'It's going to be different': Mayfield survivors trace tornado's path on first anniversary
The grain silo still looks like it was punched in, but the water tower that the tornado ripped out of the ground has been removed and even replaced.
As I walked with 200 people on the first anniversary of the deadly storm, we followed the two-mile path the tornado traveled between the factory and what was once a charming downtown. In between steps, Al Chandler, the chairman of the Long-Term Recovery Group, filled in the gaps the tornado had left behind.
One patch of land was once a gas station.
The next was an old radiator shop.
Chandler didn’t need to tell me the names of the people who were lost. Each time I turned I spotted memorials to them on a new T-shirt. The memories of Jill Monroe, Kayla Smith, Devin Burton and so many others were just as present on this damp December morning as the people who’d come to remember them.
One year ago this weekend deadly tornadoes ravaged Western Kentucky. The historic storms leveled communities and killed at least 80 people in the commonwealth. An EF4 tornado arrived in Mayfield at about 9 p.m. on Dec. 10, 2021, and the tight-knit town of about 10,000 made national headlines when the twister obliterated the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, killing nine people and trapping dozens of others in the debris.
Organizers hoped the memorial walk would serve as a thank you to the first responders, a tribute to the victims and even catharsis for the community that’s been left behind to mourn and rebuild. Walking among the group it was evident the town was moving forward, but the pace was as slow as the steps it took us to travel the two miles.
In Mayfield alone the tornado battered 18 churches, 100 businesses and more than 800 homes. Much of the attention has been on the candle factory, but just across the street from it, there’s a neighborhood off Pritchett Road where another eight people died.
Conversations among walkers flickered between “that night” and the realities of everyday life.
In one breath someone would talk about high school students taking the ACT or a trip to Europe, and another a woman wondered whether her house could survive a second tornado.
Pastor Stephen Boyken’s voice came over a microphone before the walk started, and he encouraged the crowd to feel whatever it needed to feel during the memorial.
“There’s a common saying I’ve heard: ‘Grief shared is half grief,’” Boyken said.
More on the candle factory:As tornado anniversary nears, Mayfield candle factory owner faces another lawsuit
For Diane Thomas, who grew up in Mayfield but lives in nearby Paducah, coming to the candle factory grounds almost felt like visiting a cemetery. Even though there aren’t any headstones and the debris has been cleared for months now, there’s a somberness to the site.
One of Thomas’ relatives was working there that night, and fortunately made it out alive. Another needed to be rescued from an assisted-living facility.
So many other families weren’t as lucky.
That was evident as I talked with Candace Morris. When I asked her why she’d braved the weather to be at the walk, she simply told me she’d lost too many people on Dec. 10 not to come.
The walk continued, and I came across Jha'lil Dunbar’s family. At 3 years old, Jha’lil was among the tornado’s youngest victims. The child had taken shelter in a bathroom that night, and when the tornado hit, it pushed the two-story home off the foundation and into the house next door. The second floor fell into the first.
The message on his family’s shirts said it all.
“You were ready, but our hearts were not.”
As we came up the final hill to the deserted downtown, I heard a woman nearby heave, “we made it,” and the person next to her laughed and said “I’m pretty sure I said that at the end of ‘that night,’ too.”
Chandler, again, helped me fill in the blanks.
The field of grass in front of us was where the courthouse once stood, and the frame a little further down was the skeleton of First National Bank. First Baptist Church and Hall Hotel alone made up the skyline, and they’d been completely boarded up.
Chandler makes a point of driving downtown, he told me, and he wished more residents would do the same. Mayfield doesn’t look like it did on Dec. 9, 2021, but it also doesn’t look like the warzone it was the day after the storm.
The physical changes to the town have been hardest on the older generation, Thomas told me. She turns 80 this month, and she suspected she was the oldest person on the walk. All the buildings she remembers from her childhood are gone, and she has family members who won’t come downtown. It’s just too painful to look at it.
Standing in the empty downtown, it was hard to see the potential.
For subscribers: They survived the tornado that leveled the Mayfield candle factory. That was just the beginning
Allyson Vogt, who works at the hospital, has lived in Mayfield for more than 20 years and even she can’t recognize what used to be where.
“There’s times I come up here it just makes my stomach tie up in knots,” Vogt told me.
She’d come to the walk looking for closure, and she and her friend, Stephanie Overby, found hope in the final stretch.
They’d spotted some new homes just outside of downtown.
Demolition has exhausted the community.
But now, it’s finally time to rebuild.
“Hopefully, if we do this walk another year from now, it’s going to be different,” Vogt said.
Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Mayfield survivors walk tornado's path to mark first anniversary
