Deadly forgotten tornado was worst in state history | Offbeat Oregon History | #ORhistory

LONG CREEK, GRANT COUNTY; 1890s:

Deadly forgotten tornado was worst in state history

By Finn J.D. John

December 29, 2024

HAPPY NEW YEAR! At the time of this writing, it’s just a few days before Anno Domini 2025 is scheduled to inflict itself upon us. This time of year, many writers make a regular practice of looking back upon the past year and writing about it.

I suspect this practice got started with Penny Press-era newshounds who found it very hard to track down sources during the week after Christmas — or maybe they just wanted to relax and bang out an easy story so they could get back to wassailing or speakeasy-hopping or whatever they did back then to celebrate the season.

In the spirit of the season, I also am going to look back on something I wrote — but not something from the past year. Or even the past decade.

The town of Long Creek as it appears today. (Image: Richard Bauer photo)

Fairly early in my practice as a regular writer about Oregon history, in early 2012, I started a story off with a statement that, although technically true, well — let’s just say it showcased my meteorological ignorance more than I like to admit.

“Oregon is not known as a place in which you have to worry about hurricanes of any size,” I wrote. “Nor do we get those High Plains storms with hailstones the size of golf balls, or tornadoes that vacuum up houses full of Dorothy and Toto, or dust storms you can’t see the house through.”

In my defense, though, it’s true that people in Oregon don’t expect tornadoes, or hurricanes, or hailstones the size of frozen Cornish game hens plummeting out of the sky.

Certainly David and Sarah Parrish didn’t, when they moved to the Central Oregon town of Long Creek back in the spring of 1894. They were leaving their old home in Kansas, they told their new neighbors, “to get away from the cyclones” — meaning, of course, tornadoes.

Less than four months later, David and Sarah’s new Oregon home was demolished and both of them were killed ... by a tornado.

THE TOWN OF Long Creek developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s on the banks of Long Creek, one of the tributaries of the John Day River. It was, and is, a little north of the center of Grant County, a few dozen miles north-northwest of John Day and Canyon City. It was a prosperous little town, well positioned, and it grew relatively quickly to become one of the most promising settlements in Grant County, so much so that in 1891 the residents incorporated the town and started the process of trying to take over from then-fading Canyon City as county seat.

But before anything could come of that, the town got flattened by the most intense cyclone in recorded Oregon history.

And yeah, about that cyclone: One of the people who watched it descend upon the town gave what may actually be the earliest known eyewitness description of the creation of a “bomb cyclone.”

The term “bomb cyclone” is probably familiar to you, since it was just last month that Oregonians were treated to some really breathless weather reports about one that was expected to hit the state.

“Bomb cyclone” is a super-dramatic name for what happens when, during a storm, a mass of cold Arctic air gets sucked into a storm’s vortex together with a mass of much warmer air. When that happens, something called “bombogenesis” happens.

Bombogenesis sounds like a made-up word for something Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor got up to in the kitchenette of their motel room while on the run from the Terminator, doesn’t it? But it’s strictly a weather term, and the reference is metaphorical, not literal. The intensity of the storm, as it were, explodes. And a “bomb cyclone” is the result.

In our most recent example, the bomb reference was a bit of a bust. November’s storm was not nearly as apocalyptic as its name suggested — in most of Oregon, at least. Nor was it as destructive as meteorologists feared it could get. Basically, it manifested itself as a very large and powerful, but otherwise ordinary, windstorm. It knocked out power to half a million people along the West Coast. It did a fair amount of property damage, killed two people by blowing trees down on them, and dumped huge amounts of rain across northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. But for all that, it was basically just a really big five-state-wide version of a type of storm we’re all super familiar with.

The bomb cyclone that hit Long Creek, though, was a bomb cyclone worthy of the name. It was tiny by comparison; it probably didn’t even leave Grant County. But what it lacked in size it more than made up for in intensity.

Writing in his July 8, 1894, edition, Long Creek Eagle editor (and town mayor) Orin Patterson described its...