Shinnston tornado, WV's deadliest, left indelible mark 75 years ago

Accompanied by his mother and younger brother, Rice walked to his father’s pharmacy two blocks away, where he discovered that his dad also sensed something out of the ordinary could be about to occur.

“He told Mom to take us to our house, a half-block away, and for all of us to stay in the basement until he personally came to get us,” Rice said. “We did what he told us. It stayed quiet for a while, and then you could hear the wind start to whistling.”

By the time Rice’s father appeared at the basement door less than an hour later, the peaceful town his family had spent their lives in had radically changed. The largest tornado ever to strike the state had crisscrossed Shinnston, killing 66 people and demolishing scores of homes before moving southeast through the rest of Harrison County and into Taylor, Barbour, Tucker and Randolph counties, finally dissipating on Cheat Mountain.

The 40-mile swath of destruction created by the twister left a total of 103 West Virginians dead and 381 seriously injured on June 23, 1944, with Shinnston and its environs bearing the brunt of the storm.

Those raising families, working and operating businesses in Shinnston “were from a generation that never expected West Virginia to get hit by a big tornado,” said Rice, now 81, and one of a dwindling number of Shinnston tornado survivors. “Everyone believed the state’s mountainous terrain would keep tornadoes from forming.”

The June 23, 1944, Shinnston tornado is the state’s first and so far, only, F-4 tornado, capable of producing winds ranging from 207 to 260 mph. It is the strongest and deadliest ever to touch down in the state and is rated the nation’s 15th-most deadly tornado by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When Rice, his mother and brother emerged from their basement, they found that their home, family business and much of downtown Shinnston had escaped major damage from the tornado. The same wasn’t the case for other parts of town.

“South Shinnston and the Pleasant Hill section of town were pretty well wiped out,” he said, as he drove through Pleasant Hill last week. “All the houses you see here now were rebuilt after the tornado, except for that one,” he said, pointing to a still-standing block building that had been a neighborhood grocery in 1944.

“That’s where the Sam Book family lived,” Rice said, pausing at a small home overlooking the West Fork River. “Growing up, Sam’s son, Donald, nicknamed Buzzy, was a good friend of mine. Buzzy and his dad were working in their garden behind the house when the tornado arrived. Sam saw it just in time to throw Buzzy in a ditch and jump on top of him. They both made it through the storm all right, but their house didn’t.”

Rice’s paternal grandparents, H.R. and Lilly Rice, lived across U.S. 19 from the West Virginia State Police Company A’s headquarters building. When Rice’s grandfather stepped outside to investigate the source of a strange, loud noise, he saw what he first thought was a cloud of smoke, produced by what he assumed was a train. But he soon realized he was looking at a tornado, just before it swept over a large steel radio tower, instantly bending it in half.

Rice’s other grandfather, John Finlayson, wrote the definitive history of the storm, “Shinnston Tornado: Illustrated Eyewitness Accounts of Nature on the War Path.” The book records a number of oddities that occurred during the storm, including the twister vacuuming up a section of the West Fork River, leaving a section of riverbed temporarily high and dry.

The book included an account of the tornado demolishing a barn at a farm near Meadowville that left only an interior manger standing. There, a hungry, unhurt horse was photographed calmly munching away at its contents.

A letter sent by Army Cpl. Joseph Endress, then stationed in North Africa, to his sister in Shinnston was found in a pasture near Broadway, Virginia, nearly 200 miles distant after the tornado passed though. The local man who found the letter attempted to return it to the addressee, but soon learned she and a young child had been killed in the tornado.

Rice said his father and the town’s other pharmacist both worked through the night of June 23 and long into the following day to keep emergency services workers and the public stocked with first aid supplies.

The First Methodist Church, the scene of Rice’s vacation Bible school graduation ceremony, was converted into an auxiliary treatment center for the town’s small and soon overflowing hospital. The church’s basement became a temporary morgue.

Red Cross personnel, National Guard troops, State Police and 53 inmates from a Department of Corrections work camp at nearby Gypsy cleared residential tornado debris and then began removing fallen trees from rivers, creeks and streets.

Despite the carnage and destruction caused by the tornado, most residents of Shinnston opted to rebuild.

“That’s what West Virginians do,” Rice said. “It took a long time, since there was not a lot of money in the community, and people had to pay off bills for things like funerals. But Shinnston is a place where working people with big families feel at home, so the town came back. I’m glad it did, because it’s sure been good to me and my family.”

Meanwhile, Rice worries that new generations of Shinnston residents could let the story of the tornado, the death and destruction it wreaked, and the town’s recovery from adversity, fade into oblivion.

“There is only a handful of people left in Shinnston who saw and remember what happened here 75 years ago,” said Rice, who, like his father, became a pharmacist. “I was born here and except for college, I’ve lived here all my life. Each anniversary, I get a little more emotional, because I’m afraid it’s going to be forgotten.”