Grove Street

Usually a news story is straight forward, just the facts. Occasionally something occurs that makes you stop in your tracks and wonder if it’s fact or fiction.

The residents along Grove Street had very little warning that a deadly monster of a tornado was about to unleash it’s 140 mile per hour fury in the middle of the night. Most had gone to bed Wednesday evening knowing that two hundred miles to the west the death toll had been heavy along the “Dixie Alley” storm track, but it didn’t include their little hamlet in middle Georgia. None of the old timers could remember a really bad tornado striking Lamar County.

Only a hand full were old enough to remember, and some had been told by their parents about the events of April 6th, 1936. That morning the city of Gainesville, Georgia, 110 miles to the north, awoke to dark threating skies.

A young boy by the name of Elvis Presley, and his mother, had survived a powerful tornado that killed 233 of their neighbors in Tupelo, Mississippi the day before and now the same ominous skies greeted the sunrise in Hall County.

Around 8:30 that morning two tornados descended, one plowing up Atlanta Highway and the other along the Dawsonville Highway. The two merged into one deadly twister that killed 203 and left 40 that were never accounted for after some of the destroyed buildings burned.

The street in Gainesville where, 75 years ago, the two merged to become the deadliest killer in Georgia history……Grove Street.