Gulf Hurricane
This month Hurricane Isaias hit the Florida panhandle and caused widespread damage across Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. This brought to mind another tremendous storm that battered the Gulf Coast one hundred and ten years ago in 1916. In those days, hurricanes were not given names as they are today. And, unlike today, the residents of the region had very little forewarning. I bring up this particular hurricane because at the time my great grandparents lived in Mobile, Alabama, which was the epicenter of the 1916 storm. I heard about it during my childhood from stories that my paternal grandmother—who lived through the event as a young girl—recounted to us.
My great grandfather Walter Keene Linscott was the proprietor and general manager of a lumber and freight company in Mobile known as The Mahogany Lumber & Transportation Company. He started the company in Mexico where he and his family lived for several years, before relocating back to the United States early in the Twentieth Century. The company harvested mahogany wood from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico and sent it to the port of Mobile. They also took soft pine from the American South and exported it to Mexico, where it was in high demand.
By 1916 Walter and his partners had a small fleet of three-masted schooners that plied back and forth across the Gulf of Mexico with cargos of lumber.
The hurricane that struck the Gulf coast on July 5, 1916 arrived with little warning. Forecasting tools then were highly unreliable, not only about the direction of any storm, but also as to its severity. Hurricanes that passed over Cuba or any of the other Caribbean islands could give an idea about the strength of the storm. Unfortunately, the hurricane of 1916 looped south of the major islands before skirting the Yucatan Peninsula and heading north. The Category 3 storm produced sustained winds of over 120 mph and caused a storm surge in Mobile Bay of almost twelve feet. The destruction was immense, and although the death toll was relatively light (34 souls), the property and financial damage was enormous. Walter lost all his beloved schooners, and his business was wiped out. Rather than choosing to rebuild, he and his wife moved back to Holton, Kansas, where he was born.
The 1916 Gulf Hurricane plays a prominent role in my forthcoming novel, Thou Mayest, which is based on the Linscott family’s lives in Mexico and Alabama. The storm also foreshadowed another deadly event that affected the South in 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood, which William Faulkner used as the backdrop to his novel The Wild Palms. His work was a partial inspiration to my forthcoming novel.
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