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Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Corpus Christi History is published Wednesdays. Murphy Givens also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at givensm@caller.com

Wednesday, September 8, 1999

Visiting teacher survived the 1919 storm

We are approaching the 80th anniversary of the worst disaster in Corpus Christi's history - the great hurricane of 1919 that destroyed so much of the downtown and North Beach and took hundreds of lives. We will never know the true size of that disaster.
   I've read a lot about that storm, but the best accounts were written by two who lived through it, a 37-year-old schoolteacher visiting here from Terrell, Texas, and a 10-year schoolboy whose family lived on North Beach.
   The teacher, Lucy Caldwell, was on vacation and survived the storm in her room in the Nueces Hotel. The youngster on North Beach, Theodore Fuller, lost some of his family and survived by clinging to wooden debris in the storm-tossed seas. Miss Caldwell wrote about her experiences in a letter to her mother after the hurricane. Fuller wrote about his brush with death in a book titled "When the Century and I Were Young.''

   By daylight on Sunday morning, Sept. 14, Lucy wrote that the rain was falling so thick you hardly see across the street. "When I say that water was hurled, I mean it literally, for the wind threw the water of the bay exactly as you would dash a bucket of water on to a fire.''
   By 10 a.m., no trains were leaving, the phones were out and the lights had ceased to work.
   "Although warned to keep away from the windows in the hotel,'' she wrote, "we saw that the wires were all down, telephone poles were all gone, not a bathhouse in sight, not a fishing pier, the garage near the hotel was gone, with 60 cars in the bay, the concrete service station was gone, also the dancing pavilion and bowling alley. All the timber . . . of which these buildings were constructed was piled in front of the Nueces Hotel.''
   The windows in her room on the third floor came crashing in and the wind-driven rain soaked her room.
   "Still the storm raged and still the refugees came, and still we wept for them. At 6 o'clock the storm started with greater fury and by 8 o'clock we were a mass of human beings imprisoned in the hotel without a drop of water . . . and without light, except for matches, the most of which refused to strike.''
   At the height of the storm's fury, from 10 a.m. until 2:30 p.m., she wrote, the water on Chaparral was over 10 feet deep, and in the hotel lobby it stood even with the top of the desk. Floating in the lobby were lumber, beds, baby buggies, portions of boats and clothing.
   "By the middle of the afternoon, the proprietor and assistants of the hotel were in their bathing suits . . . They spent the entire night in the water of the lobby diving to make sure that no bodies were in the water."
   Lucy and other guests spent the night huddled on the floor in the halls "like Belgian refugees,'' with no light except for the brief flare of struck matches.
   "What a sickening sight Monday morning. The water was still two feet in the lobby and several feet in the street. The beach . . . was a solid mass of wreckage, consisting of houses, cars, boats, street cars, railroad track, horses, cows, seagulls - in fact, everything which once occupied the beach. I am truly thankful that I was imprisoned in the hotel and did not see the human bodies in the wreckage.
   "Monday morning about 10 o'clock Maj. McCann . . . who was a guest in the hotel, collected a party of men, waded the water to the bluff and returned with buckets of water, bread, cheese, canned goods and cookies from grocers in that portion of the city. So we all revived a little from our long fast.
   "All day the refugees poured in . . . And oh, the shrieking and hysteria . . . as the bodies were brought in. All this time the rain was pouring - in fact, it rained the larger part of five days following the storm. And the odor cannot be described . . . slime, mud, dead horses along the beach, decayed fruits and vegetables, burst sewers, wet lumber, molded dry goods, and burst oil tanks. The streets were so slippery from the slime [that] men made walking sticks of the wrecked lumber for women in the hotel to support themselves with.''
   Miss Caldwell wrote that there was not another casket in the city available after the storm and that the courthouse lawn was turned into a carpenter's shop for making rough wooden coffins.
   "I saw men whose hands were absolutely minus the outer skin due to constant washing in disinfectants for protection from handling dead bodies. The morgue became so foul and congested that after the third day the bodies were taken immediately after a short attempt at identification . . . and buried in trenches in the pouring rain.''
   She wrote that if there were any compensation for the terrible experiences of the storm, "it is my adoration of the Red Cross. I should almost like to say my worship of the organization, for my regard for them reaches the state of reverence . . . They worked night and day. Under the leadership of Maj. McCann . . . the local Red Cross collected every bit of available food and clothing in Corpus Christi and distributed to the suffering. I saw Maj. McCann at the railway station with a handbag of money, distributing funds to refugees - taking no receipts and asking no questions.''
   On Friday, Miss Lucy Caldwell was able to leave on the first train from the area to San Antonio. When the train stopped at Sinton, she wrote, she received a telegram from her mother.
   "As a result of the awful experiences of the preceding days, my nervers werfe in a somewhat shattered condition. Consequently, on receiving my first assurance from you that you had heard from me, I broke down completely in the Western Union office. But as there were seven coffins containing the bodies of victims from Port Aransas, awaiting identification, and as the depot was full of pitiful refugees, no note was taken of me at all.''

For the full text of Lucy Caldwell's letter, complete with photographs, click here.

   (This is the first of two columns on the great hurricane of 1919. Next Wednesday's column will focus on the story of 10-year-old Theodore Fuller. The storm surge washed him into the bay, but he survived to write his personal account of the worst tragedy in Corpus Christi's history.)