Our Arklahoma Heritage: An 1892 cyclone took a pioneer farmer who worked his family's homestead on Crooked Creek
On the night the wind came for Joseph Franklin Wagley, the Ozarks still called a tornado a cyclone, and the farm on Crooked Creek still carried the shape his father had given it.
He was thirty-eight years old, a husband and the father of six, the son who had stayed on the home place after the land was divided. By morning the house was gone, the barn was gone, the fences were gone, and Joe was dead, blown from the dwelling into the wreckage of a Boone County night that newspapers from Little Rock to Michigan would name within days.
He was born April 26, 1854, in the Crooked Creek country that was then Carroll County and would become Boone County in 1869. The settlement around him was still Stiffler Springs, not yet Harrison. His father, John Allen Wagley, had come late to this second life.
John was born February 20, 1798, in Burke County, North Carolina, the son of Abraham C. Wagley, a Pennsylvania-born pioneer, and Maria Sarah Henson. John first married Mary Eliza Alexander in Louisiana in 1824 and raised a large family through Louisiana and Red River County, Texas, before that marriage ended.
In 1850, at fifty-two, he married Louisa Ann VanBebber, twenty-nine, in Claiborne County, Tennessee. Family memory has him watering a horse at a well and Louisa recognizing the face she said she had already seen in the water. Her people objected. He was two decades older, previously married, the father of many.
She married him anyway on August 22, 1850. They came west with a wagon, a team, and a little furniture and homesteaded a few miles up Crooked Creek.
Louisa, born July 25, 1821, in Tennessee, was the daughter of Isaac VanBebber and Mary Martin. She had been educated at a girls' college in the South and taught school. Her family had held enslaved people, and she had not been raised to field work. The Ozark farm taught her anyway.
John was a farmer and stockman who chose good land. Early Carroll County tax lists place him among the households that assessed enslaved labor. In 1860 the census found the family in Carroll County: John, sixty, farmer, born North Carolina; Eliza A., thirty-eight, born Tennessee; and the Arkansas-born children already filling the house, among them Joseph F., six and in school that year.
John died in 1868 and was buried in the small family cemetery on the farm. Louisa was left with eight children, the youngest only five. With hired help, she raised them through Reconstruction, a time family accounts remember for hardship and for men called to their doors.
When the children married, she divided the acreage. Joseph, the third of her sons, let the others choose and took what remained, which was the home place. His mother lived with him and Frances until Louisa died in March 1892, eight months before the cyclone. She was buried beside John in the farm cemetery.
Joseph married Frances Elizabeth Holt on December 20, 1877, in Boone County. The record in Marriage Book B, page 26, lists J. F. Wagley, twenty-three, and Fannie Holt, eighteen. She was born November 15, 1859, near Harrison, the daughter of John Larkin Holt, a Cumberland County, Kentucky, man who served as a private, and Nancy Elizabeth Bohannon, born in Virginia.
Friends called her Fannie. No record places Joseph in uniform. He was eleven when the Civil War ended and died six years before the war with Spain. His work was the farm: crops, stock, fences, the spring above which the house stood, the walnut timber that would later take fence rails like spears.
Six children were born to them on that land. Louisa Green came January 21, 1878, and later married Clarke Long. Lawrence Oscar was born January 5, 1879, married Effie May Jenkins in 1903, and lived until 1960. William Isaac was born March 5, 1883, and never married. Joseph Marvin was born April 4, 1885, married Alice Routh Lewis in 1915, worked in Harrison banks, served as county treasurer, and died in 1980.
Bertha Paralce was born June 5, 1889, never married, trained in business school, and worked with her brother in the Peoples Bank and later the Security Bank and the state highway offices. Mary Lemmer was born January 13, 1892, ten months before her father’s death, and later married William Wilson.
The children’s grandmother Louisa, the old teacher from Tennessee, had a large hand in raising them. They loved her, the family said.
November 1892 closed a hard year. Louisa was already in the ground. The baby was not yet walking. Contemporary dispatches out of Little Rock, printed November 19 through 21, said a cyclone tore through Boone County on Friday night between nine and ten o’clock and cut a swath some two hundred yards wide.
Family stones and later compiled lists give the date as November 16. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records a fatal tornado in Boone County on that mid-November date. Whatever the exact clock, the storm found the Wagley house.
Family history is blunt. The cyclone destroyed the house, the barn, the stock, and the fences. It drove rails through large walnut trees. Joe was blown out of the house and killed. Wire stories named him among the dead. One Little Rock report listed seven killed and twelve injured in Boone County, among them Joseph Wagley, a Mrs. Euston and three children, and an unknown man said to have died of fright.
Another account named Will Eaton’s two children, Joe Wagley, and Henry Spain killed outright, with Mrs. Eaton fatally hurt and more wounded. In the same farm cemetery, the stones of Homer Edens, born 1889, and Rice Edens, born 1891, also read November 16, 1892, killed in the cyclone. They were children of Joseph’s sister Olive Bethena Wagley and William Edens.
The storm did not only take a husband. It tore through a kinship neighborhood.
Fannie was thirty-three, with six children and a farm stripped to the dirt. Her brothers and the neighbors raised a log house for her. Isaac Chrisman Wagley, Joseph’s younger brother, lived nearby and helped her try to recover. Years later, in 1910, the family built a two-story frame house where the old dwelling had stood above the spring.
Fannie and William later moved into Harrison. She died January 14, 1944, and was buried in Maplewood Cemetery.
Joseph was first laid in Wagley Cemetery, the private family ground southwest of Harrison, off what is now Valley View Church Road, a field cemetery that still holds the stone for “John F.” Wagley, 1854 to 1892, killed in cyclone, and the note that the body was moved. Relatives later disinterred him and carried him to Maplewood Cemetery in Harrison, where Fannie rests beside him. The old marker was left on the farm.
What remains is the outline of an Ozark life cut short in a single night: a North Carolina line that passed through Louisiana and Texas, a Tennessee teacher who became a widow on Crooked Creek, a son who kept the home place, a Holt marriage, six children, no soldier’s record, a farmer’s work, and a cyclone the papers measured in yards and names.
The wind that night treated houses and trees as playthings. It left a widow, a baby, a broken farm, and a sentence that still stands on two stones in two cemeteries:
" Killed in a cyclone."
