(Editor's note: The following column appeared originally in the Sunday, Aug. 24, 1997, edition of the Herald Democrat. It has been edited for this new publication.)

A dispatch from Fort Worth dated April 9, 1919, dramatically began: "Coming from the cloud-draped heavens, sweeping across the country with cyclopean fury, respecting no person nor community, devastating like some destroying angel, a wind storm charged across the plains portions of Texas and Oklahoma, crushing, mangling and killing over 100 innocent victims and injuring several hundred more ...

"Besides the loss of life, the property losses will run into millions of dollars, as houses, churches, school houses, growing crops and livestock were destroyed to an extent almost beyond human conception."

From the April 10, 1919, Sherman Courier: "In the town of Canaan, near Sherman, 16 houses, a cotton gin, a church, a school house and a cotton warehouse were destroyed. A Katy freight train was picked up from the rails over which it was running and blown off the right-of-way. The caboose brakeman and the conductor were badly injured."

Many nice people have called or written me, giving me helpful facts from their own or other people's recollections about the Canaan Cyclone. I am sincerely grateful to them for educating me about a subject of which I knew very little. It's like finding a long-lost chapter from our history.

Nolen Rubarts of Rt. 1, Savoy, Texas, was 7 years old at the time of the cyclone. He wrote: "We lived at Bells at that time. My father took my sister and me over there the next morning. We weren't allowed to pick up anything. Our dad said to leave it where it was as the people might come back looking for stuff they lost. People were roaming like people at a carnival, picking up everything they thought they could use."

Mr. Rubarts added: "A freight train was coming through during the storm. People were fooled by the noise the cyclone was making, just thinking it was the train. Several box cars were blown over ...

"Some of the things I remember were the odd things left, like a kerosene lamp sitting on a stand table at a house where just the floor was left. The lamp and chimney were still intact."

He remembers a rooster that didn't have a feather left on him, but "didn't seem to be hurt at all."

Nolen Rubarts also told of a man who was standing in his yard watching the cloud when he noticed the funnel cloud. He ran into the house to get his wife and two children to go into the cellar, which was full of water. The wife refused to go into the cellar. The man took the two children into the water-filled cellar and held them up out of the water. He and the two children survived. His wife died.

*

Bub Hill, affable Tom Bean barber (whose wife Raylene is the daughter of one of my childhood friends, Clarice Hicks Cooper, at Cherry Mound) called to tell me that Mr. and Mrs. Tom May, the parents of the late Gomer May and grandparents of the late T. Kirk May of Sherman, were killed in the lethal storm system which obliterated Canaan. Mr. and Mrs. Tom May, whose home was destroyed, lived near Whitewright.

Gomer and Kirk May owned and operated May Pharmacy at 219 N. Travis in Sherman for many years.

*

From the Bonham Daily News about two weeks after the Canaan cyclone: "Tom May, who was injured in the recent cyclone which destroyed his home near Whitewright, died yesterday in a sanitarium in Sherman. His wife died one day last week from the effects of the injuries she received in the storm. Mr. May was thirty-nine years of age."

*

Mrs. Clara Owens, now 93 years old, of Bells said she was 14 at the time of the cyclone. She lived with her family just east of Canaan on the Carter place, which was later bought by the Bryants of Whitewright. Her maiden name was Hefner.

Mrs. Owens told about her cousins John and Oscar Hefner and their family. They didn't have a storm cellar. The children were asleep as the storm approached. As their mother walked the floor, their father said, "If we've got to go maybe we ought to wake the children so we will all be together." They decided not to do that. The storm passed them.

From the Ector News: "Digging storm cellars is the order of the day since the cyclone last week."

*

Mrs. Owens said one prong of the storm went to Whitewright, where the Horton home was destroyed. I asked her if Cloy Horton, whom many of us knew, was a member of that family. She replied that he was the oldest son and that he married Versa Tate.

*

There will be more about the Canaan Cyclone to come.

,i>R.C. VAUGHAN of Sherman is a retired senior District Judge.