From "Bright Glowed My Hills" by Douglas Mahnkey Ch. 7 "On March 11th, 1920, a tornado swept out of the southwest, destroyed our house and took the life of my youngest brother, William Richard." Which is all Mr. Mahnkey says about it in this book. They lived down at Melva, which was south of Hollister on Turkey Creek. The entire town was wiped out. Even now, I don't think there's even a foundation left. Elmo Ingenthron's "Land of Taney" has the tornado as the "big" event of the year in his timeline. But he has the date of 12 Mar. Otherwise, just says "many killed and wounded." Melva was on a prominent bald, next to the railroad. It might be interesting, those of you doing the transcribing, to keep track of the ones killed in the tornado. If you think it's a good idea, we could do a tribute page on the Taney site at WRV to those killed in the tornado...or shortly after, dying from injuries, maybe. To my knowledge, there have only been 2 tornadoes which actually touched down in Taney County. The one at Melva, and the one in either 1960 or 1961, which hit Bull Creek in the vicinity of Renshaw Cemetery, up from Rockaway Beach. I'm not sure the 2nd one actually touched down, even, but there were trees downed in that tornado in the cemetery. If you look at the topography of the land in the WRV, you'll see that tornadoes are rather hindered, so to speak, by the hills. Not to say they can't happen--my dad has seen plenty of them up in the sky, but not coming down. And this past spring, the night before the last day of school in Branson, I bedded my kids down in the hallway--and I don't spook in that way, normally. But the 3 young ones' bedrooms are all facing the southwest sky, and that side of the house faces uphill. A neighbor had one of the few big old trees left in the neighborhood come down on his roof--the 4th house down from ours. I'm trying to think--there's another local book that talks about the tornado in more detail, and I think it's Vickie Layton Cobb's "Fallen Leaves, Vol 1." The copy I was using was my aunt's, and I gave it back to her not long ago. The only Box family in 1910 Taney is this one in Jasper Twp. #77 BOX, Richard 43 head m2 MO TN IN Augusta 26 wife m1 2 1 1 IA IA IA Harry 9 son MO MO IA John 7 son " " " Bessie 5 dau " " " Ida 1 dau " " " Since this isn't the same family, my guess would be that the one who perished in the tornado hadn't lived here long. Vonda PS Melva doesn't seem to appear on any map drawn after the tornado, including my topo which normally shows everything...the PO started in 1906, and was discontinued in 1931. It shows up on Terraserver http://terraserver.microsoft.com/image.asp?S=14&T=1&X=150&Y=1265&Z=15&W=2 You see Taneycomo snaking through the left. The long straight stretch of road is US Fed Hwy 65. Over to the east of that, you see Turkey Creek and the railroad. The jarring white line in the middle is now paved and a road to an expensive new golf course called Branson Creek (my 17 yr old works there) Melva is somewhere south of that jarring white line, along the creek.