CHAFFEE, Mo. -- Fifty years ago today, James Stubbs was in his downtown Chaffee jewelry store when a storm he'll never forget ripped through the streets.

When the dust cleared, the new home he was building, his store and his new car were totaled -- part of the more than $1 million in damage caused by the F2 tornado.

There was no warning.

The jewelry store inventory was scattered up and down the nearby railroad tracks. Stubbs' wife Marlene was at the couple's old home at the time, baking Christmas cookies. She heard about the storm when a friend called.

As she surveyed the damage, Marlene said it looked as if someone had chopped the fronts off several downtown buildings with a knife, leaving the insides virtually untouched.

A view down Main Street in Chaffee 50 years after a tornado swept through the town. (Aaron Eisenhauer)

"It wrapped tin around trees a half-mile from downtown," James Stubbs recalled.

The Dec. 18, 1957, tornado is still considered a big event in Chaffee's history. The city's historical society museum has a display with photos and a narrative from Stubbs about the experience.

The storm damaged several well-known downtown businesses and changed the face of the neighborhood.

When things were rebuilt, they weren't the same. Many of the buildings were remnants of Chaffee's days as a bustling commercial center where people got off the Frisco railroad line.

The tornado destroyed or severely damaged several homes. The storm did major damage to the Chaffee Building and Loan Association offices, Finley's Cut-Rate Store, the Elks Lodge and other buildings, according to reports from the time in the Chaffee Signal newspaper. A shoe factory that employed 100 was destroyed.

A view down Main Street in Chaffee after a tornado swept through town 50 years ago.

But no one was killed in Chaffee, and no one was severely injured.

By the time the tornado hit, Chaffee's commercial decline had already begun, said Stubbs, and when those buildings were rebuilt they weren't quite as grand.

"Instead of having two-story buildings, we had one-story buildings," Stubbs said.

Many people living in Chaffee know about the tornado or remember when it hit.

H.B. Rice was only 6 years old at the time, but he remembers the tornado's aftermath clearly. Rice's insurance office sits at the corner of Yoakum Avenue and Main Street, where a two-story building with a hotel upstairs and a department store downstairs used to be. His building is only one story.

Damage at 109 Main Street in Chaffee after a tornado swept through town 50 years ago.

Rice said one of his most vivid memories is of emergency workers finding a mannequin in some rubble at the department store. Initially they thought it was a person, he said.

Sally Wehmeyer, a former mayor, was at home on Third Street just a few blocks away at the time. The windows in the back of her house were blown out by the storm.

"That's the first time I've ever been in anything like that, and I hope it's the last," Wehmeyer said.

Chaffee wasn't the only area town hit that day -- the tornado was only one of several that popped up around the region in a major outbreak. An F5 near Marion, Ill., and Carbondale, Ill., caused deaths, said National Weather Service forecaster Mike York. Other tornadoes were reported in Perry, St. Francois and Cape Girardeau counties in Southeast Missouri, but without as much damage, according to National Weather Service records.

msanders@semissourian.com

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