Angelina County, TX F3 Tornado – December 12, 1928

I could not find information on the “well-known Jones family” mentioned by Grazulis in his book.  He states that the owner was killed in Angelina County. There were several reports from the newspapers at the time of a John Jones, tenant farmer who was killed in Tenaha.  That is in Shelby County.  He lived on the Board Plantation.  His wife and four children were hurt. There was a tornado in Shelby County mentioned in Grazulis’ book.  He gave it a path length of 10 miles and a rating of F2.

I will have to do more research, but there may be only 1 fatality associated with this tornado.

Other details from the December 13, 1928 edition of The Vernon Daily Record:

• The home of Allen Shievers was “blown down on the occupants.”  Shievers along with his wife and children were buried under the debris but escaped with minor injuries.
• J.H. Wideman was another storm victim.  The walls and roof of the room he was in were torn away, “leaving him sitting on a trunk.”

A note about “Sulphur Springs”.  I had to look this up as the only Sulphur Springs I knew about was the one in Hopkins County, TX.  Per the Texas State Historical Association, “Sulphur Springs is on U.S. Highway 69 twenty-four miles southeast of Lufkin in southeastern Angelina County. In the 1930s the settlement was the site of a logging camp, a church, and a number of houses. Many of the residents later left the area, but as late as the 1980s a church and store remained in the vicinity. Though Sulphur Springs was shown on county highway maps in 2000, no population estimates were available.”

I found a “Sulphur Springs Church” on Google Maps.  It is location with a Zavalla address south of town.  I used that to put an approximate location for Sulphur Springs on the track map below.