Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1902 — Wednesday’s Big Storm. [ARTICLE]

Wednesday’s Big Storm.

The big storm which devastated a portion of central Indiana last Wednesday morning, did damage now carefully estimated at $1,500,000, mostly to growing crops. It was not a tornado 01 cyclone, but an aggrevated summer storm, much like that which passed over Rensselaer 6 or 8 years ago, .only much larger and more violent. Like that its course was from northwest to southeast. Its formation was in Carroll and Cass counties, but it began to make its destructive force felt in B?one county, and it reached its zenith in Hancock and the western edge of Madison counties. It varied in width from two to ten miles, and its career across central Indiana was most marked from Boone to Fayettee county, where it spent its force. Wherever it touched factories were wrecked, houses were unroofed and lifted from their foundations, windows and doors were crushed by the weight of the wind, thousands of acres of growing grain were irretrievably ruined, barns were demolished, original forest were twisted and bent and uprooted, orchards were wiped out and telegraph and telephone poles were snapped off, and the wires scattered—in— endless confusion along the highways and railways tracks.

Cattle were killed and injured; machinery was wrecked; forests were twisted and bent and broken by the fury of the storm, and telegraph and- telephone poles were snapped off and the wires scattered in fearful confusion along the highway and the lines of railway. By far the greatest amount of damage was done to the crops, an indication of the thoroughness of the destruction being the remark of a farmer close to Greenfield, who after looking over his hundredacre tract of wheat that had been beaten into the ground, offered to sell the crop as it stood for a dollar. Had it come to maturity it would have been worth at least $1,500. Four persons were killed, two of them by lightning. The number of injured is estimated at fifty persons, none of them very seriously. Most of the personal injury was due to being caught in the ruins of falling buildings or being struck by flying debris.