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Just before 10 a.m. Thursday, the sky over Natchez began to yellow through tree-bending wind and pouring rain. Minutes later, witnesses said the sky darkened to near-black and the winds swirled into a tornado that swept up the bluff from Under-the-Hill and plowed into the downtown Historic District leaving massive architectural damage but almost no injuries.

That description led the coverage in the Friday, February 27, 1998, edition of The Democrat of the weather event that damaged scores of buildings in downtown Natchez and left in its wake millions of dollars in damage and scarred memories for a generation of young students.

The storm whipped northeast diagonally across town, as it followed a straight line from Lady Luck Casino through downtown to Cathedral School and beyond toward Washington. It ripped the roofs off the Eola Hotel and Pearl Street Pasta, toppled walls, snapped trees, blew out windows and broke off four spires at St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

Many of those youngsters were at Cathedral School, where students huddled into a newly constructed elementary building crouched in the hallway outside a gym and watched the wall tumble.

Preschoolers narrowly avoided disaster when the wall they were leaning against collapsed – falling away from them – into the newly constructed gymnasium. “It’s absolutely, no question, a miracle” that no one was seriously injured at the school, said Assistant Principal Catherine D. Cook. Four blocks away, at Holy Family Catholic Church, the wind plucked the communion chalice from inside the church and carried it out into the play area.

Those preschoolers and students at Cathedral are adults now, but the memory of that day lingers.

“Shout out to the 27th anniversary of the source of our weather anxiety when that tornado hit Cathedral and downtown Natchez,” Sarah Lindsey Laukhuff posted on Facebook this Thursday.

In the nearly 130 comments that quickly followed, fellow students, parents and teachers shared their memories of, as Louisa Shows wrote, “the storm that traumatized a generation.

Our eldest son, Thomas, is part of that generation. He was huddled against the gymnasium wall and watched it tumble into the gym … and like so many other parents, we carry our own scars from that day: fear, anxiety and an overwhelming sense of grace and relief.

“I will never forget pulling up to pick up a preschooler and seeing the damage. When I got to him it felt like we should be on an insurance commercial,” shared Ami Scott.

And while Caitlin Goodman said she will never forget “that basketball goal on the playground doing back bends,” Mattie Brown recalls “the corner of the music room coming off (and) covering our heads with carpet squares.”

Students remember then-principal Jules Michel “yelling through the bullhorn to put your heads down and pray.” And his daughter, Jennifer Michel Eidt, said “after that day and until the day he retired he had a television in his school office on the weather channel every day!”

It was Carol Savant Loy’s sophomore year, and she remembers looking outside a high school classroom “watching the chairs blow by.”

Two-hundred-year-old seamed tin roofs were ripped free from antebellum buildings and hurled to the ground, where at least three times in the downtown area they wrapped around parked vehicles. The Guest House, the grand brick bed and breakfast at the corner of Franklin and Pearl streets, got slammed so hard that three of its four columns were knocked off their bases …”

Marty Seibert was working at the former Britton &Koontz Bank that day and remembers “hearing what sounded like a jet landing” on Main Street. “Thank goodness for basements!” she wrote.

Sylvester Matthews Jr. said he was in shock the storm hit, even though he objectively knew it could happen. “I heard the wind pick up until it sounded like a freight train mixed with a giant cooling tower. Then, the bell and buzzer went off, and as we walked out to the hallway to take cover, the lights went out. I remember Mr. Michel saying something like ‘All we can do now is pray folks!’ A few seconds later it was over, and about a half hour later my mom came and took me home.”

We’ve all weathered many storms since that February day in 1998 – from those dealt by Mother Nature to more personal ones – and as the students grow into adults, former vice principal Cathy Cook is still offering lessons to be learned.

“Cathedral students … flip the script,” she wrote. “You survived a terrifying event and thankfully we had only a few minor injuries. Even though it brings back scary memories … you know how to protect yourself and family when storms approach and don’t dismiss the possible danger. You’re survivors! (But I don’t advise signing up for Survivor Island!) I was then and still am proud of you.”

And that is worth holding tight.

Stacy G. Graning is publisher of The Democrat. She was its editor in February 1998. Contact her at stacy.graning@natchezdemocrat.com.