Frost, Texas · What Endures

Part Four of 8

One Foot in the Storm House Door

Here's what the next town over saw that afternoon.

Five miles east, Blooming Grove watched it come. “It was a typical funnel-shaped cloud,” the Blooming Grove Times reported that Friday. It rose and fell, dragged its tail along the ground, and at one point stopped as if it might come their way. “Then it was that our folks watched with one foot in the storm house door.”

In Frost the telephone and telegraph lines were down. A man named Otis Dickson crawled out from under the brick and timber, found the one car in reach that would still start, and drove to Blooming Grove for help. Blooming Grove closed up shop and came running, with its fire truck, spades and shovels. The call to Corsicana went out from Blooming Grove, and three ambulances were on the road within minutes.

The paper kept a list of narrow escapes. Three people rode it out under an oil stove at Heflin-Mitchell's while brick bounced off the top. Half a dozen lay flat beside the jail and lived. More than a dozen made it into a stone ice house. And “as many people as could crowded into the vaults of the two banks and were not injured while the buildings about them fell in.”

Two vaults. In 1930 two banks faced each other across Garitty at Front: Citizens State on one corner, and First National across the street with the Masonic hall upstairs. The 1915 fire-insurance map shows them both. Both buildings still stand. So do both vaults.

By Thursday noon Blooming Grove had raised about $1,800 in cash for its neighbors, not counting the food and clothing.

The whole account is in the field note The vault held.

Some things are built to endure.