F2 tornado, Piedmont, MO, February 19, 1888

1. F040 to 72 mph

   Light damage. Surface peeled off some roofs, gutters and siding damaged, branches broken, shallow-rooted trees pushed over.

2. F173 to 112 mph

   Moderate damage. Roofs badly stripped, mobile homes overturned or badly damaged, exterior doors lost, windows broken.

3. F2113 to 157 mphthis tornado

   Considerable damage. Roofs torn off well-built houses, frame homes shifted on their foundations, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, cars lifted off the ground.

4. F3158 to 206 mph

   Severe damage. Whole stories of well-built houses destroyed, large buildings badly damaged, trains overturned, trees debarked, heavy cars lifted and thrown.

5. F4207 to 260 mph

   Devastating damage. Well-built houses leveled, structures with weak foundations moved some distance, cars thrown and large missiles generated.

6. F5261 to 318 mph

   Incredible damage. Strong frame houses swept off their foundations, car-sized missiles thrown more than 100 meters, steel-reinforced concrete badly damaged, high-rise buildings deformed.

7. Unrated

   Grazulis gave no rating: the surviving account records a tornado without enough about the damage to rate it. Almost all of these are before 1880.

Rating

F2, assigned by Grazulis from the accounts

Date

February 19, 1888

Time

2:30 PM CST (20:30 UTC)

Places named

Piedmont, MO

Path length

Not recorded

Path width

200 yards (183 m)

Deaths

Not recorded

Injuries

Not recorded

County today

Wayne County

Point

37.16, -90.68

Record

Tornado Archive TPG2378

The record names one place, so the tornado is drawn as a point there rather than as a path. The counties are today's, and many had other lines, or did not exist, in 1888.

The warnings

The Weather Bureau issued its first public tornado forecasts in 1952. The warning archive this site reads begins in 1986.

The outlook

SPC's archive of convective outlooks begins in 1987.

The radar

Weather radar did not watch storms until after the Second World War. The radar archive this site reads begins in 1991.

The Weather Service's narrative

The Storm Events Database, with its narratives and casualty records, begins in 1950.

A damage survey

The Fujita scale dates from 1971, so no tornado before it was rated at the time. The rating here is Grazulis’s, from the accounts.

A sounding

The upper-air archive this site reads begins in the middle 1940s.

Surface observations

No airport observations within 150 km of the path survive in the archive for those hours.

5 more significant tornadoes are on record that day.

The live radar over the trackEvery 1888 tornado in MissouriEvery tornado in MissouriWarnings in force in Missouri now

Significant tornadoes only

Grazulis listed tornadoes rated F2 or stronger, and weaker ones that killed somebody. Most tornadoes are weaker than F2, so the list holds a fraction of the tornadoes that happened.

The early years are thin

A tornado is on record only where somebody saw it and wrote it down. The count rises through the 1800s with settlement and newspapers, not with the weather.

Rated from accounts

Grazulis rated each tornado decades later from newspaper reports, Weather Bureau records and local histories, not from a damage survey.

The tracks are reconstructed

Tornado Archive drew each path through the places Grazulis names, most often as a straight line from the first to the last. A track can miss a town it hit, and a tornado with one named place is a point. The counties are today’s.

A separate record

SPC’s database, from 1950, counts every confirmed tornado of any strength. The two are kept apart on every page and never added together.

Ratings are Grazulis's, read from written accounts of the damage; the rating scale is above. About the record before 1950 says what it holds and what it leaves out.

Thomas P. Grazulis, Significant Tornadoes 1680-1991 and Significant Tornadoes 1880-1989, as digitized by Tornado Archive (Maas and others, 2024). Public domain. Counties assigned by this site from today’s NWS county lines.