FARGO — The other day, while researching the famous 1975 summer flood , I came across Forum clippings from other old papers. The headline of one caught my attention. The first part read, “Seven children from Fargo family killed by.
..” The rest of the headline was covered up by the other clippings.
Because this was a file folder of storm coverage, I figured the headline was part of a story about the tragic deaths of the Munson children in the 1957 Fargo tornado. But when I shuffled the papers around, the rest of the headline was uncovered: “Seven children from Fargo family killed by 1890 storm.” 1890.
Not 1957. I was shocked to read that 67 years before Gerald and Mercedes Munson buried six of their seven children, another Fargo family had been through an eerily similar tragedy. It began in the early morning hours of July 7, 1890, when “a tempest of wind and rain broke upon Fargo with appalling fury,” according to Roy Johnson, in a retrospective story he wrote for The Forum in 1950.
At 2:30 a.m., the streets were deserted and quiet, Johnson wrote.
”Nothing could be heard but the roar of the wind and the crashing sound of flying debris.” It must have been incredibly frightening for Rose McCarty and her seven children to be awakened by the noise and chaos outside. Some of the older children begged Rose to let them seek shelter in the coal bin under a shed attached to the back of their house, located around Eighth Avenue and First Street North in Fargo, near Mic.
