SIDNEY, Texas-It was one serious storm. It would have been difficult for anyone at the May 26 Gustine Junior Rodeo to ignore the lightning. The closer that storm got, the faster those bolts came.
In the end, it was mostly a rain event for Gustine. Twenty miles west in Sidney, however, it was quite a different story.
David Ward lives two miles west of Sidney and is the secretary-treasurer of the Pendergrass Cemetery Association. Like many folks in the area, he wasn't aware a tornado had come through until the following day.
"When the tornado got all those trees at the Gibsons' house, it got the power lines and everyone was out of electricity," he told the Abilene Reporter-News. "From that point on, we didn't know until people started calling. My brother called me from Stanton to ask me where the tornado hit."
It wasn't until that afternoon that he knew the cemetery had taken the brunt of the storm.
The first interment was five years earlier, however, after Pendergrass offered a plot of his land to bury a stranger whose body had been found nearby. Shortly after, he moved the graves of two of his grandchildren from another tract when he sold it.
After he died, his widow Emaline donated a second acre. In 1975 the marker noted 525 graves in the cemetery, with the Pendergrass family included in that tally.
It's impossible to know how many storms the cemetery has endured in a century's time, but it's for certain this year's won't be forgotten.
Massive live oak trees marked the property. Ward said they were estimated to be 300 years old. Some of those trees weathered the storm, but others weren't so lucky.
"We have got a big mess. Boy, look at all these beautiful trees, just demolished," Ward said when I visited in early June. "The first time you walk through it, your heart just kind of sinks and you think, 'Good gosh. I don't know if we'll ever get all this put back or not.'"
An EF-0 is the weakest rating for a tornado. But with 80-mph winds, even that was an impressive display of nature's power.
"You can tell, it looks like it just twisted the tops of the trees off, like you would a bottle cap," said Caroline Pinkard. She and her husband, Richard, live nearby. The cemetery is home to the remains of his brother, parents and grandparents. Caroline was part of a genealogy group that had cataloged the cemetery's graves three years earlier.
One tree had been pulled straight out of the ground, its root ball hanging over the gravestones that had sat before it. They sat on the edge of a gaping 3-foot hole, but thankfully there was nothing poking out of the soil except rocks. Tiny leaves were beginning to bud out from the roots left behind when the tree toppled.
"Unbelievable, isn't it, that kind of power? But it sure happened," Ward said.
He pointed to some of the markers pushed down by the twister.
"And then those huge stones that just got rolled over, that one over there probably weighs 600 pounds," he said. "Three of us have tried to budge some of them, and there ain't any way."
Other limbs had fallen on markers. A few were broken and many were knocked over. Ward said they have someone in mind to fix those, but for now it's just down to chopping wood.
They've had one work day already. I returned last week to check up on the cemetery, and many of the limbs had been cut and a large portion of the debris cleared out. They've got another work day scheduled for the morning of July 9. The big job will be tackling the 5-foot-wide root ball.
"We're going to try to get as much of the caliche and dirt out of it as we can," Ward said. "We'll have to get a crane or something to try to lift it out."
The storm came on a Thursday, right before Memorial Day weekend. Ward and some friends were going to put out flags for the veterans in the cemetery. Disheartened, they talked about maybe not placing the flags this year. The place looked
a wreck.
Thinking about what to do, Ward talked it over with his wife, Kay. For her, the answer was fairly
simple.
"Let's go put them out," she said. "Some of those veterans went through a lot more than a tornado."