By Tracy Gupton
Columbia Historical Museum Board Member
John Garrett Smith’s premonition could not have imagined the scale of devastation that was forthcoming. “Shorty” Smith rode his horse to work that morning 90 years ago at the Texaco oil fields just outside the West Columbia city limits.
“He told them he felt there was a storm coming,” said Linda Howard Gardner, granddaughter of John Garrett Smith.
Practically everyone who witnessed and survived the massive hurricane that blew through the West Columbia area that night nearly a century ago is no longer alive to share their memories of the horror they endured. So it is left to their descendants to pass along stories told to them many years ago.
The date of death etched into the four headstones at Old Columbia Cemetery where members of the Suggs family were buried after becoming victims of the hurricane, puts the great tragedy into perspective. August 13, 1932, is the common thread weaving these four deaths from the same family together.
An August 15, 1932, edition of The Houston Post displayed a photo of survivors of “The ’32 Storm” gathered the day after the damage had been done. Posing for the Post photographer’s camera were J.W. Crocker, Frank Crocker, Pauline Crocker and Mr. and Mrs. Ira Bell. Their house near West Columbia was destroyed by the storm, but their neighbors did not live to tell their story.
Ira Bell “discovered the grisly sight of four of his neighbors’ dead bodies in a field between where the homes of Bell and Henry Suggs once stood,” The Post story revealed.
Constable Henry Suggs, his wife Rosie, their 8-year-old daughter Bulah and Rosie’s mother, Orelaney Reed, were all killed when their house near the “oil fields” just outside West Columbia was blown apart by the massive force of the storm’s winds. Many of the houses and businesses in West Columbia and other neighboring towns were destroyed or heavily damaged that memorable night.
The 1932 hurricane killed 40 people with the greatest single toll for any one town in its path being the seven deaths in West Columbia where sustained winds more than 100 miles per hour flattened numerous homes. Two neighborhoods that had been constructed for oil industry workers near West Columbia were wiped out.
Occurring in an era before television and around-the-clock weather forecasting, official warning for the deadly storm came just four hours prior to landfall and many people who tried to evacuate inland had to abandon their cars in high winds and heavy rains to seek shelter from the devastation.
Cheryl Rice remembers her grandmother telling her about “The ’32 Storm.” Rice said her grandmother lived on CR 23 about 5 miles outside West Columbia. “She stepped across the threshold and the part of the house she was in tore off (from the rest of the house) and ended up in the pasture.”
“By the time he got off work that day it was bad,” Linda Gardner recalls her grandfather telling her. “They left their home (that night) and stayed with another family in West Columbia. That home was knocked off its blocks.”
Mary Stockman Ward said, “I remember my grandmother talking about her home swaying from side to side and how she walked through waist high water to help deliver a baby” during the storm.
Ruby Nell Gupton Fontenot told her younger relatives about surviving the ’32 storm. She graduated from West Columbia High School two or three months earlier and found clothing items she had been gifted for graduation hanging on tree limbs and scattered across pastures after the storm. Ruby’s family home was destroyed, and she and her three younger brothers and their parents sought shelter in nearby relatives’ homes.
Bulah Helden Suggs was 3 weeks shy of celebrating her ninth birthday when she became the youngest victim of West Columbia’s fatalities. Her older sister and brother survived by luckily not being home that night. Hazel Suggs Broadway was spending the night with a friend, and Johnny Suggs was working and living in Brazoria when the hurricane blew through.
“Grandad John was 21 at the time,” Cindy Suggs Massoletti recalls. “He didn’t like to talk about the ’32 storm much, but we all knew about it. He did tell us that when the storm passed, he walked all the way from Old Town Brazoria in the rain and the mud to West Columbia to find his family.”
Cindy claims Johnny Suggs told her his parents, grandmother and youngest sister “were already being buried when he got there.” She said Johnny embarked on a frantic search for his sister Hazel.
“He searched ‘til he found her,” Cindy said. “It was a sad reunion for them both, knowing they were the only two left” from their family.
Eugene Giesecke, a 25-year-old mechanic, died the following day to add to the West Columbia death toll. He suffered injuries from airborne debris the night of August 13, 1932, that proved fatal. Giesecke, who is also interred at Columbia Cemetery, died in a Houston hospital on August 14, 1932.
Freeport, Angleton and Galveston also suffered extensive storm damage that night, while the inland towns of Brazoria, Damon and Needville, all in the path of the hurricane like West Columbia, were also devastated.
