Patterson (Joy D.) Slide Collection PI/2000.0017

The seventy-nine 35mm color slides in the Patterson (Joy D.) Slide Collection were created by her husband, Joe A. Patterson, a gas measurement specialist, immediately following two of the most destructive storms to strike Mississippi: the March 3, 1966, Candlestick Park tornado, and Hurricane Camille, which made landfall on the Gulf Coast on August 17, 1969. Joy Patterson donated the collection to MDAH in 2000. 

 The Candlestick Park tornado, named after a South Jackson shopping center it destroyed, was one of only two documented F5 (the most violent on the Fujita scale) tornadoes to strike Mississippi in the twentieth century. The official track for the storm followed a continuous 202.5-mile line from Hinds County, Mississippi, to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, but the worst damage occurred in parts of Hinds, Rankin, Scott, and Leake Counties, where fifty-seven people were killed and over five hundred were injured. Joe A. Patterson took photographs on March 3 and 4, 1966, as he and Joy looked in on family members who had been in its path in Hinds and Rankin Counties.

Camille, a category 5 hurricane, landed just east of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, around midnight on August 17, 1969, with winds estimated at 200 miles per hour and tides fifteen to thirty-two feet above normal. As it moved through central Kentucky and into West Virginia and Virginia, it dumped up to thirty-one inches of rain, generating flash floods and landslides. The storm system caused an estimated 259 deaths (three in Cuba, 143 on the Gulf Coast, and 113 in the Virginia floods) and $1.421 billion in damage. The Hurricane Camille images were produced by Joe A. Patterson on August 19, 1969, while checking in with his gas customers on the Coast.