On April 5, 1936, a tornado killed 216 people in Tupelo, Mississippi. The next day, April 6, another tornado killed 203 people in Gainesville, Georgia. The Storm Prediction Center ranks them as the fourth and fifth deadliest tornadoes in United States records, on a list of the 25 deadliest. Two catastrophic tornadoes on consecutive days is an unusual pairing in the record, and the 1936 outbreak is the only one in which two separate tornadoes each killed more than 200 people.
Save more, waste less: The Cool Down’s newsletter sends smart, simple changes that help you and the planet in your everyday life.
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
The two storms belonged to a single multiday outbreak across the Southeast, with Tupelo struck on April 5 and Gainesville on April 6, and the death tolls for each town are drawn from the Storm Prediction Center’s list.
The Storm Prediction Center Ranking
The Storm Prediction Center’s list of the 25 deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history, maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows Tupelo on April 5, 1936, at 216 deaths and Gainesville on April 6, 1936, at 203. Only the 1925 Tri-State tornado across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana at 695 deaths, the 1840 Natchez, Mississippi, tornado at 317, and the 1896 St. Louis tornado at 255 rank higher. Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1947 follows them at 181, and Joplin, Missouri, in 2011 is seventh at 158.
The list carries a caveat. It includes no intensity ratings, and its notes say events before comprehensive damage surveys may consist of multiple tornadoes along a damage path, and that death counts from the 1800s and early 1900s are estimates because records from that era were inconsistent.
Tupelo, Mississippi, on April 5
An encyclopedic account of the 1936 Tupelo-Gainesville outbreak describes the Tupelo storm as retroactively rated F5, with a path of about 15 miles and a maximum width of about 1,000 yards. It reports at least 216 deaths, with an unofficial estimate of 233 from the Mississippi State Geologist, and at least 700 injured. The tornado leveled 48 city blocks and destroyed an estimated 200 to 900 homes, with the Gum Pond area hit hardest and many bodies never recovered.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln weather researchers add that the Tupelo storm swept away a house and killed a family of 13, and that total destruction occurred in the Willis Heights neighborhood. The sources do not agree on how many homes were lost, which is one reason historical tornado statistics are treated as estimates rather than exact counts. A one-year-old named Elvis Presley and his parents survived the Tupelo tornado, according to the encyclopedic account.
Gainesville, Georgia, on April 6
The following day the damage moved to north Georgia. The same outbreak account says the Gainesville tornado was rated F4, formed by two tornadoes that merged on Grove Street downtown, with a path of about 7 miles, at least 203 deaths and about 1,600 injuries. The outbreak account adds that more than 200 deaths occurred in Georgia, the deadliest disaster in that state’s recorded history, and the University of Georgia reports that hundreds of businesses and homes were destroyed. The university counts the storm as the fifth deadliest tornado episode in recorded U.S. history, consistent with the Storm Prediction Center’s ranking.
The Cooper Pants Factory collapsed and burned during the storm, killing workers who were mostly young women and girls. Accounts differ on how many: the University of Georgia says 60, while the Nebraska-Lincoln summary and the outbreak account describe about 70 and call it the highest tornado death toll in a single building in the nation.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke from a train platform in Gainesville on April 9, according to the outbreak account, and the rebuilding effort ended in 1938 with the dedication of a new city hall and county courthouse by Roosevelt, as the University of Georgia describes it.
An Outbreak Larger Than Two Towns
The two cities were part of a larger outbreak across the Southeast. The encyclopedic account counts at least 14 tornadoes over about 18 hours, at least 454 deaths with 419 caused by just two tornadoes, and more than 2,498 injuries, making it the second deadliest tornado outbreak in U.S. history after 1925. Damage totaled at least $15.9 million in 1936 dollars, with Gainesville accounting for about $12.5 million of it, and the account cites a 1936 Monthly Weather Review paper by J. B. Kincer and a Mississippi State Geological Survey bulletin by W. C. Morse among its primary references. Other destructive tornadoes struck Columbia, Tennessee, Acworth, Georgia, and Anderson, South Carolina.
For comparison, the National Weather Service lists 158 fatalities in the Joplin area on May 22, 2011, a tornado it calls the deadliest since modern record keeping began in 1950. Because Tupelo and Gainesville both occurred before that cutoff, they sit outside the modern-record comparison even though each killed more people than Joplin did.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
Save more, waste less: Subscribe to The Cool Down →
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
More from Morning Overview
- NOAA now gives this winter a 75% chance of the strongest El Nino since 1950
- Doctors warn a silent liver disease now affects one in three American adults
- The FBI told the rest of ShinyHunters to surrender after a 24-year-old was arrested
- Two passengers died at an Ohio toll plaza, and the NTSB now wants the cash lanes shut
