Mourning for Mayfield, Kentucky: The Morning after a Deadly December Tornado

I woke up at 12:45 am this morning – the wind chimes on our porch were clanging incessantly and a toddler may have been coughing. After checking on everyone, I turned my attention to the weather forecast. Our antenna wasn’t doing much to keep the radar in focus on the TV, so I retreated to my phone, and the next few hours were horrifying. Tornado warning after tornado warning after tornado warning, the alerts and seek shelter directives keeping time with the relentless wind chimes on the porch. Around 1:20 am,  the reports about the destruction of Mayfield, Kentucky replaced the urgent weather updates.

Mayfield is the county seat of Graves County, in the Jackson Purchase region of Kentucky. It is located on the Tennessee state line and is a very large county (especially to compared to the multitude of small counties that cluster together in the central part of the state), covering some 557 square miles. The tornado curled into action in the northeastern part of Arkansas, before spinning into Missouri and Tennessee before its northeasterly path ravaged over 200 miles in Kentucky. Mayfield was directly in its path.

I struggled to comprehend the nighttime photos filtering into the cyber world. The late-19th century Graves County courthouse, designed by the H.P. McDonald firm of Louisville, Kentucky, and built for $40,000 (a price that included an iron fence encircling the courthouse square), looked amputated and wounded in the blurry and dark photograph. The shapes didn’t make sense. Where were the trees? When I took photos of that same courthouse, it was hard to do  justice to the facade because of those lovely, mature trees obscuring my view.

I looked in vain for other images from Mayfield, while I continued to nervously monitor the weather reports closer to me.

Tornados in December just don’t happen. I’ve always been super cautious about bad storms in the spring – although I wasn’t alive when the 1974 tornados caused so much damage in Kentucky, I grew up hearing about those dreadful storms. I’ve always lived in a house with a basement because of fear of tornados – although I was less than eager to wake up  my children and drag them to our ancient cellar, I am so thankful to have the option.

But it did happen and historic downtown Mayfield, established in 1823 as the county seat of Graves County, is a now a sea of rubble and disrupted – and in some cases destroyed – lives.

The loss of life renders the loss of historic buildings insignificant.

But the loss of whole town’s history, as told through its buildings – what does that mean for a community when it is time to rebuild and to try and heal?

My one and only visit to Mayfield was in the summer of 2018. Work took me to neighboring Marshall County, and after I finished up with what my real job demanded, I explored, heading southwest from Benton.

I regret – oh, how much I regret – that I spent but a passing hour in Mayfield. There was no way to know, on that sticky July day, that a whole downtown would be wiped out by a tornado just before Christmas.

I photographed some houses, some commercial and public, and some churches, before heading on toward Hickman and Futon Counties.

By the mid-19th century,  Mayfield was a tobacco market town. In1885, Mayfield contained ten dry goods stores, thirteen grocery stores, four drugstores, three candy stores, three hardware stores, one bookstore, two newspapers, two agricultural warehouses, two jewelry stores, one saddle and leather store, and several general merchandise stores.

Additionally, there was one large tobacco warehouse in Mayfield, three hotels, six livery stables, two large flour mills, one marble dealer, two furniture stores, and several blacksmiths and wagon makers’ shops.

The town grew, expanded, and developed into the 20th century. Much of downtown Mayfield was documented in 1984 as the Mayfield Downtown Commercial District, and listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The district covers a nine block area “comprised of Victorian and Classical Revival commercial, religious, governmental, and industrial buildings. Downtown Mayfield was laid out in 1824 in a grid system with a county courthouse occupying the central square block of the downtown and commercial buildings facing the courthouse on all four sides. Most of the buildings around the courthouse square date from 1880 to 1910. ” *

It appears, from the images I saw once the day was underway, that most of the nine block historic district has been destroyed.

I didn’t go back to sleep until after 5:30 this morning (a tornado warning was briefly issued for the southeast section of my county at 5 am ), but I was able to sleep, in my bed, in my creaky old farmhouse, with my family safe (and coughing) around me. I woke up to gray skies and fallen tree limbs, but I woke up.

How many people were sleeping when nature turned ugly and menacing in the wee hours this morning? Families who are now homeless, families facing a Christmas with a world disrupted, alien and strange.

I grew up 300 miles from Mayfield in the central part of Kentucky. I’ve only been through Graves County three times that I can recall. But my heart aches for a town whose future has suddenly been rewritten and whose past lies in rubble.

I grieve for my fellow Kentuckians who are heartbroken, hurt, and despairing tonight. The sun will shine on our old Kentucky home again – even if that day seems so far away right now.

 

 

 

*Richard Holland, The Mayfield Downtown Commercial District, nomination to the NRHP, 1984.

 

Two other posts about Mayfield, Kentucky, on this blog:

Remuddling: Mayfield, Kentucky  

The Mayfield Electric & Water Systems Building, Mayfield, Kentucky