Camanche: The Tornado That Made National News in 1860

On June third, eighteen sixty, a tornado descended on Camanche with almost no warning and leveled the town in minutes. Of the roughly three hundred fifty houses standing that afternoon, fewer than fifty were left upright. Camanche was a river town of about twelve hundred people, and the windstorm lasted about two minutes. A raft carrying twenty-six men was hit outside town, and only three on board survived. At least forty one people were killed in Camanche alone. The storm then crossed the Mississippi River and struck the Illinois town of Albany, drowning those it had swept up.

The scale of the disaster drew national attention. A correspondent from Harper's Illustrated traveled here to sketch the wreckage, and the images were published across the country. Relief funds poured in from cities and towns that had never heard of Camanche before. Bodies were laid out on the counters of a vacant store, and twenty-five coffins lined the sidewalk in front of Dunning's Bank. Survivors dug a hundred graves. The town had been laid out in eighteen thirty-six by Doctor George Peck, who platted thirty-two hundred lots and walked to Lake Michigan to sell them to Chicagoans. The town rebuilt, but the tornado remained its defining event in the public memory. Settled in eighteen thirty-seven, Camanche today is a small Clinton County city along the river, quietly carrying the memory of a single afternoon that briefly made it the most famous small town in America.