"Listen, we have to break this door open or we're going to drown" from the Journel of Ernest Robert TIgner

In the summer of 1911 (grandpa was 11 years old) we had a huge crop of corn and wheat. It had been exceptionally warm. All of us except for Dad had retired for the night. My dad was studying and reading the Bible. He stepped outside for a few minutes. As he opened the back door, he new something was not right. The air was just like a vacuum. Over to the southwest he saw large black clouds rolling towards our home.

He got us up and we went down in the cellar. The cellar had two doors that sloped up. You would swing one back one direction and one the other direction then step down the steps into the cellar where we stored food. We got down in the cellar and the storm hit. We could hear the wind howling and the rain with it, as we huddled in the cellar. We had beaten a path to the cellar from the house getting food and pretty soon water started coming down that path right under the steps into the cellar.

I began to get excited when the water got up around our ankles and then up to our knees. We knew if the water kept getting higher we would have to get out of there. Suddenly the wind broke off a fork of the elm tree above the cellar and it came right down over the door. That created some excitement. Dad went over to raise the cellar door but could not budge it.

We had a lantern. Dad got his shoulders under the door and hollered for Elmer and me to help him. All three of us were on the step and water was getting waist high by then. "Now listen to me, back up, back up." We crowded together, "Listen, we have to break this door open and get out of here, or we're going to drown." If anybody ever hunched over and lifted, we did. We broke out and got back into the house. Debris and shingles were lying all over the place, a tornado had just missed the house!

The tornado took our orchard, trees and all, right out by the roots. Over in the pasture,where the walnut and oat trees were, the tornado cut a swath right through the grove. Every tree in that grove was twisted off about three or four feet from the stump just like you would twist off a small twig with your finger. The whirling wind picked up the trees carried them out, dropped them here and there, all over the pasture. What a terrible thing to see!

The rain and wind flattened our cornfield like a pancake. The ears were just about ready to form with kernals on them and it flattened all of them. My brother and I rowed all over the cornfield the next day in our rowboat. When the water came down, what a sorry sight that place was. Dad had always wanted to live in Kansas. he thought it was ideal country. After the tornado, he did not feel so good about Kansas.

Eric's note: Great grandpa and grandma left Kansas soon thereafter for eastern Washington. Good thing because that is where grandpa Tigner met Mae Louise Nugent in just a few years, quite a romantic story but that will be for another day.