Bangor to Lowell Tornado Eyewitness Accounts:

Bill Alfred

The tornado started near Bangor and crossed Base Line Road, on the east end. It went north of Bloomingdale and hit Ray Imig's house and destroyed that. Ray was in the basement and his wife Lois was on the basement steps. It knocked her into the basement. It completely removed the house and the floor was left with the carpets on it. Lois and Ray survived.

There was an old horse tank in the attic of the house, where the windmill used to bring the water up into the attic for bathing, and so forth. The horse tank was found in a big elm tree near the road. I saw pieces of wheat straw driven into the bark of the trees in the front yard. It went east, down over the hill, and then it went to Eagle Lake and followed the curvature of the lake north. It took out 25 cottages in a row. It destroyed them. Nothing left. About in the middle of those 25, my dad had just finished building a brand new cottage. They had never stayed overnight in it. He had three lots on the lake and was planning on building on two of them. He'd just finished the first one. It picked that new cottage up and took it back up over the hill and trashed it into little pieces. He salvaged the medicine cabinet and a little gas heater. That's all he found of the cottage.

Blanche (Peet) Wilkinson

When the tornado hit, I was living in a house which was east of the city of Allegan and just east of the Allegan County Road Commission, along with my husband, George Peet, and our two oldest children, Mark and Jane Peet. A couple of days before the tornado hit, we had some very unseasonable weather. The day before the tornado it was in the low 70s. On April 3, it was hot, sunny, and quite windy. Our children really enjoyed being able to play outside because they had been confined to the house all winter. Mark had just had his third birthday on March 31 and we celebrated with several family members at our house. In the afternoon I turned on the television and there was an announcement of a tornado watch for our area. I dismissed it since I never remembered having any trouble with tornadoes. During the afternoon, I received a call from the Goodwin Road Construction Company. They were trying to reach my brother, Martin Evans, to have him come back to work. He had been laid off for the winter. My brother lived near South Haven. Just a few days before, they had had an ice storm and his telephone was out of order. So I told them that we would get word to him that he could start work.

When my husband returned home from work I mentioned that we were going to have to drive to South Haven to give my brother the message. His comment was, "we better get going right away because it really looks stormy." I also mentioned that I heard something about tornadoes. So we hurried and ate dinner, then took the children and went out the door to get in the car just as my father-in-law, George Peet Sr., drove in. We told him where we were going and we asked him to ride with us.

On our way to South Haven it started storming very hard. It was also hailing and the hail was large. We had a convertible at the time and my husband, George, told us that when he was stationed in Alabama in the Service they had hail storms that would tear a convertible top to pieces. It stormed very hard, and when we got to my brother's house - where he was living with his in-laws - they told us that my brother and his wife of only three weeks had gone to our house. With the storm being so fierce we started right back to Allegan. It stormed all the way home. Just as we were coming down the hill on Ely Street, we noticed that there were all kinds of emergency vehicles going in the direction of our house. I made the statement that there sure must have been a terrible accident with all of the police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances.

As we got near the Allegan County Road Commission, we were stopped by emergency personnel telling us we could not go any further because there had been a tornado and there were houses all over the road. Of course, we were real upset because we knew that my brother, Mart, and his wife, Dorothy, were at our house. George got out and was going to walk over to the house, but they would not let him because there was a large electric transformer that had been knocked down. So we sat in our car in the parking lot of the County Road Commission. We weren't there very long when my brother's car came weaving out of our yard with them in it.

My sister-in-law was a polio survivor, but ended up completely paralyzed from the disease. They described the storm. When they got to our house, my brother got out of the car to get the key. He knew where we kept it and was going to carry his wife in to the house. He heard the tornado coming, and he said it sounded like a thousand jet airplanes. So he went back to the car, pushed his wife down, and lay on top of her to protect her. They looked out the windshield and saw our garage get blown out of sight. Several times they felt the storm trying to lift the car. The next day, we discovered that the car was not moved because debris and metal from the County Road Commission building blew around the car, holding it down. My father-in-law's truck was picked up by the wind and blown almost into the road. My brother's car had $800 glass and paint damage which, at that time, was a lot of damage.

We always felt that if we had been home, some of us would have lost our lives. At that time, they said you should get to the southwest corner of the basement. Our basement was filled with metal debris that blew in from the Road Commission. In fact, our furnace was cut in half. It looked like an explosion hit our house. It was pushed off the foundation. Only a tree in front of the house kept it from blowing away.

We knew that we had to find a place for all of us to stay. So we turned around and went back to South Haven and took my brother and his wife to his in-laws. My husband, father-in-law and our two children went to my sister's house and stayed for the night. We did stop at a relative's house to let them know that we had survived the storm. My brother-in-law, Paul Peet, had not been told that we weren't home when the tornado hit. He and the Methodist Minister, Rev. Bill Short, were at our house looking for us. They were almost afraid to pick up blankets or anything, because they did not know what they would find.

The next day, we left the children and went to our house to inspect the damage and see if we could salvage anything. We were able to get a few items. The insurance company called the house a complete loss. We had friends helping us the next day. My sister lived near Kalamazoo, and she was frantic because she could not reach us by phone. So when her little girl got out of school she drove to our house to find out if we were okay. When she got to our house the authorities would not let her stop. When she saw the house, she was sure we must have been hurt or killed. She went to the hospital and found out none of us were there. One of our friends had taken us to her house for lunch. So my sister stopped there and when she knocked on the door, I went to the door and she was so relieved that we were okay.

After we worked all day at our house, my father-in-law asked us to go with him to Eagle Lake because he heard there was damage there. When we got there, he found there was not a thing left of his cottage. He lost his truck in our yard and his cottage at Eagle Lake.

I know that storms of this description do disrupt lives. It did ours for quite some time. It caused three moves before we really got settled down. We first moved to Bloomingdale to live in my parent's house. They were in Florida at the time. Later we moved back to Allegan. Our three-year old son was very upset. Every time it stormed he thought our house was going to blow away again. The storm was very upsetting to all of our family and we were not home when it hit. I sure feel for people who have a tornado hit their house and go through the storm plus all of the disruption it causes.

Don Forster

On the night of April 3, 1956, I was in the Allegan County Sherriff's Department when a call came in. The caller said, "I don't know what has happened out here, but buildings are down and power lines are across the road. We need help now." He gave the location as the Allegan County garage on Marshall Street.

I was one of the first officers on the scene. When I got to the area and saw the mass damage, I called for more help. There were several mobile homes behind the Crescent Industries plant. Someone came to me and said there were several injuries there. I found one small child and carried him out to an ambulance. In order to get the injured out I had to step in between several downed power lines. I will never forget the look of the child's face as I carried him out. It looked like his face had been sand blasted. Needless to say, we worked throughout the night looking for more victims and getting Marshall Street opened to traffic.

Matthew Spreitzer

The area where I lived was hit by the tornado that came up through Bloomingdale and the city of Allegan. I was living on 118th Avenue near 24th Street. I was visiting the Don Miner residence, just across the street from where I lived. We were supposed to go to an event in Allegan that evening. Suddenly the power went out. I told Don that I had a flashlight in the car and went out to get it. As soon as I got back inside the house I heard a roaring noise, like a freight train. I went to the dining room at the south part of the house and looked out the window. I saw the bushes along the driveway being blown over at about a 30-degree angle by the wind. Then I heard the windows shattering on the other side of the house. It lasted about 30 seconds. We went outside and noticed that the cement block garage was destroyed, but the barn was intact. I started walking back to my house and we met Mrs. Leslie Miner at the road. She said "We just lost everything." Their house and barns were flattened. Some cows were trapped under the collapsed barn. I went and got a long rope. Using the rope, we were able to rescue about 15 cows. One of them had a broken leg and had to be destroyed. It took about a week before a new barn was put up to house the cattle.

My house lost its roof and the east wall had fallen, but it had fallen so gently that none of the windows even broke. There was a scarf that had been set on the television that was right next to the wall and it was still sitting there. We moved a trailer in and lived there while the house was rebuilt. The house had been a two-story and we cut the second story walls off and converted it to a one story.

Florence Vander Ploeg

We lived on 128th Avenue about three miles east of Hopkinsburg. We moved there the year before. I remember it was very humid that evening. My husband, Gerald, had heard on the television that there were bad storms so he went out to check the weather. He came in from outside and told me to come out and look at the sky. It was dark and stormy but, what was most frightening, was when the lightning would flash, we could see a spout coming down from the clouds to the southwest. It looked like a white tube and was moving from side to side. We had never seen a tornado before, but we knew that this would be a bad storm and my husband told me to get the kids into the basement. We had just gotten 400 baby chicks and we had them in the brooder coop. The door of the coop was open because it had been a warm day and Gerald went to close it while I tried to get the kids to the basement. The storm hit before we got to the basement. Gerald made it back to the house and just got in the door when the wind slammed the door shut against the back of his heels, knocking him down. We went down the basement, but the storm was over. It lasted less than a minute. The power never went out. We came upstairs and looked outside. The brooder coop door was open again. The wind had shifted the coop a couple feet and the door could not be closed because the door frame was bent. One of the windows on the coop was blown in. Gerald went in and lifted up the window and two baby chicks ran out from under it. They had been trapped there. But all of the chicks survived the storm. Other than the brooder coop, we did not have any damage on the farm. The winds must have been strong, though, because it took two tractors to move the coop later on. After the storm, Gerald found some roofing material in the hayfield to the west of our house that originated from somewhere else.

David Dykstra

The 1956 tornado hit our farm at 10398 Finkbeiner Road, about a mile northwest of Middleville. I was 16 at the time. We were very lucky not to have been seriously hurt or killed. It destroyed the barn that my brother and I had been milking cows in just moments before.

It had been a nice day and I recall that we took a ride to Dutton to pick up some lumber earlier that afternoon. When we returned, we started our chores and it was around 8 p.m. when my brother Paul, 13, and I were in the barn milking. It was a large barn, about 46 by 100 feet, with a hip roof and it housed our 60 head of cattle. We took about eight cows at a time to the milking area and we were in there doing the milking, oblivious to the approaching storm. Luckily for us, my father, Henry Dykstra, came out to do some carpentry work that evening and he heard the tornado approaching. He came in the barn and said "Boys, come out here and listen to this." We went outside and heard the roaring noise. It was very dark and we couldn't see anything. None of us had any experience with a tornado before, but we knew that something bad was on the way by the sound. I suggested we take shelter in the barn, but my dad said to make a run for the house instead. So we headed for the house but only got about 50 feet before the wind and debris knocked me and my brother down. Dad grabbed us both with one arm and held onto an electric pole with the other arm as the tornado went through. We were pelted with stones and sticks. We heard a loud crash as the barn was lifted up and set back down, collapsing onto the cows. We could hear the poor cows bellowing under the barn. The top limbs of a big maple tree nearby were ripped off and went sailing over our heads. Sparks were flying from the wires of the electric pole. Then it was over, but we could still hear it moving away. Within a few minutes it started raining very hard.

I had a bump on my head where a rock had hit me, but otherwise we weren't hurt bad. If my dad had not come out there that evening, my brother and I probably would have been crushed by the barn. It landed right where we had been milking and it killed all the cows in the milking area. We were also fortunate that we weren't hit with any large debris. A piece of metal roofing from a barn on the Bumgarner farm to the southwest of us was wrapped around the top of the electric pole that my dad had been holding onto. We lost our barn and a silo, and the chicken coop and hoghouse were damaged. We had no wind insurance. Fortunately, our house wasn't seriously damaged, although most of the windows were blown out. Several cornstalks had been stuck into the plaster of the house by the tornado. There was a gravel road near our house and it was swept clean of every small stone by the wind.

The tornado had come from the southwest and it crossed Green Lake Road. It hit the Bumgarner farm and our farm on Finkbeiner Road. From our place it went on to the northeast and went across Garbow Road where it intersects with Stimpson Road. It did more damage to some farms there and it pulled up a lot very large, hundred-year-old trees by the roots. Then it crossed Parmalee Road near the intersection with Whitneyville Road. It went into Kent County and up towards Alto from there.

Willis Hatch

I was still living in Indiana at the time of the 1956 tornado, but was in the process of moving to a farm I bought in the fall of 1955. It was northeast of Alto on M-50, also known as Alden Nash Avenue. My wife's family owned the farm, which was a centennial farm at the time. It is now a sesquicentennial farm. Ila and Elmer Swanson were there. They were both out in the barn when the tornado came through. It was a T-shaped barn and the east end of the T was blown down. The falling beams killed five of our cattle. A lot of the milk cans were blown around. Elmer was in the milk house and Ila was milking but they were not hurt. Elmer spent a frantic few minutes trying to get out because the doors were stuck. Part of the south end of the roof of the house was lost, and the windmill was bent over by the wind. A lot of trees were blown down or lost limbs. It took a couple days just to clear the yard. It took most of the spring to rebuild everything. We rebuilt the barn with a new pole barn. It was one of the very first pole barns put up in the area.

The tornado came up from the south. It sheared the tops off two silos on the Bill Smith farm on 84th Street, then it came up and hit the Erickson farm on M-50, where the barn was completely knocked down, killing some dairy cows. It followed M-50 north and went a little west, where it blew down a lot of trees just east of Alto. M-50 was closed for a while before all the trees could be cleared. After it hit our place, it went off to the north and northeast and did some roof damage to the Offringa house on 52nd Street. There was also some roof damage to the Wingeier place on Cascade Road, a couple miles south of Lowell.

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