The Great Pickens County Hailstorm of 1928

On this date in 1928, a 45 minute long barrage of hen’s egg to baseball sized hail struck Pickens County around 9 a.m.

According to historical reports, many head of livestock were killed and the hail piled so deep in ditches that some of it did not melt for weeks.

In fact, homemade ice cream was made using the frozen hail that was still piled up in ditches on the Fourth of July!

Pine trees were completely stripped of their needles and stands of the trees looked like there had been a forest fire after the storm.

The storm impacted areas from Aliceville to Gordo. Areas north of Gordo near the Fayette County line were hardest hit. The storm knocked windows out of the Pickens County Courthouse as it grazed the town of Carrollton, but a curiosity that has “haunted” Alabama schoolchildren for decades was preserved.

In 1878 a man named Henry Wells, wrongly accused of burning down the former courthouse, was being held in the new courthouse when lightning struck the building. Legend has it that an image of Wells’ face was etched in a pane of glass. The pane reportedly survived the great hailstorm.

And the legend gets even bigger. Any time the pane was replaced through the years, the ghostly image reportedly came back!

(Many thanks to Melba Moss from the First National Bank of Central Alabama, who invited me to speak to the Gordo Rotary Club on Wednesday, April 24th. She gave me the article about the hailstorm.)

Category: Alabama's Weather, Met 101/Weather History