Polk County farmer Robert Eugene Weems stepped down off the afternoon train at the Wickes train depot at just after 4:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon November 17th, 1921. Weems, who had been in Mena conducting business, commented to others milling around the train platform on the ominous clouds that covered the horizon to the east of the center of town.
Little did Weems know those darkened clouds, illuminated briefly for seconds by brilliant flashes of lightning, would change his life forever.
The bustling community of Wickes, located 26 miles slightly southwest of the county seat, would suddenly be in the grip of a violent storm system that would scar the community forever and impact the life of Weems and all the people he knew and loved.
The day had already brought endless showers and other stormy conditions to the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma throughout much of the region. In fact, later that evening storms hit a lumber camp near Arkadelphia that killed at least two people and the same storm cell killed two other people near Magnet Cove in Saline County.
But neither of those situations, coming on the heels of the system that battered the Wickes community earlier in the day, could compare to the death and destruction and the ultimate decimation of the Weems family that occurred that afternoon.
Robert Weems was totally unaware of the devastating condition of his homestead as he motored out of Wickes once the rain had calmed. He first became aware of the potential of something being horribly wrong a few miles from his home when he saw a whirlwind of activity including what limited emergency vehicles they were in the region and his neighbors making their way down the dirt roads leading to his home in every conceivable mode of transportation.
Soon enough, the reality of the horrific scene revealed the true results of the destructive force of mother nature. The Weems home, which had been a humble one-story house surrounded by lush acreage, was completely flattened and there was devastation everywhere. Weems would learn soon enough that his entire family, including his wife and seven children, had fallen victim to the devastating storm.
Weems was of old Mississippi stock. His father William Weems had been born in Mississippi but by the age of 40 had migrated through Texas and wound it up in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Robert had been born in Mississippi in 1870 but by 1878 the flirtation with living in Texas had ended and the family was firmly supplanted in Oklahoma.
Sometime before 1900, Robert Weems skirted across the border from Oklahoma into Arkansas and planted roots in rural Polk County. In fact, all of the children resulting from the marriage of Weems to Sarah Ella Alston were born at the Wickes homestead. Sadly, they would all die together on that fateful day in November of 1921.
A contemporary newspaper account of the tragedy in the Mena Weekly Star reviewed the terrible scene:
"The bodies of all the victims were broken and mangled and innumerable places. In some cases the entire heads were battered away by the violent contact with trees in the fall to the earth. Medical authorities, however, are of the opinion that life was extinct as a result of the terrific force of the whirling auction of the tornado before the final crash came.
So terrible was the power of the storm that none of the eight human beings in the Weems home survived its fury. The little home situated about a mile and a half from the business district at Wickes, was torn asunder and scattered and ever direction. The eight persons in the humble home, a mother, her four daughters, and two sons with a neighbor's boy were caught up in the mighty currents of air and their lives snuffed out in an instant.
Their torn and mutilated bodies were found by searchers later, in the debris of the storm, some far distant from the Weems home. The last body recovered, that of a 10-year-old daughter (Verna) , was located fully a half mile from the scene of the terrible disaster."Â
Among the dead was Sarah , the wife of Robert and mother of all his children. A 17-year-old daughter, Maddie Felts, who had already been widowed at the age of 17, was also visiting in the home when the storm hit and died as well.
Three other daughters, Bella Octavia, 18, Kerren, 15 and Verda, 10, all succumbed to the power of the storm as did two sons, Robert, 21, and Warren, 13.Â
Twenty-one year-old Hawley Felts, the brother-in-law of Maddie, had brought her to the home that day to visit. He was also killed in the tornado.
Several other members of the community nearby the Weems home we're also injured, but all the Polk County deaths that occurred that day we're connected to the Weems family.
The property damage at the Weems home alone was assessed at $2,500. In 2024 dollars that equates to $60,610.55.
The only child of the Weems family that survived the disaster was 25-year-old Velma Williams Bacon, who had married earlier in the year and moved back to Oklahoma. She gave birth to a little girl the next year and named her Bela Octavia in honor of her fallen sister.
Three days after the tragedy, all of the deceased members of the Weems family were buried in a mass grave in the Daniel Cemetery in Wickes.Â
Robert Williams outlived his family about 20 years. Eight years after the tragedy he married Rena Perry in Murray County, Oklahoma. That union produced one son, Thurman Adolphus "Bud" Weems, and the couple remained married until Robert's death in 1937.
To this date, the 1917 storm system remains the most deadly in terms of lives lost in one weather-related incident in Polk County.
