1936 — Apr 6, Tornadoes and Fires (esp. Cooper Pants Factory), Gainesville, GA — 203

–203 Brooks/Doswell “Normalized Damage…Major Tornadoes in the [US]: 1890-1999.” 2000
–203 Cornell, James. The Great International Disaster Book (Third Edition). 1982, p. 222.
–203 Grazulis. Significant Tornadoes 1680-1991. 1993, p. 866.
–203 Grazulis. The Tornado. 2001, p. 292.
–203 Ludlum. The American Weather Book. 1982, p. 71.
–203 NWSWFO, Paducah KY. NOAA/NWS 1925 Tri-State Tornado Web Site. “Gen. Info.”
–203 Storm Prediction Center, NOAA. “The 25 Deadliest Tornadoes.”
–203 Tornado Project Online. US Killer Tornadoes of 1998.
–203 Worthy, Larry. “A Time to Mourn – 1936 Gainesville Tornado,” About North Georgia.
–200+ National Fire Protect. Assoc. Spreadsheet on Large Loss of Life Fires (as of Feb 2003)
–149 “Southern Tornadoes, April, 1936.” NFPA Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1, July 1936, 60-61.
— 90 History.com. This Day in History, April 6, 1936. Tornadoes Devastate…Gainesville.

Cooper Pants Factory Fire (corner of West Broad and Maple Streets)
–70-125 Worthy, Larry. “A Time to Mourn – 1936 Gainesville Tornado,” About North Georgia
–40-125 Hale. “Architect wants excavation of property…Cooper Pants Factory sat.” 2012.
— 40-70 Blanchard estimated range.
— 70 Wikipedia. “1936 Tupelo-Gainesville tornado outbreak.” 1-1-2013 modification.
— 60 Digital Library of Georgia. The 1936 Gainesville Tornado: Disaster and Rec. 2008.
— 60 Tabler. “It was daytime, but the sky was as dark as night.” Appalachian History. 2012.
— >40 Associated Press. “Marker Sought for 1936 Deadly Fire.” GPB News, 11-8-2012.

Narrative Information

Associated Press, 2012: “Gainesville — Leaders of a northeast Georgia town are seeking a historic marker to commemorate the deaths of dozens of young women, killed when a tornado slammed into their factory and the building caught fire in 1936…. The tornado that struck Gainesville in 1936 is considered one of the deadliest in U.S. history, with about 200 people killed according to some estimates.

“The tornado struck the Cooper Pants Factory, causing a collapse that set off the fire there. Authorities say it killed at least 40 workers who were trapped inside. Some bodies were never identified.” (Associated Press. “Marker Sought for 1936 Deadly Fire.” GPB News, 11-8-2012.)

Digital Library of Georgia: “The following film clips [website] depict the absolute devastation in the area surrounding the Cooper Pants factory on the corner of West Broad and Maple Streets. Minutes after the tornado struck on April 6, 1936, the two-story building collapsed and immediately burst into flames trapping over half of the garment factory’s 125 employees inside. Sixty employees, most of who were women and young girls, were unable to escape and perished tragically in the factory.” (Digital Library of Georgia. The 1936 Gainesville Tornado: Disaster and Recovery. “Cooper Pants, Area 5.” 2008.)

Grazulis: “A massive pair of tornadoes moved east-northeast through downtown Gainesville, Georgia, at the start of the work day. This event consisted of two large funnel clouds which struck the city of Gainesville after a smaller tornado hit north of town. The course of one of the funnels led into the city from the southwest, just west of the Atlanta highway. The other came in from the west along the Dawsonville highway. These two paths came together west of Grove Street, and a four-block-wide area was laid waste across the entire city, beyond which separate courses of destruction appeared again.

“The wreckage was astounding, with debris filling the streets up to 10 feet deep. About 750 houses were destroyed and 254 were badly damaged. Damage totaled $12,500,000. The largest death toll in a single building for any US tornado occurred at the Cooper Pants Factory. The multi-story building, crowded with young workers, collapsed and caught fire, killing about 70 people. At the Pacolet Mill, the funnel was seen in the southwest, and the 550 workers ran to the northeast corner of the building, thus averting an even greater tragedy. Many people, especially high school students, sought shelter in Newnan’s department store. The building collapsed, killing about 20 people. The wreckage was so deep and swept by fires that it was not possible to determine how many people were killed in which buildings. At the time that the 203 person death toll was listed, 40 persons were still missing. In the downtown area, few buildings were swept away, as the multi-story businesses and factories were blown over or collapsed. Letters from Gainesville, Georgia were dropped onto Anderson, South Carolina. $13,000,000.” (Grazulis. “Descriptions of the Top Ten US Killer Tornadoes #4: The Tupelo Tornado.”)

Grazulis: “Gainesville, Georgia…experienced a devastating tornado on April 6, 1936, when 203 people were killed and 1600 were injured…the tornado struck in the morning, laying waste to the city…. the fires that followed made it impossible to determine who died where….” (Grazulis. Tornado Project Online. “US Killer Tornadoes of 1998.”)

Hale: “Downtown Gainesville property owners call it an eyesore, but one prominent Hall County architect says the old House of Kustom building — scheduled for demolition this week — may hold historical significance. The building sits on the site where dozens of young women died at the Cooper Pants Factory as a result of the devastating 1936 tornado… The tornado that struck Gainesville in 1936 is considered one of the deadliest in U.S. history. About 200 people were killed, according to estimates, and much of downtown was destroyed….

“One of the most tragic scenes played out at the Cooper Pants Factory, which Reynolds says was on Broad and Maple streets. According to accounts, a tornado hit the factory, causing it to collapse. That collapse set off a fire that killed — depending on whose estimates you’re looking at — between 40 and 125 workers who were trapped inside. Some bodies were never identified. Reynolds [architect] describes most of the victims as poor young women from the country. “From published accounts, cremated remains of the (victims) were found clumped together in the burned-out stairway and lower level where they had attempted, in vain, to exit the building’s blocked doorway,” he wrote. He’s requested an archaeological investigation before demolition begins, believing that some remains of the victims ‘might still be buried below the floor or below grade’.” (Hale, Aaron. “Architect wants excavation of property where Cooper Pants Factory sat.” Gainesville Times, GA, 6-11-2012.)

History.com: “In Gainesville, Georgia…three separate tornadoes continued the destruction [of previous day in Tupelo MS]. In the single worst tornado incident in the United States in the 20th century, 70 workers at the Cooper Pants factory were killed when the building collapsed on them. Twenty more people were killed in a department store collapse. Debris was piled high throughout Gainesville. Hospitals all over the Southeast were pressed into service to help survivors. Better weather forecasting and warning systems helped prevent tragedies of this scale in the years that followed.” (History.com. This Day in History, April 6, 1936. Tornadoes Devastate…Gainesville)

NFPA: “This city [Gainesville, GA] was probably the hardest hit of all the places visited by the tornadoes. The Red Cross reports 149 persons killed and approximately 800 injured out of a population of about 8600. The tornado developed west of Gainesville and struck the city at 8:45 A.M. on April 6, 1936. The path of the tornado, which was several blocks in width, crossed the entire mercantile dis¬trict. Although mostly of substantial brick construction, all of the 148 buildings in the business center suffered some damage, and fifty were either severely damaged or totally demolished. Outside of the mercantile district 275 dwell¬ings were totally destroyed and 130 were severely damaged. A hosiery mill and a large cotton mill were severely damaged. The total property damage in Gainesville was between eight and ten million dollars.

“At least five fires broke out following the tornado. The center of the storm passed directly over the one and three-story brick joisted buildings of the Pruitt Hardware Company, lifting off the roofs and tearing down the walls to street and floor levels. With employees trapped in the wreckage, fire broke out from a gas-heated pressing boiler in one of the buildings used as a cloth-working factory. The broken sprinkler piping was useless, and with no fire¬fighting or rescue facilities immediately available the fire burned out of con¬trol and a number of employees, variously estimated at from fifty-seven to one hundred, lost their lives. Most of these employees were women. It is im¬possible to obtain information as to the exact circumstances of these deaths, but it appears that the employees were trapped in the building and that many of the fatalities were primarily due to the fire rather than to injuries due to the collapse of the building….

“The fire department station was practically demolished by the tornado, but the apparatus was undamaged and the firemen escaped injury. Debris blocked the doors and prevented removal of apparatus: The telephone system which furnished the only fire alarm service was interrupted, but within a few minutes firemen noted fires in two buildings in different blocks within two hundred feet of their station. As the pumper could not be moved the firemen supplied it with two lines of hose from the nearest hydrant and laid one line from the pumper. This was operated alternately on the two fires. Calls for assistance were immediately sent, but before help arrived fires were reported in three other blocks of the business district. Within an hour help began to arrive. By 3 P.M. seven cities, including Atlanta, had supplied five pumpers and three hose trucks. Fortunately the hose threads of these departments had been standardized in 1931. Due to the low water pressure, direct hose streams could not be used, and there was insufficient water to supply all pumpers simultaneously. The work of the different departments was well coordinated, however, and streams were used alternately on different fires as conditions would permit.” (NFPA Quarterly, “Southern Tornadoes, April, 1936.” Vol. 30, No. 1, July 1936, 60-61; citing published reports of the South-Eastern Underwriters Association and the Associated Factory Mutual Fire Insurance Companies.)

Tabler: “It still stands on record as the 5th deadliest twister in American history. Shortly before 9:00 A.M. on the morning of April 6, 1936, the citizens of Gainesville, a prosperous northeast Georgia textile mill center, were dealt an agonizing blow when a series of deadly tornadoes ripped through the heart of the city….

“Minutes after the attack, numerous fires erupted throughout the Public Square and downtown area. Damage from the tornadoes immobilized the Gainesville Fire Department and forced rescuers to dynamite buildings on the Public Square as a means of controlling the rapid spread of fire.

“The most tragic of these fires occurred at Cooper Pants Factory, a two-story garment factory located on the corner of West Broad and Maple Streets. When the tornado struck, many of the 125 workers, most of who were young women and girls, rushed to seek shelter in the basement level of the factory. The sudden clamor of the employees coupled with damage sustained from the tornado caused the building to collapse and ignite into flames. Sixty of the factory’s employees died.

“In the days following the tornado disaster, an army of 2000 relief workers converged to haul away the millions of tons of debris in the city’s business section. The American Red Cross reported that over 500 homes were destroyed and nearly 750 dwellings were damaged. More than two hundred men, women, and children were killed and an estimated 1,600 citizens were injured.

“President Franklin Delano Roosevelt paid two visits to Gainesville, a brief one three days after the tragedy and one two years later….” (Tabler, Dave. “It was daytime, but the sky was as dark as night.” Appalachian History. 4-13-2012.)

Wikipedia: “Gainesville tornado

“After hitting Tupelo, the storm system moved through Alabama overnight and reached Gainesville, Georgia at around 8:30 A.M. This early morning tornado was a double tornado event: one tornado moved in from the Atlanta highway, while the other moved in from the Dawsonville highway. The two merged on Grove Street and destroyed everything in sight, causing wreckage pileups up to 10 feet high in some places. The worst tornado-caused death toll in a single building in U.S. history was at the Cooper Pants Factory. The multiple-story building, filled with young workers, collapsed and caught fire, killing 70 people. At the Pacolet Mill, 550 workers moved to the northeast side of the building and survived. Many people sought refuge in Newman’s department store; its collapse killed 20 persons.

“The final death toll could not be calculated because many of the buildings that were hit collapsed and caught fire. A 203 person death toll was posted, and 40 were reported missing.”
(Wikipedia. “1936 Tupelo-Gainesville tornado outbreak.” 1-1-2013 modification.)

Worthy: “On April 6, 1936, at about 8:15 a.m. an F4 tornado landed in Hall County southwest of Gainesville and began to destroy homes and infrastructure as it moved northeast. A second funnel was spotted west of the city moving almost due east. At 8:27 the funnel paths met in downtown Gainesville, heading towards the Catholic Church on Spring Street. The edifice was spared when the combined tornadoes miraculously veered around the church, then returned to its original path, taking dead aim on the square in downtown Gainesville….

“The tornado caused a fire in the collapsed multi-story building that housed the Cooper Pants factory, killing some 70 workers (depending on whose report, this number can be as high as 125).

“School children who sought shelter in a downtown department store died when the building collapsed. A third storm, which skirted the city a few minutes before the double tornado, headed northeast doing additional destruction around and to the Pacolet Mills building in New Holland.

“The Gainesville storms, spawned from the same weather system that created the Tupelo tornado, would cause more extensive physical damage ($13 million) but the cost in human lives lost (203) would be below the earlier storm. More than 1600 people would be injured in Gainesville and throughout Hall County and more than 750 houses were damaged or destroyed. Most experts agree that the total number of lives lost in these storms was significantly higher.”
(Worthy, Larry. “A Time to Mourn – 1936 Gainesville Tornado, April 6, 1936.” About North Georgia.)

Sources

Associated Press. “Marker Sought for 1936 Deadly Fire.” GPB News, 11-8-2012. Accessed 3-27-2013: http://www.gpb.org/news/2012/11/08/marker-sought-for-1936-deadly-fire

Brooks, Harold E. and Charles A Doswell III (NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory). “Normalized Damage from Major Tornadoes in the United States: 1890-1999.” Revised manuscript submitted as Note to Weather and Forecasting, Vol. 16, 9 p., Sep 2000. Accessed 11-25-2017 at: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/damage/tdam1.html

Cornell, James. The Great International Disaster Book (Third Edition). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.

Digital Library of Georgia. The 1936 Gainesville Tornado: Disaster and Recovery. “Cooper Pants, Area 5.” 2008. Accessed 3-27-2013: http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/tornado/cooper_pants/cooper_area05.php

Grazulis, Thomas P. Significant Tornadoes 1680-1991: A Chronology and Analysis of Events. St. Johnsbury, VE: Environmental Films, 1993, 1,326 pages.

Grazulis, Thomas P. The Tornado: Nature’s Ultimate Windstorm. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001, 324 pages.

Hale, Aaron. “Architect wants excavation of property where Cooper Pants Factory sat.” Gainesville Times, GA, 6-11-2012. Accessed 3-27-2013: http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/archives/68721/

History.com. This Day in History, Disaster, April 5, 1936. “Tornadoes Devastate Tupelo and Gainesville.” Accessed 12-17-2008: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&displayDate=04/05&categoryId=disaster

Ludlum, David M. The American Weather Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1982.

National Fire Protection Association. “Southern Tornadoes, April, 1936.” Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association, Vol. 30, No. 1, July 1936, pp. 60-61.

National Fire Protection Association. Spreadsheet on Large Loss of Life Fires (as of Feb 2003). (Email attachment to B. W. Blanchard from Jacob Ratliff, NFPA Archivist/Taxonomy Librarian, 7-8-2013.)

National Weather Service Forecast Office, Paducah, KY. NOAA/NWS 1925 Tri-State Tornado Web Site. “General Information.” Accessed at: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/pah/1925/gi_body.php

Storm Prediction Center. The 25 Deadliest U.S. Tornadoes. Norman, OK: SPC, National Weather Service. NOAA. Accessed 10-12-2008 at: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/killers.html

Tabler, Dave. “It was daytime, but the sky was as dark as night.” Appalachian History. 4-13-2012. Accessed 3-27-2013: http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2012/04/it-was-daytime-but-sky-was-as-dark-as.html

Tornado Project Online. US Killer Tornadoes of 1998. Accessed 1-4-2009 at: http://www.tornadoproject.com/

Wikipedia. “1936 Tupelo-Gainesville tornado outbreak.” 1-1-2013 modification. Accessed 3-27-2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Tupelo%E2%80%93Gainesville_tornado_outbreak

Worthy, Larry. “A Time to Mourn – 1936 Gainesville Tornado, April 6, 1936.” About North Georgia. Accessed 3-27-2013 at: http://ngeorgia.com/ang/1936_Gainesville_Tornado