Lorain: Steel, the Deadliest Tornado in Ohio History, and Toni Morrison

Lorain is a Lake Erie steel town that produced one of the deadliest natural disasters in Ohio history and one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Both stories start with the same city: working class, multiethnic, shaped by the water and the mills.

By the late eighteen hundreds, the discovery of iron ore in Minnesota's Mesabi Range gave Lake Erie port cities like Lorain a reason to industrialize fast. Steel mills and shipyards went up along the waterfront. Workers arrived from Poland, Slovakia, Italy, Greece, and the American South, African American families making the Great Migration northward, finding jobs and neighbors in the same integrated steel-country streets.

On June twenty-eighth, nineteen twenty-four, just after five in the afternoon, a tornado swept directly off Lake Erie into downtown Lorain. It was rated an F-four, the second-most powerful category on the scale that existed at the time. In minutes it demolished nearly one hundred twenty-five city blocks, collapsed a theater with people inside, and killed at least seventy-two people in Lorain alone. Combined with damage in Sandusky to the west, the death toll reached eighty-five. It remains the deadliest single tornado ever recorded in Ohio history.

Seven years later, on February eighteenth, nineteen thirty-one, a girl named Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born in Lorain. Her father was a shipyard welder. The streets outside were racially integrated by economic necessity, workers of different backgrounds living close together because the mills brought them all to the same place.

She grew up, went to Howard University, went to Cornell, became an editor at Random House, and started writing novels. She took the name Toni Morrison. Between nineteen seventy and two thousand-twelve she published ten novels. Her work absorbed the multiracial, working-class, post-migration world she had grown up in, the textures of Black life in American cities and towns, the weight of slavery's aftermath, the specific geography of people who came from somewhere else and made a new place home. In nineteen eighty-eight she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. In nineteen ninety-three she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African American woman to do so. She died in two thousand nineteen.