Rural Missouri - February 2025 - 25

Left: Flood waters on the Missouri River stalled this MKT (Katy) Railroad train in 1904. Photo courtesy Library of Congress. Right: Lewis County
REC employees checked power lines in boats during the Great Flood of 1993. Heavy rainfall that year drove the Mississippi River to record levels,
breaching levees and flooding farms like this one, which also flooded in 1973. Photo by Jeff Joiner, Rural Missouri.
were reported in Union, with stockyards statewide crowded
from a rush to market livestock before they died.
Hot as the temperature was that summer of 1954, it
paled in comparison to August 1936 when the lowest
temperature recorded for 16 days was 103 degrees. That
wasn't the record heat wave though. From July 20 to 25,
1934, the state average maximum temperature was a sizzling
108 degrees.
Cold, colder, coldest
Ironically, Warsaw is also the location for Missouri's
lowest recorded temperature. That bitterly cold record
came on Feb. 13, 1905, when the mercury dropped to 40
degrees below zero.
The Marshall Republican reported the area was in the
grasp of an unusually severe blizzard. " Cold, colder, coldest
is about the way the weather has been acting this
winter, " read the front-page story. A mild fall had everyone
thinking winter would be the same.
The paper related: " Therefore, when zero was reached
people thought that the end of their endurance surely was
reached. They thought the same when 5, then 12, then 13
below zero was registered. But there certainly was a cold
surprise in store for them Monday morning when those
thermometers having the downward capacity registered all
the way from 20 to 30 below, with the government thermometer
at twenty-six and a half below. Our people were
literally frozen up and snowed under. "
According to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat,1905 saw the
coldest February of any the Weather Bureau had recorded,
with a mean temperature of 18 above through Feb. 13.
That followed a bitter January that was the coldest since
1885. By Jan. 26 the Mississippi River had frozen over,
allowing residents to walk across the river.
In more recent memory, the statewide average temperatures
for the winters of 1976-1977, 1977-1978 and 19781979
ranked as the 7th, 2nd and 1st coldest winters on
record for Missouri, respectively.
In 1977, Columbia would see a record 54.9 inches of
snow and an average temperature of 24.3 degrees. Two
years later, Cape Girardeau and Scott counties would see
24 inches of snow in a single day, a record snowfall they
would share with four other Missouri counties set in 1911,
1925 and 2011.
World-record rain
While Warsaw and Union can both claim Missouri
weather records, Holt is the location of the heaviest
amount of rain in the shortest period of time ever recorded.
The world-record rainfall took place between 6 and 8 p.m.
on June 22, 1947. In just 42 minutes, 12 inches of rain
fell on the town located north of Kansas City.
June 1947 was the wettest month on record for northwest
Missouri, dating back to 1888. The storm that put
Holt in the world-record books caused already swollen
rivers to overflow. The St. Joseph Gazette reported rail
traffic all over northwest Missouri was halted when tracks
washed out on every line. Vacationers were stranded at
area lakes. One couple boating on a lake near Agency was
forced to shelter outdoors as a tornado passed overhead.
Violent electrical storms were experienced everywhere.
Many small towns were cut off as roadways and bridges
washed away.
As the heavy rain made its way to the Missouri River
and downstream, it caused the worst flood then on record
for St. Louis. Only one east-west road in the state - Highway
50 - was open. High water closed access to five of the
seven Missouri River bridges.
An article in the July 12 Kansas City Times put the wild
weather - including bitter cold temperatures in the NorthCentral
U.S., a heat wave in the Midwest and a record
year for tornado deaths - in perspective. It quoted Oscar
Tenenbaum, a Kansas City weather forecaster working in
Washington, D.C., at the time, who said the spring weather
was a bit unusual, " but not unusually unusual. "
The writer boiled down the scientist's meteorological jargon
to explain the turbulent weather in layman's terms: " It
means simply that a lot of cold air from the North tangled
with a lot of hot air from the South and brewed up a lot of
no good. "
Tenenbaum added that the atomic bomb had nothing
to do with heavy May snowfall in Nebraska, floods in Iowa
nor a tornado in Ohio. " The bomb was credited for this
funny weather all over the country by experts including a
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Rural Missouri - February 2025

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