Appalachian History Series – The 1890 Wilkes-Barre Cyclone: The Tornado That Tore Through the Wyoming Valley
On the evening of August 19, 1890, the sky over the Wyoming Valley turned black.
Wilkes-Barre was a coal and railroad city, crowded with houses, churches, factories, rail yards, breweries, mills, and mine works. The Susquehanna River curved through the valley below the mountains, and the city’s working neighborhoods stood close to the tracks and industrial buildings that fed the anthracite economy. By the census year of 1890, Wilkes-Barre had grown into one of Pennsylvania’s important urban centers, with nearly 38,000 people living inside the city.
Then, around the supper hour, a storm came up the river.
Many newspapers of the time called it a cyclone. Today it would be called a tornado. The name has changed, but the destruction has not. In less than an hour, the storm carved through Luzerne County, tore into South Wilkes-Barre, crossed streets lined with homes and businesses, wrecked railroad property, damaged coal operations, killed at least sixteen people in the city, and left hundreds of families staring at broken walls, open roofs, and blocked streets.
The 1890 Wilkes-Barre cyclone became one of the deadliest tornadoes in Pennsylvania history. It was also one of the clearest reminders that Appalachia’s industrial valleys were vulnerable not only to mine disasters, floods, fires, and labor violence, but also to sudden storms that could descend without warning.
A Storm Remembered as a Cyclone
Modern readers may miss the story if they search only for “tornado.” In 1890, many newspapers and official reports used “cyclone” for violent rotating storms. The Wilkes-Barre event appears under both names, and the older wording matters because it is the term used by many of the people who saw the destruction.
The best early study of the storm was written by Thomas Patterson Santee, a Wilkes-Barre educator and careful local observer. His Notes on the Tornado of August 19, 1890, in Luzerne and Columbia Counties was read before the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society on December 12, 1890, only a few months after the disaster. It was published in Wilkes-Barre in 1891 and included a map of the storm track.
Santee did not write as a distant historian. He gathered testimony while the damage was still fresh. Later local historians noted that he collected statements from many witnesses and tried to trace the storm by the marks it left on trees, buildings, fields, and streets. His work remains the essential starting point for understanding the Wilkes-Barre cyclone.
The U.S. Signal Service also recorded the event in the Monthly Weather Review for August 1890. One related item, “The Wyoming Tornado,” described the storm as becoming intensely black as it struck South Wilkes-Barre. The language fits what witnesses across the valley remembered. They saw not simply wind and rain, but a dark, violent, rotating mass moving into the city.
The Tornado Before Wilkes-Barre
The Wilkes-Barre tornado was not the only violent storm in northeastern Pennsylvania that day. Modern tornado historians separate the Wilkes-Barre tornado from another destructive storm that moved from Columbia County into Luzerne County near Rohrsburg and Silkworth. Thomas P. Grazulis, in Significant Tornadoes 1680 to 1991, listed several intense Pennsylvania tornadoes for August 19, 1890, including the Wilkes-Barre event.
The Wilkes-Barre storm appears to have started west of Nanticoke. Santee’s notes described the first signs as scattered but recognizable. A gust passed through Nanticoke, dust and light objects rose in a whirlwind, and a large maple tree was blown down near the east end of the Nanticoke Bridge.
From there, the storm followed the Susquehanna River valley eastward. At first its path was not always continuous. In some places it marked trees and fields. In others, it left little clear evidence. Then the damage became stronger near Hanover Green and Butzbach’s Landing. The storm turned toward Wilkes-Barre.
By the time it entered South Wilkes-Barre, it had become a dangerous tornado.
Into South Wilkes-Barre
The National Weather Service reconstruction places the tornado’s entrance into South Wilkes-Barre around 5:30 p.m., moving along the line of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad. The path was around one hundred yards wide as it came in, then widened as it moved deeper into the city.
Bradsby’s 1893 History of Luzerne County described the route in local terms. The storm struck Main Street near its southern end, swept northward toward Wood Street, widened, and hit Franklin Street and the lower end of Dana Place. Santee’s route and later summaries show the tornado turning and curving through the city rather than following a simple straight line.
Trees, fences, and buildings were wrecked between Main and Franklin streets from Wood to Academy. At Academy Street the storm turned east, crossed toward the German Catholic Church on Washington Street, and continued toward the Lehigh Valley Depot. From there it turned north along the railroads toward Five Points.
The path explains why the destruction was so severe. The tornado did not remain in open fields. It cut into the industrial and working heart of Wilkes-Barre. It struck homes, factories, railroad property, churches, hotels, shops, and coal-related buildings in rapid succession.
Railroads, Factories, and Falling Walls
A same-day dispatch quoted by the National Weather Service called it the worst cyclone the locality had experienced. It described houses unroofed or demolished, passenger trains and locomotives blown over, and brick buildings with their upper stories torn away or leveled.
Newspaper reprints from August 1890 add more detail. One report described the city around the depots as showing some of the worst damage. Passenger and freight cars were lifted from the tracks and laid on their sides. The report noted that other cars were pushed along by the storm’s swirl, giving readers a sense of the wind’s force.
The Hazard Wire Rope Works became one of the disaster’s most tragic scenes. The storm badly damaged the building, leaving dead and injured workers in the debris. Contemporary reports and later tornado summaries identify the works as one of the places where several men were killed.
The Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse was destroyed. The Kytle Planing Mill suffered a deadly collapse when a large stack fell. Stegmaier’s Brewery was damaged severely enough that two men were reported killed there. A brick business building on Market Street was leveled. South Main Street, Hazle Street, Canal Street, Cinderella Street, Washington Street, Fell Street, Northampton Street, and the railroad district all appear in the old damage trail.
The tornado was not just a weather event. It was an industrial disaster unfolding above ground.
The Coal Works in the Path
The cyclone also struck the anthracite industry directly.
The Pennsylvania mine inspection report for 1890 included a section titled “Collieries Damaged by a Cyclone.” It stated that the cyclone passed over Wilkes-Barre around 5:45 p.m. on August 19, wrecking about two hundred buildings and two coal breakers. The same report said seventeen persons were killed or died soon after from their injuries, and about two hundred others were more or less injured. Its total damage estimate was about half a million dollars.
Two breakers lay in the storm’s path. At the Hollenback breaker, the tower over the shaft was driven several feet out of line, the roof was torn from the fan engine, windows were broken, and the building was twisted in places. Workmen underground had to be brought up with difficulty, but they escaped injury.
The Hillman Vein Colliery suffered even worse damage. The tower supporting the sheaves over the shaft was blown down, sending the cages into the shaft. Steam pipes for the fan were broken, stopping ventilation. The danger was heightened because a fire was burning in one of the mine’s gassy gangways at the time. Men worked to fight the fire until conditions became too dangerous.
That detail gives the Wilkes-Barre cyclone a distinctly Appalachian industrial character. The storm did not only knock down houses and churches. It threatened men underground by disabling the surface machinery that kept air moving through the mines.
Five Points and the Human Toll
The Five Points section became one of the most devastated parts of the city.
The tornado moved through neighborhoods where families lived close together in frame houses. Some houses were unroofed. Others were destroyed outright. In the Scott and Kidder Street area, later summaries describe every home as either unroofed or destroyed, with some houses swept from their foundations or thrown over almost intact.
One contemporary report described mothers with children in their arms crying for help while their houses fell around them. The homes of the McGinley and Halegan families were among those reduced to ruin. The report named Mrs. Eliza Jane McGinley, her infant, and her son John among the dead, and said another child, Mary Jane McGinley, had been terribly injured.
The list of dead and injured shifted in the early reports, as it often did after nineteenth-century disasters. Telegraph wires were down. Streets were blocked. Darkness came quickly. Some victims were taken to hospitals. Others were trapped in ruins. Nearby towns also reported storm damage, making it difficult for newspapers to separate confirmed deaths in Wilkes-Barre from rumors and reports elsewhere in the valley.
Modern National Weather Service figures give sixteen deaths in the city, fifteen serious injuries, thirty-five slight injuries, 260 damaged buildings, and an estimated 240,000 dollars in damage. Other sources, including the mine inspection report and later local memory, preserve slightly different numbers. The Evening News of Wilkes-Barre, as later remembered in a Times Leader “Look Back” piece, was associated with a higher tradition of twenty-seven deaths.
The safest conclusion is that the confirmed Wilkes-Barre death toll was at least sixteen, while contemporary reporting and local memory sometimes counted the broader disaster differently.
Churches, Hotels, and Streets of Rubble
Churches were among the landmarks damaged in the storm.
St. Mary’s Church was heavily damaged, with part of the rear of the church blown away. St. Nicholas Church lost much of its stone facade. Helfrick’s Hotel had a large hole punched through a side wall. Other buildings nearby were unroofed, twisted, or opened to the weather.
The damage photographs later preserved by local collections show why the event stayed in memory. They include ruined churches, leveled buildings, the destroyed roundhouse, and streets filled with debris. TornadoTalk’s modern summary lists several of these images through Wilkes-Barre City History and Luzerne County Historical Society related collections, including St. Mary’s Church and the destroyed roundhouse.
For a city that depended on railroads, mines, and dense working neighborhoods, the aftermath was paralyzing. Streets were blocked. Rail property was damaged. Communication lines were down. Families searched through wreckage for the missing. Workers tried to secure factories and collieries. The rain that followed added to the misery, soaking exposed homes and goods.
The cyclone left Wilkes-Barre looking like parts of the city had been shelled.
Out of the City
After passing through the main damaged district, the tornado moved out of Wilkes-Barre.
Santee wrote that after leaving the city the storm did no serious damage because its track passed through a wooded region. It touched at Mountain Park, crossed Laurel Run, moved over the north end of Indian Hill, crossed John P. Lawler’s farm, and continued toward the northern side of Bald Mountain. There it became diffused and left no distinct marks of its course.
That ending is almost quiet compared to what came before. The storm that had torn through streets, factories, churches, and rail yards faded into woods and mountain land east of the city.
But in Wilkes-Barre, the work of recovery was only beginning.
Why This Tornado Matters
The 1890 Wilkes-Barre cyclone matters because it sits at the crossing point of weather history, industrial history, and Appalachian community history.
It reminds us that northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region was not just a place of mines and strikes. It was also a landscape of steep valleys, rivers, rail corridors, crowded neighborhoods, and fast-changing weather. The same geography that made Wilkes-Barre an industrial center also funneled people, tracks, factories, and homes into narrow spaces where disaster could spread quickly.
The tornado also shows the value of local historical work. Without Santee’s careful paper before the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, much of the route and testimony would be harder to reconstruct. Without mine inspection reports, we might miss how the storm threatened workers underground. Without newspaper accounts, we would lose the voices of the first stunned reports from the ruined city. Without modern National Weather Service and tornado-history research, we would have a less precise understanding of the storm’s path, rating, and place in Pennsylvania tornado history.
The people of Wilkes-Barre called it a cyclone. Later researchers called it an F3 tornado. Both names point to the same moment, when a black rotating storm came up the Wyoming Valley and tore through one of Appalachia’s great coal cities.
On August 19, 1890, the wind wrote itself into Wilkes-Barre’s history.
Sources & Further Reading
Santee, Thomas Patterson. Notes on the Tornado of August 19, 1890, in Luzerne and Columbia Counties: A Paper Read before the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, December 12, 1890. Wilkes-Barré, PA, 1891. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100495013
Santee, Thomas Patterson. Notes on the Tornado of August 19, 1890, in Luzerne and Columbia Counties: A Paper Read before the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, December 12, 1890. Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?id=YCA-eSTwKDwC
United States Signal Service. Monthly Weather Review 18, no. 8. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief Signal Officer, August 1890. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/18/8/1520-0493_1890_18_197a_i_2_0_co_2.pdf
“The Wyoming Tornado.” Monthly Weather Review 18, no. 8. August 1890. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/18/8/1520-0493_1890_18_208_w_2_0_co_2.pdf
Pennsylvania Mine Inspection. “Collieries Damaged by a Cyclone.” In Reports of the Inspectors of Mines, Fourth Anthracite District, 1890. https://www.northernfield.info/Collieries/Hillman%20Vein/G%20Inspector%20Narratives.pdf
Bradsby, Henry C., ed. History of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania: With Biographical Selections. Chicago: S. B. Nelson, 1893. https://archive.org/details/historyofluzerne00brad
Bradsby, Henry C., ed. History of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania: With Biographical Selections. Google Books. https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_Luzerne_County_Pennsylvania.html?id=4BkVAAAAYAAJ
Harvey, Oscar Jewell, and Ernest Gray Smith. A History of Wilkes-Barré, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Vol. 4. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Raeder Press, 1929. https://archive.org/stream/historyofwilkesb04harv/historyofwilkesb04harv_djvu.txt
National Weather Service Binghamton. “Tornadoes August 19, 1890.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.weather.gov/bgm/tornadoaugust191890
TornadoTalk. “Luzerne County, PA Tornadoes, August 19, 1890.” August 14, 2020. https://www.tornadotalk.com/luzerne-county-pa-tornadoes-august-19-1890/
Grazulis, Thomas P. Significant Tornadoes 1680–1991: A Chronology and Analysis of Events. St. Johnsbury, VT: The Tornado Project of Environmental Films, 1993. https://www.worldcat.org/title/30894589
Times Leader. “Look Back: Cyclone Struck Wyoming Valley in 1890, Killing 27.” Times Leader, August 12, 2019. https://archive.timesleader.com/article/752242/look-back-cyclone-struck-wyoming-valley-in-1890-killing-27
Cappucci, Matthew. “Striking in the Dark of Night, the Wilkes-Barre Tornado Was a Freak.” Washington Post, June 15, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/06/15/striking-in-the-dark-of-night-the-wilkes-barre-tornado-was-strangely-strong/
The Wilkes-Barre News. “The Wilkes-Barre Cyclone.” August 20, 1890. Newspapers.com clipping cited by TornadoTalk. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/57201479/
Beitler, Stu. “Wilkes-Barre, PA Tornado, Aug 1890: Another Deadly Cyclone.” GenDisasters, October 23, 2007. https://www.gendisasters.com/pennsylvania/2210/wilkes-barre-pa-tornado-aug-1890
Luzerne County Historical Society. “Research Sources.” https://luzernehistory.org/research-sources/
Luzerne County Historical Society. “Research Services.” https://luzernehistory.org/research-services/
State Library of Pennsylvania. “Pennsylvania Newspapers.” https://digitalcollections.statelibrary.pa.gov/pennsylvania-newspapers
Penn State University Libraries. “Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive.” https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/digital-newspapers/pennsylvania-newspaper-archive
Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive. https://panewsarchive.psu.edu/
Wilkes-Barre Record Almanac. Wilkes-Barre, PA: Wilkes-Barre Publishing Company. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/wilkesbarrerecor00wilk_0
Author Note: This story is built from Santee’s near-contemporary tornado study, weather records, mine inspection reports, newspapers, and later local histories. The death toll varies across sources, so this article follows the strongest confirmed figures while noting the higher numbers preserved in local memory.