Marshfield Tornado

A couple of my recent posts concerned the killing of Webster County Sheriff Bertie Brixey in 1914. Another historical episode of note from Webster County is the infamous Marshfield tornado of 1880.
It struck in the early evening of Sunday, April 18, catching most of the townspeople unaware. Some folks living near the town square took shelter in the bottom floor of the courthouse, but some who tried didn't make it that far before the storm hit. Many others were too far away even to try and were left with nowhere to hide.
The twister killed ninety-two Marshfield residents and seriously injured over 150 others. It virtually demolished one side of the square and left the top floor of the courthouse in ruins. About 150 homes and most of the town's businesses were destroyed. In terms of lives lost and damage done, the Marshfield tornado, at the time, was the second worst twister in U. S. history, surpassed only by the 1840 tornado at Natchez, Mississippi.
The same twister that struck Marshfield first touched down in Barry County and continued in a northeasterly direction, killing seven people in Greene County, before reaching Webster County. In addition, several other distinct tornadoes struck the Ozarks on the same day as the Marshfield twister. One of them, for instance, killed five people in rural Morgan County, Missouri, before wiping out the small village of Barnett, where several more people lost their lives.

The Case of Sheriff Bertie Brixey

The Officer Down Memorial Page at www.odmp.org is an interesting website commemorating law officers who have lost their lives in the line of duty. There are several interesting pages at this website about lawmen from the Ozarks region who have been killed in the line of duty. One, in particular, that caught my attention is a page about Bertie Brixey, who was sheriff of Webster County during the early 1910s. According to the Officer Down website, Brixey was killed on November 22, 1914, reportedly by his best friend, whom Brixey was trying to arrest for murder. Later the killer was supposedly lynched by a mob on the Marshfield square. It's fascinating story, if it's true, but so far I've been unable to confirm the more colorful details of the case. Sheriff Brixey was, indeed, killed (in Niangua) on November 22, 1914, but I haven't found anything yet to suggest that the killer was the sheriff's best friend or that he was later lynched on the square at Marshfield. The ODMP is normally pretty accurate, though, and I'm still looking. So, maybe I'll come up with something to confirm the rest of the story.
On a personal note, I've recently learned that my book entitled "Ozarks Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents" should be released by Pelican Publishing within the next couple of months. Covering both the Old West era and the gangster era, the book describes 25 notorious incidents of the Ozarks, starting with Wild Bill Hickok's shootout on the Springfield square immediately after the Civil War and ending with Bill Cook's mass murder of the Mosser family in the mid twentieth century.