If you’re a Baby Boomer, chances are you grew up hearing stories from parents or grandparents about Hazel. That’d be Hurricane Hazel, the October 1954 storm that tore through this part of North Carolina on a path that went all the way to Canada.
It’s just one example of a natural disaster that people use as a yardstick of sorts by which to measure other storms. Hazel made landfall in Calabash as a Category 4 storm as it headed straight up the middle of the state on its way north.
Millenials, Gen Xers and Gen Zers will be able to tell stories about Florence, Fran and Floyd, but hurricanes are just one category of natural disaster that has struck this area. WIZS’s Bill Harris chatted with local historian Mark Pace to remember a number of historic events that affected the four-county area in Thursday’s TownTalk segment Around Old Granville.
“What made Hazel so remarkable,” Pace said, was that it was very short-lived. After making landfall on the coast, it reached this area by about 2 p.m. “By 3:45, it was gone from Vance County,” he said. “It came through like a freight train.”
Forty-two years later, Hurricane Fran took more or less the same route as it rolled through North Carolina, killing 36 people and causing extensive damage in September 1996.
Hazel’s fierce winds snapped off a lot of the trees halfway up, Pace said, and it brought great destruction in a short period of time.
This area was also subjected to what is called “the Great Storm of 1893,”
“People didn’t have to worry about the electricity going out,” Pace said, because there weren’t many places that had it. “In a lot of ways, they were able to deal with the effects of the storm a lot better” than we do today.
Over the years, information from climatologists and weather forecasters help prepare for weather events like hurricanes, but people don’t always have a lot of advance warning about tornadoes.
And this area has had its share of tornadoes. Just last year, Epsom experienced a rash of tornadoes, spawned in the remnants of Tropical Storm Debbie. They were relatively weak – F-0 and F-1 – but that’s strong enough to cause damage.
In the Oak Hill community in northern Granville County, a tornado flattened Oak Hill School in November 1952, Pace said. Luckily, it was after school had let out, so there were no injuries. But the yearbook in subsequent years was renamed ‘The Tornado.’
Other tornadoes have demolished warehouses and killed more than a dozen people in Warrenton in 1936, homes in Huntsboro in 2016 and tore roofs off the Medical Arts building on Ruin Creek Road in 1988.
And while nobody welcomes hurricanes and tornadoes, there are plenty of people who wish for a good snowfall every winter – none more than schoolchildren. And probably a teacher or two.
But even the biggest snow fans may balk at the possibility of having 2 feet of snow on the ground. That’s what Warren County got during a massive storm in 1856.
Henderson got close to that – 22.5 inches – in 1922, which collapsed a couple of tobacco warehouse roofs and part of the Corbitt Factory, Pace said.
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