1900 Storm in Galveston for September 28, 2008 By Carol Taylor [email protected]

I spent last weekend glued to the television screen watching Hurricane Ike reign terror and destruction on Galveston Island. I did some research a few years ago about the

1900 Storm that hit Galveston on September 7 and 8 of that year. Much of what I saw on television looked and sounded like pictures and stories I saw in my research. We have a good collection of books relating to the storm here at the W. Walworth Harrison Public

Library. Many are located in the Northeast Genealogy and History Center and cannot be checked out due to their age and fragile condition.

The earliest book we own is Galveston in Nineteen Hundred: the Authorized and

Official Record of the Proud City of the Southwest as it was Before and After the

Hurricane of September 8, and a Logical Forecast of its Future edited by Clarence

Ousley of the Galveston Tribune. Many historians believe this is the best account of the storm, written immediately afterwards with profits benefiting the public schools. In it,

Ousley has a list of 4,293 persons who died in the storm. Yet the complete death toll will never be known.

About the same time Murat Halstead, author and journalist from , wrote

Galveston: the Horrors of a Stricken City. Halstead arrived on the scene after the storm.

He did focus on the relief that came from all over the country and reached the island as early as the following Wednesday, September 12.

Dr. Isaac Cline was the officer in charge of the Weather Bureau in Galveston at the time. His brother, Dr. Joseph Cline, was a weather observer in the same office. At that time, news did not have the immediacy that it has today. Local weather reports were unheard of; all weather news came from Washington, D. C. Even the use of the word

“hurricane” was forbidden. As soon as Isaac Cline realized the imminent danger, he took his horse and buggy to warn the residents nearest the Gulf of . Remember there was no seawall in Galveston in 1900. Later Joseph joined his brother to spread the alarm.

Isaac Cline lost his wife in the storm but he and his brother saved Isaac’s three daughters plus another little girl about six years old. Joseph and two of the girls were floating on a plank when Joseph thought one of the girls slipped into the churning water. He picked up a little girl whom he assumed to be his niece; but quickly discovered he had an extra child on the board. All three girls clung to safety with Joseph while Isaac held tightly to the other daughter.

Both of the Clines wrote autobiographies that included first hand material of the storm. The library only has Dr. Joseph Cline’s book, When the Heavens Frowned. Other exceptional works include Death from the Sea: Our Greatest Natural Disaster the

Galveston Hurricane of 1900 by Herbert Molloy Mason, Jr. in 1972, and Through a

Night of Horrors: Voices from the 1900 Galveston Storm edited by Casey Edward Greene and Shelly Henley Kelly, archivists at the Rosenberg Library in Galveston. Greene and

Kelly compiled their book to celebrate the 100th anniversary of one of the worst disasters in history. This book does circulate.

Ironically, the 1904 statue “Victims of the Galveston Flood”, sculpted by San

Antonio artist Pompeo Coppini, has been reported destroyed by Hurricane Ike. It was placed along the seawall as a symbol of hope that the 1900 devastation would never occur again. One Galvestonian commented at the end of 1900 that after the Storm, “Galveston was never the same again.” No longer was it a gentile Victorian city by the sea. What will Galveston residents say about Ike?