Deadly Long Creek tornado was worst in state history

Happy New Year! At the time of this writing, it’s just a few days before Anno Domini 2025 is scheduled to inflict itself upon us. This time of year, many writers make a regular practice of looking back upon the past year and writing about it.

I suspect this practice got started with Penny Press-era newshounds who found it very hard to track down sources during the week after Christmas — or maybe they just wanted to relax and bang out an easy story so they could get back to wassailing or speakeasy-hopping or whatever they did back then to celebrate the season.

In the spirit of the season, I also am going to look back on something I wrote — but not something from the past year. Or even the past decade.

Fairly early in my practice as a regular writer about Oregon history, in early 2012, I started a story off with a statement that, although technically true, well — let’s just say it showcased my meteorological ignorance more than I like to admit.

“Oregon is not known as a place in which you have to worry about hurricanes of any size,” I wrote. “Nor do we get those High Plains storms with hailstones the size of golf balls, or tornadoes that vacuum up houses full of Dorothy and Toto, or dust storms you can’t see the house through.”

In my defense, though, it’s true that people in Oregon don’t expect tornadoes, or hailstones the size of frozen Cornish game hens plummeting out of the sky.

Certainly David and Sarah Parrish didn’t, when they moved to the Central Oregon town of Long Creek back in the spring of 1894. They were leaving their old home in Kansas, they told their new neighbors, “to get away from the cyclones” — meaning, of course, tornadoes.

Less than four months later, David and Sarah’s new Oregon home was demolished and both of them were killed ... by a tornado.

The town of Long Creek developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s on the banks of Long Creek, one of the tributaries of the John Day River. It was, and is, a little north of the center of Grant County, a few dozen miles north-northwest of John Day and Canyon City. It was a prosperous little town, well positioned, and it grew relatively quickly to become one of the most promising settlements in Grant County, so much so that in 1891 the residents incorporated the town and started the process of trying to take over from then-fading Canyon City as county seat.

But before anything could come of that, the town got flattened by the most intense cyclone in recorded Oregon history.

And yeah, about that cyclone: One of the people who watched it descend upon the town gave what may actually be the earliest known eyewitness description of the creation of a “bomb cyclone.”

The term “bomb cyclone” is probably familiar to you, since it was just last month that Oregonians were treated to some really breathless weather reports about one.

“Bomb cyclone” is a super-dramatic name for what happens when, during a storm, a mass of cold Arctic air gets sucked into a storm’s vortex together with a mass of much warmer air. When that happens, something called “bombogenesis” happens.

Bombogenesis sounds like a made-up word for something Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor got up to in the kitchenette of their motel room while on the run from the Terminator, doesn’t it? But it’s strictly a weather term, and the reference is metaphorical, not literal. The intensity of the storm, as it were, explodes. And a “bomb cyclone” is the result.

In our most recent example, the bomb reference was a bit of a bust. November’s storm was not nearly as apocalyptic as its name suggested — in most of Oregon, at least. Nor was it as destructive as meteorologists feared it could get. Basically, it manifested itself as a very large and powerful, but otherwise ordinary, windstorm. It knocked out power to half a million people along the West Coast. It did a fair amount of property damage, killed two people by blowing trees down on them, and dumped huge amounts of rain across northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. But for all that, it was basically just a really big five-state-wide version of a type of storm we’re all super familiar with.

The bomb cyclone that hit Long Creek, though, was a bomb cyclone worthy of the name. It was tiny by comparison; it probably didn’t even leave Grant County. But what it lacked in size it more than made up for in intensity.

Writing in his July 8, 1894, edition, Long Creek Eagle editor (and town mayor) Orin Patterson described its inception:

“With a roar and a rumble which was no less than the effect of a severe windstorm in the forest surrounding Fox Valley,” he writes, “two angry looking clouds met on the summit of the mountain three miles south of Long Creek and the work of destruction began in all its fury, taking its course almost due north.”

Patterson would have no way of knowing that one of the two clouds he saw was warm and the other cold; but what happened next makes it pretty clear that such was the case. The combined cloud swirled together savagely, dropped a funnel cloud to the ground, and started racing down the mountain toward the town, gouging a half-mile-wide trail of destruction through the thick virgin-timber forest that would be visible as a scar on the mountainside for at least half a century afterward. In minutes it reached the town of Long Creek.

“Dwellings, barns, and store buildings were lifted into the air as if but the weight of a feather, and torn to atoms, portions of which were carried for miles distant,” Patterson writes. “For a moment the air was a thickened mass of missiles, flying in every direction.”

At the same time, the cloud above were releasing hail, and if someone had been able to preserve some of it, it probably would have set a national record for size. But it was also very unusual stuff, according to S.M. Blandford, the officer in charge of the U.S. Weather Bureau in Portland, who reported his correspondent told him, “The formation was more in the nature of sheets of ice than simple hailstones. The sheets of ice averaged 3 to 4 inches square and from 3/4 to 1 1/2 inches in thickness. They had a smooth surface and in falling gave the impression of a vast field or sheet of ice suspended in the atmosphere and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand.”

Some of the residents managed to get out of the way of the fast approaching funnel cloud, but three of the houses it hit and demolished were occupied. One of them was the home of David and Sarah Parrish — the refugee couple who’d fled Kansas to get away from tornadoes, both of whom died at the whim of this one. Another was the Nichols residence, home of Dr. and Mrs. Nichols. Both were badly injured, and their infant daughter, Blanche, was killed.

The Parrishes and little Blanche were the only fatalities from the storm. Six others were injured, some very badly. One lucky stormwatcher, I.W. Splawn, was snatched up off the ground and carried high into the air over the top of a store before being dashed to the ground — but he landed in a haystack and was completely uninjured. The storm also picked up a piano, probably from Dr. Nichols’ house, and hurled it several hundred yards.

All told, the storm inflicted about $30,000 in damage (about $1.1 million in modern currency) upon the community, leaving some residents with literally nothing left to their names.

“Those houses that had escaped being destroyed were thrown open to the wounded and medical assistance was summoned,” Patterson writes, “while the dead bodies were taken to City Hall and prepared for interment.”

“With all its fury the cyclone swept everything in its course and, of over two dozen structures destroyed, there is not enough left to erect a decent dwelling,” he adds.

In the aftermath, Long Creek struggled to get back on its feet. An appeal for humanitarian assistance was sent out to nearby cities and towns to contribute to a relief fund; but this does not seem to have done much for them. The timing was terrible; in late May of 1894 the Willamette River had flooded the streets of downtown Portland (here’s a link to the Offbeat Oregon column about that event), and at the time the cyclone hit, the floodwaters had just receded a day or two before. So, Portland had a lot of cleaning-up to do and damage to fix, and plenty of other towns situated close to the banks of the Columbia River also took heavy damage from floodwaters.

As if that weren’t enough, the “Panic of 1893” (actually a full-blown depression) was in full swing. There just wasn’t much relief money available, and there were lots of other disasters competing for what there was.

So Long Creek pretty much had to do its best with what it had. They managed; but after that day there wasn’t any further talk of taking over as county seat.

Today, Long Creek is a nice little community well off the beaten track, and home to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 people. The weather in the summer is about as close to perfect as it gets — the average highs in the hottest months, July and August, top out at 84 degrees — and winters are not bad either. It’s easy to see why people loved it, back in 1894, and didn’t expect that balmy, mellow weather to suddenly turn as deadly as it did.

(Sources: In the Land of Bunch Grass, Gold, and Trees, a book by Reiba Carter Smith and Louetta Zumwalt Shaw published in 1993 by the authors; “Family and Community on the Eastern Oregon Frontier,” an article by William F. Willingham published in the Summer 1994 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “Lumps of Ice as Hailstones,” an un-by-lined article published in the July 1894 issue of Monthly Weather Review; cityoflongcreek.org; archives of the Ashland Semi-Weekly Tidings, The Dalles Daily Chronicle, and Heppner Gazette, June 1894.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.