Low, seething clouds swirled in from the west. Wind bursts scattered litter. Awnings snapped. Fat raindrops smacked the streets.
A tornado formed near Hampton Avenue, damaging the cluster of hospitals and asylums along Arsenal Street. Gathering ferocity, the black corkscrew churned through Shaw’s Garden and the Liggett & Myers tobacco works, going up on Folsom Avenue. Thirteen construction workers died amid collapsing beams.
They were the first victims of the Great Cyclone, the deadliest single calamity in St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬. It struck on the afternoon of May 27, 1896, and killed 255 people in a wide path along today’s Interstate 44, across the south riverfront and into the heart of East St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬.
The cyclone damaged or destroyed more than 8,000 buildings and homes, devastating fashionable Lafayette Square, working-class Soulard and the riverfront rail yards. At Seventh and Rutger streets, 23 died in two collapsed tenements. Fifteen were crushed in the ruins of the Vandalia railroad’s depot in East St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬.
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It all took place in 20 minutes.
Even with the carnage and a national depression, St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ hardly skipped a beat. Its population jumped 27 percent during the 1890s to 575,238, finally establishing St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ as the nation’s fourth largest city in 1900. Spicing the strong German flavor were newcomers such as Poles and Russian Jews, who settled northwest of downtown; Italians in Little Italy downtown and on the Hill; and Bohemians south of downtown.
More than half the population was foreign-born or first-generation American, and most of them Germans on the South Side. The big Irish neighborhood was Kerry Patch, northwest of downtown. The wealthy moved ever westward.
Black population, barely 3,300 in 1860, jumped as Jim Crow cruelties hardened down South. By 1900, more than 35,000 blacks lived here in scattered, segregated enclaves around downtown.
Business grew sluggishly in the city during the depression. Faster industrial growth was on the East Side, where cheap coal, flat land and immigrants from Eastern Europe fed mills and foundries. Granite City, named for a company that glazed cookware with a granite-like sheen, was incorporated in 1896.
St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬, meanwhile, built enduring monuments to its sense of self. Construction of today’s City Hall began in 1890. Union Station was dedicated on Sept. 1, 1894, when a 200-piece band played for 20,000 guests. With its distinctive clock tower, Grand Hall and wide train shed, it was the nation’s largest station, and often its busiest.
Just three weeks after the cyclone, the Republican National Convention convened here June 16. It was to have been held in a new coliseum on the site of today’s Central Library, but work had fallen behind. In three months, the city hustled up a 14,000-seat temporary hall on the south lawn of City Hall.
The tornado had spared downtown. GOP delegates took streetcar tours of wrecked neighborhoods and nominated former Ohio Gov. William McKinley on the first ballot. Barkeepers grumbled that they left town too soon.
McKinley won election in November.
Look Back 250 • The Great Cyclone
The remains of Purina Mills, 12th and Gratiot streets, after the tornado of May 27, 1896. (Missouri History Museum)
The jagged remains of St. John Nepomuk Catholic Church, Lafayette Avenue and 11th Street, which exploded as the tornado roared directly overheard. It also wrecked the parish school, which had been filled only two hours before with 800 children of the city's Bohemian community. The church and school were rebuilt. (St. John Nepomuk Church)
Seventh and Rutger streets, ground zero of the Great Cyclone, a massive tornado that killed 255 people along a 10-mile path through St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ and East St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ on May 27, 1896. Seventeen people were killed in the collapse of the building on the left. Across the street, another six died. The working-class Soulard neighborhood suffered severely, with about 40 deaths. (Missouri History Museum)
The remains of Purina Mills, 12th and Gratiot streets, after the tornado of May 27, 1896. (Missouri History Museum)
The wreck of the Chicago & Alton Railroad's train No. 7, which was crossing the Eads Bridge when the tornado struck. Everyone on board survived, but the tornado killed 118 in East St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬. (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)
A map of the tornado's path published in the Post-Dispatch on the 100th anniversary of the storm. (Bill Keaggy/Post-Dispatch)
Another view of the temporary convention hall, looking northwest at 12th and Clark streets. (Missouri History Museum)
The temporary convention hall at 12th and Clark streets on June 16, 1896, when the Republican Party opened its presidential nominating convention. The meeting was to have been held three blocks north in a building that wasn't ready. When planners realized it wouldn't open in time, they had a temporary hall built of wood that could seat 14,000. Today, the site is the south parking lot of City Hall, which is seen nearly complete in the background. Construction of City Hall began in 1890. (Missouri History Museum)
A sketch of the view along 12th Street (Tucker Boulevard) in June 1896, when the Republican Party held its national convention here. St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ hosted the Democratic convention four times, from 1876 to 1916. (Post-Dispatch)
A ticket to the Republican National Convention, held June 16-18, 1896, in downtown St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬. The city hosted one GOP convention and four Democratic national gatherings from 1876 to 1916. (Missouri History Museum)
The Grand Hall of Union Station on Sept. 1, 1894, during the gala dedication of the new railroad station, then the nation's largest. About 20,000 invited guests, many in formal wear, heard long speeches and music by a 200-piece band. Many thousands more gathered outside along Market Street. It was a monument to St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬' sense of itself. (Missouri History Museum)
A newspaper sketch of Republican delegates hobnobbing in the lobby of the Planters House Hotel, Fourth and Pine streets. Mark Hanna, an industrialist and GOP boss from Cleveland, engineered the nomination of former Ohio governor William McKinley from the Southern Hotel two blocks away. (Post-Dispatch)
The view of the Union Station train shed in 1895 from its junction with the rail yard. The design allowed passenger trains to back into the platform area, making things easier for passengers. The station could accommodate many more trains than the Union Depot, six blocks to the east, which it replaced. (Missouri History Museum)
The interior of the temporary convention hall downtown, where the Republican National Convention was held June 16-18, 1896. The party nominated former Ohio governor William McKinley, who won election in November over the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. (Missouri History Museum)
The caisson bearing the casket of former Union Gen. William T. Sherman turns from Pine Street north onto Grand Boulevard during the procession from downtown to Calvary Cemetery on Feb. 21, 1891. The procession of 12,000 veterans, soldiers and notable wound seven miles through the city. (Missouri History Museum)
The Sherman family home at 912 North Garrison Avenue, where they lived off and on until 1886, when William and Ellen Sherman moved to New York. It later became the Sherman Apartments and was demolished in 1974 with little notice or protest. (Missouri History Museum)
Union Gen. William T. Sherman, who was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's closest brother-in-arms during the Civil War. Like Grant, Sherman had strong connections to St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬. He served at Jefferson Barracks, briefly ran a street railway here before the Civil War began and returned here after the war to live in a home west of downtown that grateful St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ans provided for his family. He and his wife, Ellen, are buried at Calvary Cemetery in St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬. (Missouri History Museum)
William Torrey Harris, a teacher and philosopher who was St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ public schools superintendent from 1867 to 1880. He also was one of Missouri's leading intellectuals and a co-founder of the St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ Philosophical Society. (Missouri History Museum)
Ellen Sherman, circa 1875. They lived in St. Ïã¸ÛÈý¼¶Æ¬ for almost 12 years before the after the Civil War. They moved to New York in 1886, two years before her death. Her body was returned for burial at Calvary Cemetery, and he was buried alongside her in 1891. Also buried there is a son, Willie, who died of yellow fever while with his father during the campaign to capture Vicksburg, Miss. (University of Notre Dame)
