In the early hours of June 28, 1924, a major storm passed through Des Moines. Most news reports called it a tornado. If it was, it was the only tornado in recorded history to ever pass directly through the city.

I say “if” because one report described the storm as a series of “violent squalls” similar to the derecho that caused massive damage here on Aug. 10, 2020.

One argument in favor of straight winds, as opposed to a rotating tornado, was that on that night 100 years ago, most of the downed trees and telephone poles fell to the south, indicating wind from the north.

Whatever the storm was, it was the most devastating summer weather event to hit Des Moines until massive floods hit the city in 1993 and the derecho blew through four years ago.

The Des Moines Tribune for June 28, 1924, reported that beginning at 1:22 that morning, winds “lashed the city with a fury that has doubtless never been exceeded here.”

“The tornado struck the city broadside in the early morning hours,” following an “afternoon and evening of extreme sultriness,” the article said.

“For a few minutes, perhaps three, it emitted a hissing noise as of steam escaping from a huge safety exhaust valve. Then it struck with a fierceness equaled only by modern warfare.

“Chimneys fell, automobiles were lifted from their wheels or swept down the streets ahead of it, roofs were torn from buildings and carried sometimes a block and crushed into bits.”

“Almost instantly the city was … plunged into darkness” as trees and telephone poles were uprooted and roofs ripped off.

The devastation came from the north and “followed Forty-sixth Street to Grand Avenue where it turned and went directly east to the city limits,” the Tribune said.

“Behind it left a trail twenty blocks wide of uprooted trees, twisted telephone poles, wrecked homes and broken windows. … On Forty-second Street and Kingman Boulevard trees were uprooted and tangled into a mass of jungle.”

As the winds turned east, they narrowly missed a construction site south of Grand where, a year earlier, cosmetics magnate Carl Weeks had begun a five-year effort to recreate England’s Salisbury House.

Also undamaged was the newly completed 19-story Equitable Building in the city center, although there were reports of “branches, pieces of signs, boxes and bushel baskets … whizzing by the dome” more than 300 feet above street level.  

Several properties on Grand Avenue were not so fortunate, including the grounds of Terrace Hill, a home built in 1869 that is now the Iowa’s governor’s mansion.

The home of D.S. Chamberlain, built in 1903, lost its roof. Chamberlain manufactured patent medicines, including cough syrups, liniments and hand lotions. His home later became the headquarters of WesleyLife, Iowa’s largest nonprofit provider of services and care for older adults. Now a part of the Wesley on Grand campus, the Chamberlain Mansion — named to the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s — is open to the public as a pub and bed-and-breakfast.

Despite the ferocity of the 1924 storm, it was soon forgotten — possibly because, unlike simultaneous storms in Ohio and Illinois, there were no deaths here. Only six injuries were reported in Des Moines, while 109 fatalities were recorded in Ohio and eight deaths attributed to a storm in Peoria, Ill.

Looking back a century later, it is worth noting that with the possible exception of the 1924 storm, Des Moines has never suffered a direct hit from a tornado. Many have gone around Des Moines, causing damage in Johnston, Ankeny and Bondurant; as recently as two months ago, a twister ripped through Pleasant Hill. 

But never Des Moines. The worst wind damage suffered in Des Moines was from the 2020 derecho, which also flattened 10 million acres of crops worth $3.7 billion, with residential damage totaling nearly $90 million.

Tornadoes, it appears, don’t touch Des Moines. Over the years, several theories have been put forward, including the fact that Des Moines sits at the conjunction of two major rivers, which some argue result in temperature variations that repel or divert tornadoes. 

If that’s true, it does not work for straight-line winds.