On the evening of November 10th, 1915, Great Bend, Kansas, with a population of 5,000, a city of beautiful homes located in Barton County, the banner wheat county in one of the richest agricultural regions of the world, was swept by a cyclone which resulted in the death of nine people, the injuring of fifty to seventy-five more and the destruction of property worth almost one million dollars.

This included three of the large flour mills of the city, the electric light and water plant, a large laundry, the Santa Fe passenger and freight depots, a large grade school and thousands of dollars of railroad property damage; wrecked over one hundred homes, about fifty of them being literally blown to pieces, the contents and wreckage being entirely carried away. More than fifty more homes were badly damaged, the most of them being so wrecked that they could not be rebuilt but had to be torn down.

All the buildings and 1,500 head of sheep on the large Moses & Clayton ranch adjoining the city were completely destroyed.

The same storm visited several farms in the vicinity, doing an immense damage. The twister struck the city at five minutes after seven o'clock, many clocks in wrecked homes being found that had stopped at that hour. The loss of life would have been much greater had it not been for the fact that a Santa Fe passenger train, due at the time the storm struck, was a few minutes late.

This web site contains a number of views taken from the wrecked devastated district and shows in a partial way some of the effects of the storm's visit to the city. Though houses were turned into huge piles of broken timber, the citizens of the town in a few minutes had organized relief committees and every house and every store in the stricken district visited, the wounded taken out and rushed to the hospital and temporary shelter provided for the others. The city the next day had started a relief fund and in less than a week business had resumed normal conditions and the work of rebuilding the stricken district was in progress.