Clay County, IN Tornado 1834

The first cyclone known to have ravaged Clay county territory within the recollection of surviving pioneers was that of 1834, which swept an area of timber in the southwest part of Posey township, along the headwaters of Honey Creek, where it is said to have dipped into the heavily timbered native forest, twisting about, uprooting and felling trees promiscuously, then lifting and passing on eastward at an elevation above the dangerline, the damage having been confined to the locality named. The center of the storm's fury was a tract of land which had been purchased by Dickinson Wyatt, then still residing in southern Ohio, who emigrated to this county in 1835. Alfred Wyatt, residing near Cory, relates that he remembers well, though a boy but eight years old at the time, of his father's receiving a letter from Fielding Carter, father of Allen W. Carter, who preceded the Wyatt family to Clay county and then lived on land nearby, giving a description of the havoc wrought by the "hurricane," as then called. The Wyatt place lay between the Ayer place on the east and the Whallon place on the west, with the Rule place on the north. There were no injuries to life attending this storm, for the reason, as stated by Mr. Wyatt, that there was then nobody there to be killed. Henry Rule and Micajah Phillips were the nearest settlers.

A history of Clay County, Indiana : closing of the first century's history of the county, and showing the growth of its people, institutions, industries and wealth, New York: Lewis Pub. Co., 1909, page 385
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