GOLIAD, Texas (Kiii News) — The Coastal Bend is well south of Tornado Alley, but that doesn't mean we haven't had our fair share of twisters over the years. In fact, one hit back in 1902 and devastated the small town of Goliad.
The tornado killed 114 people and left a mark on Goliad that can still be seen to this day.
Most people know about Goliad, Texas, because of the Mexican Army's massacre of Colonel James Fannin and hundreds of his men back in 1836; but there is another huge tragedy that struck the town.
On May 18, 1902, an F-4 tornado touched down in Goliad and killed 114 people. It was one of the deadliest tornado strikes in U.S. history.
"In 1902 the courthouse, the ground floor of the courthouse, became the hospital and the morgue for all the loss of life," Goliad County Judge Pat Calhoun said.
Calhoun showed 3News the path that the deadly twister took across the heart of the town.
"It was just on the other side of the river where the storm started, and came across and destroyed that bridge and worked its way up," Calhoun said.
It left death and destruction in its wake.
"This is where the largest loss of life was, in this church. They were having an afternoon church service and it killed nearly everyone in the church," Calhoun said. "The story was there was a baby ripped out of its mother's arms from here and landed two or three blocks away, under a bush, and was okay; but everyone else was killed."
Calhoun was talking about the United Methodist Church on Fannin Street. 50 people were killed there. Many more deaths soon followed.
"The tornado came right up here, hit the church and destroyed it, and then went straight up Mount Auburn Street and went all the way to the edge of town," Calhoun said.
At the time, the 1902 Goliad tornado was the deadliest twister in Texas history, and there are plenty of reminders of that deadly storm.
For instance, a huge steel railroad girder flung like a spear from a bridge that was destroyed. It bored so far down into the earth that no one was able to pull it out, and it remains in that spot to this day.
"The story was they tried to take a six-mule team and pull that out of the ground after the tornado and couldn't, so they just left it because there may be 30 feet of that thing buried in the ground," Calhoun said. "Nobody knows how deep it is in the ground right there."
Elaine Brackin is a photographer whose family ranch in Goliad is littered with some of that 1902 bridge debris.
"That's one of the reasons my mother doesn't want to sell back the 11 acres of the property, is because of that bridge," Brackin said. "It's a piece of history."
It's also one of the reasons why everyone in Goliad keeps their eyes on the sky in May, a month that can produce some of the most violent storms in the Coastal Bend.
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