Stone Gardens: The New Hope Cemetery in Peggs is the final resting place for dozens of victims from a 1920 tornado
They named the ground New Home Cemetery because that is how places keep a name when the people who planted it are gone. Not for a storm or a headline. For the living who still needed somewhere to put their dead when the map still said Cherokee Nation and the wind had not yet come.
The stones that stand there now do not all speak of the second day of May in 1920. Some are older. Some are later. But a long stretch of them holds the names of the families that the cyclone took in a single night, and the ground remembers the weight of the digging that followed.
The storm first showed itself west of Peggs, tracked for a time by a railroad engineer on the Katy Flyer before it outran him. It skipped and settled again, a mile wide path that tore through the village and beyond, then lifted and dropped once more along the Illinois River.
Houses came apart. The concrete schoolhouse was crushed. Mud and debris filled the air so thick that survivors later found it packed into the bark of trees, hard as concrete and still there years afterward. In one damaged house lay twenty mud-covered bodies. Whole households ended together.
At the Forbes place, the midwife Zella Ford and her small son were killed. In the same wreckage Mary Forbes gave birth to a daughter she named Maudie, sheltered by fallen timbers. Dr. Israel Hill, on his way to help, crossed a field, caught in a barb-wire fence, and did not rise. He was taken to Blue Springs Cemetery. Two Watkins boys went with him. Most of the others came south a mile to New Home.
Deputy Sheriff A. K. Ralston gathered about seventy-five volunteers. They dug with picks and shovels from morning until two the next morning. Eighteen bodies went into the ground in the first twenty-four hours. By the next evening the count at New Home stood at forty-three.
Caskets ran out in Tahlequah and had to be sent for from Muskogee and Pryor. Bodies were hauled on trucks, stacked. A minister from Locust Grove stayed until the last prayer was said.
One large grave held the Stephens family, eleven of them lowered together. Another held eight.
John Madison Littlefield, seventy-one, was buried near Elizabeth Lizzie, thirty, Willie Alexander, nineteen, Jennie E., seventeen, Lue Madison Mattie, fourteen, Soggie Daniel, eleven, and Donald Lee, twelve.
James Jim Henry Franks, forty-three, and Ledona Donie Elizabeth, forty-eight, were laid with sons Monroe, twenty, Virgie, eight, and Leo C., six, who died later of his injuries.
Willie B. Blevins and Gency M., both twenty-three, went in with their three-year-old daughter Helen. James Jim W. Wilkerson, fifty, was buried with several of his children.
Carl Howard Kinyon, thirty-seven, Bertha Mae, thirty-two, and Ruth Mae, ten, rest together. Jack Bond, fourteen. Polly Roxie Hall, eighteen. Vernie Timmons, twelve or thirteen. The names fill the rows.
A man who helped dig later said he pulled a board from the back of Jack Wilkerson’s head.
Another remembered the lightning as the most wicked he had ever seen. Survivors followed half a hundred coffins from a twisted house that served as a morgue through the ruins of the village to the new graves. The total known dead reached fifty-two; the injured numbered more than seventy-five. Fourteen of the worst cases were carried to the Allison hospital in Tahlequah. Peggs itself was left a barren waste.
New Home Cemetery is still in use. The lawn is kept. The stones from that week stand among later ones. Some of the tornado dead have markers that name them. Others are among the unmarked places marked only by native red clay stones.
The families who lost nearly everyone are still named on the ground: Stephens, Littlefield, Franks, Blevins, Wilkerson, Kinyon.
The digging is finished. The wind is long gone. What remains is the quiet of a hillside that took them in when there was nowhere else to go, and that still holds the names of the people the storm did not spare.
