One hundred and forty-six years ago this week, Fayetteville was just beginning to recover from a pair of back-to-back disasters. Most accounts of a damaging tornado and subsequent fire are written, but one photographer, John Hansard, did get his equipment out of his damaged business to capture day-after images. Those rare photographs will be shown and discussed Saturday morning at 10 at the Fayetteville Public Library. Alan Gates of Little Rock will bring these images to the library. He says the path of the April 18, 1880, twister led right to downtown Fayetteville.
Gates: The tornado started out by the fairgrounds, which was about a mile southwest of the town center, but it touched down most heavily in the block just west of the square, moving through the square and off to the east. And it did the most damage right on the square.
Kellams: The tornado was bad enough, but then there was a fire after that?
Gates: That's correct. There was a fire that started in the post office, which was at that time in a building on the east side of the square. And it completely destroyed that building and a building next to it and would have spread further, but for the firefighting that was done at the time, completely by bucket brigade. There was a bucket brigade that reached from the cisterns on the town square across the street and up to the roof of a second-story building where the local townsfolk were standing on the roof and pouring buckets of water into the fire.
Kellams: How much damage did these two combined disasters do to downtown Fayetteville?
Gates: There was an estimate of approximately $100,000 given in the papers at the time, which would equate in today's dollars, more or less, to $3 million. But that really understates the extent of it, because the buildings at that time did not have central heating and air. They did not have indoor plumbing. They did not have all of the various pieces of infrastructure that we normally think of in a building. They completely destroyed three buildings, seriously damaged several others, took the third story off the only three-story hotel at the time. It was really an amazing amount of damage, and at that time there was no storm insurance that would cover wind damage. So it was all a completely uninsured loss.
Kellams: And there are images of the aftermath.
Gates: That's exactly how I got involved. I collect antique photographs, specifically stereo photographs — these photographs that have two pictures side by side and give you a 3D image. And I happened across five stereoviews of the aftermath of this tornado. I started researching the history of the tornado and then trying to research whether there were any more images that photographer John Hansard produced at the time. He had his studio actually in one of the buildings that was leveled. And he somehow managed, despite the complete destruction of his studio, to get out and take these images. I found three more in other museums, so that this series that he called "The Ruins of Fayetteville" was a series of eight stereo photographs that he then quickly set about selling in the area.
Kellams: So there was a commercial aspect to this — people would want these images.
Gates: Yes. In the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century, the stereo images were immensely popular. Millions and millions of them were produced of all sorts of scenes. And John Hansard, who was operating out of Fayetteville, produced, I would guess, a couple of hundred different stereoviews of scenes in northwest Arkansas, southwest Oklahoma, the Indian Territory — eastern Oklahoma, as it's called today. They were very, very popular. It was very common for a family to have one of these stereo viewers and a collection of stereoviews that they would go through. It's a very popular form of entertainment that survived well into the 20th century.
Kellams: People of a certain age will remember the View-Master. So you would put it up to your eyes, and it would give you a captured 3D image.
Gates: And these images done by John Hansard were made at a time where the technology was extraordinarily difficult to execute. He would pour a collodion solution onto a glass plate, coat it, and then put it in a sensitizing solution in the dark. And while it was still in the dark, put the glass plate, still wet, in the camera for exposure. These photographers would do this in little portable tents. It was kind of an amazing production. And they produced images of extraordinary detail. The View-Master is a very similar kind of effect, but the images that the 19th-century stereo photographers produced were more on the order of five by three. So they have a huge amount of detail when they're properly done.
Kellams: So it was complicated taking the image — and then of course producing the final product.
Gates: They would use that glass negative to produce the stereoviews. There was difficulty involved, because you'd have these paired images. You had to put the correct one on the correct side or you'd get this squirrelly image that would hurt your eyes. They had to be placed at the same level vertically and horizontally, and you couldn't twist either one of them. So it took an enormous amount of precision, once you had the glass plates, to produce the images as well.
Kellams: None of us have a frame of reference of what Fayetteville was like before the tornado and fire. But do these images that have survived more than a century show us the devastation and destruction?
Gates: They show the devastation, but they also show a lot about what things were like. One of the images, for example — when I was putting together this presentation, I discovered something that surprised me. I magnified it quite a bit. And in the street there were people standing and looking at the destruction. But there was also a dog standing in the street — not terribly surprising — and a pig standing in the street. And there was a glorious story from an early history of the tornado that the hotel that was severely damaged, the Tremont House, was raising a pig in a barrel out back, and that the barrel supposedly was picked up and blown across the street into the courthouse square, where the barrel landed with the pig unhurt. And I kind of like to think the pig in this picture is the pig that was in the barrel.
Kellams: These twin disasters came not relatively long after the Civil War, and we know Fayetteville suffered during the Civil War. Did this provide a setback for civic or community growth?
Gates: You know, it's interesting — how quickly things were rebuilt on the square. The recovery effort, the town mayor convened a town meeting the morning after the tornado. The tornado was about 7:30 on Sunday evening; at 8 o'clock Monday morning, there was a town meeting, and a finance committee and a recovery committee were convened. They set about what they were going to do to provide relief, and they collected goods and money. The newspaper nine days later reflects that they were done, that they had completed all the recovery effort. And you just kind of shake your head and know that their buildings were devastated and yet the public effort of recovery was over. The hotel that had had the third story ripped off was rebuilt and back in operation by July. Most of the buildings were rebuilt surprisingly quickly, and many of the businesses were back up and running within a week or two in new locations or in modified locations. But you don't know about the people who lost their business and never recovered. There was one I was able to track — a dress store that was operating and its building was leveled. The dress store next door took in a lot of their goods to kind of salvage them from the storm. But looking at the property records, that lady was never able to get her dress store back up and running. So you don't know what didn't happen.
Kellams: It's decades before there's any sort of early warning system. Do we have any written accounts of what people experienced as the tornado bore down on Fayetteville?
Gates: The most telling thing was that the newspapers reported the next day that it was fortunate that the storm hit when it did, at 7:30 on Sunday evening, because everybody was in church and the churches were located off the square. And it was also fortunate that it rained as the tornado passed through. This tornado that hit Fayetteville was part of a general outburst of tornadoes over a 36-hour period that stretched from Texas to the Great Lakes. And the worst of them all was in Marshfield, Missouri, about 80 miles away. In Marshfield, the tornado hit in the middle of town, as it happened in Fayetteville. But there was no rain and the town caught fire. Everybody had candles and whatnot burning, and hundreds of people died.
Kellams: Do we know anything about fatalities connected to either the tornado or the fire in Fayetteville in 1880?
Gates: One. A total of one. The lady who was married to the owner of the Tremont Hotel was crushed when the third floor was torn off, and that was the only fatality. There were a number of broken bones mentioned, but the papers were pretty specific. There had been one child reportedly killed, but they corrected that in later editions, saying the child was not killed after all. The images are part of a broader collection that John Hansard put together, and he was the only photographer in Fayetteville who produced stereoviews.
He was one of about a half-dozen photographers in Arkansas who in the 19th century produced a number of stereoviews. His, at least in the estimation of collectors, are considered among the very best. They're highly prized, in part because they have survived extremely well. He was exceptionally careful about his craftsmanship. So just the wear and tear of the chemistry — his have survived the best from that standpoint. And he is generally one of the most highly prized by collectors, finding them because they're so well executed.
Kellams: Alan, thanks so much for your time.
Gates: Thank you. And I look forward to seeing folks in Fayetteville. I hope they enjoy the show.
Alan Gates lives in Little Rock, and he'll bring the images of Fayetteville in the aftermath of the 1880 tornado to the Fayetteville Public Library on Saturday morning. The event begins at 10 a.m. and is free and open to the public. He will be joined for the presentation by local author and historian J.B. Hogan.
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