On April 24, 1908, the sky over Purvis went dark for approximately four minutes while the eight-deadliest tornado in United States history tore through the small town in Lamar County, taking the lives of at least 55 citizens and inuring 360 in its wake.
One hundred and sixteen years later, members of the Lamar County Historical Society and other officials held a memorial service last Wednesday at Coal Town Cemetery in Purvis to honor the victims of that F4 storm. In addition, after decades of searching, volunteers were able to find the mass grave where many of those individuals were buried in that cemetery.
“Maybe as much time wasn’t as much time spent honoring them then, because there was just so much to do,” said George Stevens, treasurer of the Lamar County Historical Society. “People didn’t have a house to live in, they were sleeping in tents on the ground, they didn’t have a job – it was just hard times.
“Even more important than that in some ways, we need to know that we’re subject to these tornadoes, and we need to build our buildings – our libraries and our hospitals and schools – to withstand 200-mile-per-hour winds.”
According to the “Hubert Reynolds Interview Account of the Tornado” in the 2002 edition of the Purvis Tornado book, several houses in the center of town were demolished. Some people “were blown away,” whose bodies were found days later, in some instances three or four miles outside of Purvis.
“The dead were loaded on a flat car and shipped to Hattiesburg,” the account states. “Approximately 17 Blacks were killed. They were so badly injured that they could not be identified, so they were buried in a common grave in the community center in the Black section of town.
“The same thing happened at the Coal Town Cemetery. There are some buried out there that are unknown. There are no markers on those graves; the victims were buried in a common trench.”
Several years ago, members of the Lamar County Historical Society placed a memorial at the community cemetery on Martin Luther King Drive in Purvis. In May 2020, historical society member Ernestine Thompson met with Stevens at the cemetery, where Thompson pointed out the area where she thought the graves would be.
“My ancestors are buried (in Coal Town Cemetery) … and when we would come up to funerals with my grandmother, she would show us where the mass grave was,” Thompson said. “She always told us about that, and we had to hear about the tornado.
“She would always talk about how terrible and devastating it was, because she had two brother-in-laws who got killed in the tornado. There were a lot of people they couldn’t recognize, so they took some of the clothes off of some of them, or shoes, hoping that maybe someday, someone would recognize them and know who they were.”
After that meeting, Reggie Ridgway – president of the West Lamar Water Association – and water association employee Kenny Bozeman used a ground-penetrating radar machine to locate the graves. They were able to locate three graves approximately 7 feet wide by 6 feet long, approximately 3 to 4 feet deep.
“We can’t tell how many people are buried (here); all you can tell is that there was a ground disturbance,” Stevens said. “What Mrs. Ernestine told me, and that I didn’t realize, was that they dug the graves with a road grader, pulled by mules.
“So that’s probably why the graves are three to four feet deep, so that kind of makes sense. We were fortunate that we didn’t have to raise money for this project; the Lamar County Board of Supervisors fronted it in its entirety, and I was certainly glad for that.”
The headstones and corner markers for the graves were ordered in June 2022. After supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, American Monument placed the headstones at Coal Town Cemetery in February.
“I’m hoping that in the future, if we learn more, there’ll be a place for (another) stone that goes into detail as to who might be there,” Stevens said. “I’m hoping that one day, that technology might be where ground-penetrating radar might see the remnants of the bones, and that might tell us how many people are here.
“But that’ll be off in the future.”
The 1908 tornado outbreak produced at least 31 tornadoes in 13 states, with a total of at least 324 deaths across that area.
