and landed it completely in the middle of the road, where it was setting [the next morning]."
The fire departments of Rockville, Gaithersburg and Sandy Spring responded to the call made by farm worker James Leizear, who “extricated himself from the wreckage” and ran half a mile to a neighbor’s house to summon help.
Trees completely stripped of their branches create an eerie landscape amidst the rubble.
The Washington Post reported on May 4th that 28 people in Maryland and Virginia had been killed by multiple tornadoes appearing during the storm; most of the casualties were in Virginia, where an elementary school was struck full-force and at least 18 children died.
In Montgomery County, the local Red Cross Chapter formed a citizen committee to raise funds “for relief of the sufferers.”
Lewis Reed's daughter, Mary Jane, helping her father document the historic storm
