For three terrifying hours on March 18, 1925, the very worst tornado in American history ripped a mile-wide, 216-mile-long scar into the states of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, but after the stormclouds cleared, the communities had to pull themselves together and go on.

      The Fujita tornado intensity scale rating of this massive March monster was an "incredible" F5, which is the second most damaging rating on the scale; however, a tornado with an F6 rating is "inconceivable" (Grazulis 13). The townspeople of Griffin, Indiana were horrified by the looting of "people from other parts of town" ("they were stealing rings from the dead," recalled Dorothy Potts), but the National Guard was activated and put a stop to the pilfering (Felknor 70). The individuals of the Griffin community and of other middle Mississippi valley communities easily looked beyond the selfish actions of "outsiders" when they focused their sights upon the selfless deeds that they could do for each other at home.
      The victims of the the Tri-State tornado were provided with the following gems of generosity:

• Before any real organizing could be done in Griffin following the tornado, people who owned large houses that weathered the storm took large numbers of people into their homes, fed them, and gave them a place to sleep. The next morning, the newly homeless people would go down the hill to the ruins of the town and try to salvage what possessions they could.

• Trains arrived from Evansville, Indiana and from Illinois in order to transport Griffin's injured to hospitals and to cart supplies into the town. The caboose of the train that the Army bought to Griffin served as a post office.

• Other Indiana towns--New Harmony, Grayville, and Poseyville--also offered assistance to the victims of the tornado.

• People deposited piles of clothes in a De Soto grain elevator so that the essentials would be available for tornado refugees who had lost everything.

• Mary McIntire's father, who lived about two miles southeast of Griffin, dropped his own farm work so that he could pitch in. According to his daughter, he "spent some weeks with his team and wagon helping people take what they could salvage. He'd do anything he could, help 'em out and get their places cleaned up so they could start over again" (Felknor 63).

• Beside the ruins of Griffin's Trinity Baptist Church, the Army soldiers established what was called "Tent City"--a huge field filled with tents, which were erected for the Griffin people to take shelter after the disaster (Felknor 63, 68).

      America Welch had this to say about how relief was funneled into the string of stricken communities: "It was a time of closeness. You just don't realize how humanity can pull together. You just have a sense of sympathy, and of feeling for each other, closeness--and that's what it did. Everybody was concerned about the other person as he was his own self" (Felknor 97).