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Barefoot In The Sand: Remembering the Waning Days of the Hopewell Community (1998) Bruce C. Gragg 95/123

OUR WEATHER PROBLEMS

During the war years, it was not uncommon to hear a big flight of
airplanes, perhaps heading to the European War, flying over. One
stormy day in the spring of 1944, we heard just that familiar sound
above the wind and rain and lighting. When Vera came home from school
she told about a wide area about a half mile north of our house where
a lot of trees were down. A tornado went trough and cleared a path
about 200 yards wide. It twisted and broke the trees about 8-10 feet
above the ground. Russell Carter owned the land and quickly he sent
his timber crew in to salvage all they could for logs to go to his
sawmill. He and Joe Watts, his brother-in-law, had a sawmill just
north of his dads old home place in Ga. on the way to Fargo. We later
learned this storm had left a long trail of destruction as it skipped
up and down in its wake as it headed north east. Mama was not home,
she was working at the Navy Base in Lake City at the time and did
until the war was over and they closed the base. That was probably
the closest we ever came to having a real weather problem in all our
years living there. With all the big trees around the house we were
always concerned when the wind began to blow very hard. We were
always fortunate we never had a tree close to the house hit by
lightning or blown over by high winds. We had some very large trees
near the house and they could have done some heavy damage if blown
over. Mostly the big trees gave room for all kinds of monsters when
the storms blew all around at night. A kid could have his imagination
run wild especially at night, when it was stormy and dark, and a lot
of close by lightening flashing and thunder rumbling.

Hurricanes were always a threat, but we most often got a lot of rain
and some strong wind. During the forties several of the late summer-
fall monsters came close enough to dump a lot of rain. I can remember
going to Fargo and the creeks along the way would be up to the top of
the elevated roadway bed in the floodplain. The Suwannee at Fargo
would be way out of its banks and flooding the lowlands. The bridges
were old wooden ones that were replaced in the late forties or early
fifties with new concrete and steel structures. The wooden bridge
across the river was almost a half mile long and just wide enough for
cars to meet. Then there were not many trucks on the road except
local log or pulpwood trucks. It would create quite a rumble as
traffic crossed it. Today's 1990’s "Big Rig" trucks including the
modern log trucks would have been banned from crossing those bridges.
Highway US 441 through most of that part of Georgia was in very bad
repair. Always big pot holes in patches of pot holes, then pot holes
that never got repaired. When the bridges were replaced they rebuilt
the road, plowed up the old and completely did a new paving job. This
made the trips to Fargo a lot easier and quicker. Fargo and Edith,
were at the very

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