SOUTH CAROLINA: Triple Tornado

Breakfast in Charleston, S.C. has been for generations a high social rite. At 8:00 one morning last week, custom in Charleston was interrupted. At 8:07 a. m., 31 victims lay dead or dying (including one Arthur Pinckney, Negro, but no others of great name or lineage). Honored walls and lovely trees were down or damaged. To the Bombardments of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the Great Gale of 1804, the Earthquake of 1886, had been added Charleston’s Three Tornadoes of 1938.

Charleston’s tornadoes in trio were not unusual, nor were they related to the hurricane which struck farther up the northern Atlantic Coast last fortnight. Blowing up from some 25 miles in the interior, the first twister knocked down a row of Negroes’ houses near the Ashley River. Within seven minutes, another twister licked down Meeting Street, along the Cooper River, wrecked more ancient hovels of the poor, flattened many a garden of the native gentry and rich Yankee interlopers. Sadly battered but not ruined were palmettos, oaks in famed White Point Gardens, known to millions of tourists. A third blow skirted Charleston proper, whisked off a dozen cottages on Sullivan’s Island, where Fort Moultrie (four times rebuilt) has stood since 1776. Untouched by wind was neighboring Fort Sumter, where the first engagement of the Civil War was fought.

Because old places are living things in time-soaked Charleston, it was not in human for the city to count its casualties in terms of history. Unroofed or other wise seriously injured were “the only Huguenot Church in America” (1681); St. Philip’s Church, in whose graveyard lie the bones of Statesman John C. Calhoun and the William Rhett who captured Pirate Stede (“Bluebeard”) Bonnet; City Hall, once a branch of the Bank of the United States which Andy Jackson and Henry Clay rowed about; Miles Brewton House (1765), where Lord Cornwallis once stayed during the Revolution. Razed was a row of ancient shells where legend places the public slave market—a matter of sore denial by Charleston historians, who say Charleston’s slaves were sold in decent privacy. Unscathed save for their gardens were the mansions along South Battery, many now owned by Northerners. Storm-conscious Harry Hopkins found, when he arrived to direct Government aid, that the damage countable in dollars was about $2,500,000.