Black and white photo of narrow, 5-story building spire
The old Mount Vernon High School stood at the corner of Hamtramck and North Mulberry Streets. It was built before the Civil War at a then-astronomical cost of $30,000. It served well for many decades, but was near the end of its life when the 1922 storm hit. Just a year later, the building was demolished after a new high school was built. Credit: Photo courtesy of Knox Time Collection

History Knox

Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a History Knox column each Saturday at Knox Pages

MOUNT VERNON — Ah, the good ol’ days, when everyone was made of sterner stuff than today, and schools didn’t close just because the kids got wet…

Oh, wait.

Actually, that’s exactly what happened one day in mid-May of 1922.

According to a report on Friday, May 19, in the Democratic Banner, the day dawned overcast and threatening rain, but no precipitation had fallen all morning.

In a time when most students in the town walked to and from school, many of them scampered home for lunch. Finished with lunch, hundreds of students started making their way back toward their various schools throughout the town.

That lowering sky that had been threatening rain all day suddenly unleashed with severe thunder and lightning, slicing open a deluge that hit just as all of Mount Vernon’s young ‘uns were on the streets headed back to school.

Since the sky had not gotten any more threatening than it had been all morning, virtually none of the children were ready with raincoats or umbrellas, and hundreds of them got soaked through to the skin in the downpour.

I’m not going to say that it was as bad as a room full of wet dogs, but a classroom full of wet children in warm humidity can’t be much better. The school officials did what they had to do:

They sent the drenched scholars home early for the weekend. Mount Vernon High School and the Fourth Ward School completely shut down for the day.

The First, Second, and Third Ward schools ended up sending about half of their students to their homes to change clothes, but kept operating. 

Only the Fifth Ward School was largely unaffected by the storm.

I don’t have a city ward map from 1922, but if the wards were still the same as on previous atlases, it would suggest that the severe thunderstorm was small but intense, tracking from the southwest through the center of town, trailing thundershowers to the south of it. 

The north side of town appears to have only caught the very edge of the storm.

It just goes to show that all things are relative. Such a thunderstorm would be a minor inconvenience today, between students traveling to school in cars and buses, and weather radar giving us fair warning of looming storms.

But it is amusing to think of the tough folks of that sterner age getting completely washed out by a simple spring storm.