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By Tom McGehee
Museum Home Director
As September comes to a close, residents along the Gulf Coast sigh in relief if the area has not been visited by a hurricane. Mobile has been hit hard by September hurricanes with the two worst being in 1979 and 1906.
The 1906 storm was Walter Bellingrath’s first. He had been in town barely three years when it hit the area hard, killing an estimated 150 in Mobile County. Long before the advent of radar and countless “Weather Alerts” residents along the Gulf Coast were often surprised by the unwelcome arrival of a hurricane.
In late September of 1906 there had been news of a hurricane entering the Gulf of Mexico, but the slim accounts offered little help as to where it would hit. The closest guess was from the western coast of Florida to New Orleans. Skies were overcast in Mobile on September 25 and as the day progressed so did the amount of rain. Telephone service and electricity were knocked out by 9:00 PM. The next day the winds picked up rapidly, knocking down church steeples and sending statuary atop the Mobile County Courthouse crashing to the street and the storm only worsened that night.
On the night of September 27, two days of heavy rain joined a high tide resulting in heavy flooding. Water rushed several blocks into downtown Mobile bringing an assortment of debris and a few riverboats. Walter Bellingrath found his modest Coca-Cola plant on Water Street waist deep in water. In a letter to his mother, he described watching helplessly as countless wooden crates for his bottles were washed out into the Mobile River. Discouraged he wrote, “I feel just like a modern day Jonah.”
Thankfully, Walter Bellingrath started over and just two months later married Bessie Morse. The couple would go on to survive other hurricanes together, none of which would equal the storm of 1906.