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A house in Roseland, Virginia, collapsed under hurricane pressure.
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A submerged truck in a local river during the storm. Photos courtesy Nelson County Historical Society.
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A rescue helicopter flying over the Tye River.
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A rescue helicopter arrives at a family’s home. Photos courtesy Nelson County Historical Society.
Massies Mill, Virginia, my hometown, is a small, rural town located within Nelson County, a beautiful area at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, intersected by the James, Tye, and Rockfish rivers. It was settled in the 1700s by William Massie. Nelson County itself was founded in 1807 and named after Virginia’s fourth governor, Thomas Nelson.
The area is home to the Monacan Indian Nation, and Nelson County is also Walton country. Earl Hamner, the creator of The Waltons TV series, drew on his experiences growing up during the Depression era in the town of Schuyler, Virginia, about thirty miles from Massies Mill. He was the model for the character John-Boy in the show that ran for nine seasons on CBS television and became an American classic.
The community of Massies Mill was brought together by tragedy. Regardless of race, people supported each other and collectively grieved. The survivors began to focus on rebuilding.
In August 1969, seventeen years before I was born, Hurricane Camille slammed Massies Mill, a small community of about 150 people on the Tye River. Between twenty-seven and thirty-one inches of rain fell in just a five-hour period, flooding the town, destroying land, demolishing homes, and taking the lives of at least twenty-three residents. It was a blow from which the town has never recovered.
Today, Massies Mill—the name refers to a giant gristmill that was once in the heart of the community—is too small to be included in Census counts. But it makes up a small share of the town of Roseland, which has a population of around 1,700 people. The scarce jobs in town are in farming, woodwork, and retail (country stores). Some residents drive nearly an hour to work in Charlottesville or Lynchburg.
Growing up in Massies Mill, I heard many stories about Hurricane Camille and the devastation it caused. I began researching its history years ago, in part because I knew that Hurricane Camille could be a precursor of tragedy to come on a planet in which the climate crisis has made severe weather deadlier and more frequent.
My inquiries drew me to the Oakland Museum in Lovingston, Virginia, which is dedicated to Hurricane Camille and other remnants of Nelson County’s history. In March 2011, with permission from the museum’s organizers, I was given private access to glean as much information about the hurricane as I could.
It was there that I came upon a news clipping mentioning a Black man named Sam Johnson. Johnson died in 2001, but I was able to track down Sam’s stepdaughter, Joyce Brown. She told me the story of Sam’s experience with Hurricane Camille, as relayed to her by Sam and her mother, Emma. As it turns out, they met during the disaster.
Hurricane Camille began on Thursday, August 14, 1969. It started as a tropical wave near the Cayman Islands that quickly moved toward western Cuba. The hurricane’s momentum would fluctuate constantly with winds raging up to 115 miles per hour.
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Joyce Brown and her late husband, Jimmy.
By Sunday, August 17, storm warnings were in effect for Mobile, Alabama, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Biloxi, Mississippi. Despite evidence to the contrary, Virginia weather reports claimed that Hurricane Camille was weakening as it traveled toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, and that there was no need for evacuation.
Local radio stations advised listeners to stay tuned for possible changes in the weather, but assured them that the worst was over. By August 18, it was reported that a low pressure area was all that remained of Camille and that it was moving northward from the south of Memphis, Tennessee, at a speed of fifteen to twenty miles per hour.
Meteorologists continued to say that the storm would weaken as it moved inland, and that no serious damage was to be expected by Camille. Most of Massies Mill’s residents remained in their homes, waiting for the rain to end. No one expected the disaster that was to come.
It was not until Wednesday, August 20, that there were reports of heavy rains and extreme flooding. By then, the residents of Massies Mill were no longer listening to their radio stations; they had been ambushed by this vicious storm and were fighting for their lives.
On the night of August 19, Sam Johnson, his wife, Virginia, and their young daughter Theresa, went to bed around 10 p.m. Their eldest daughter, Arlene, was away in Connecticut for the summer, working in a tobacco field.
The Johnsons could hear the rain beating on the rooftop of their small home. The rain was rhythmic like music from a drumline. Or, as the old folks from the Mill would say: “That’s the sound of the devil beating his wife!”
Around 5 a.m., Sam went downstairs to the lower level of his home. He was not prepared for what he found—the entire living room covered in water, waist-deep and steadily rising.
“Virginia!” Sam called. “Virginia, the house is flooded! We have to go!”
Photo courtesy Joyce Brown
Sam and Emma Johnson
Virginia rushed downstairs to meet Sam and was caught off guard by the amount of water. She rushed upstairs to rouse Theresa. Holding tightly to her daughter, Virginia walked downstairs to join Sam, a look of fear in her eyes.
Sam asked Virginia to hand Theresa to him. The water was flooding in so rapidly, Virginia could barely hold herself up as she held Theresa on her hip. She stepped forward.
Virginia didn’t even have time to scream. A tree came crashing through the roof. It fell right on top of her, breaking her neck and pushing her underwater. Theresa slipped out of her hands.
Sam grabbed for his daughter, but he couldn’t catch her. Theresa was swept away in the sudden rush of water that had smashed open their front door. Sam was unable to hold on inside the house and was washed outside, too. His wife and youngest child were gone. He was all alone, floating with pieces of houses, cars, and other debris in the flooded streets of Massies Mill.
As the rain beat down on Massies Mill, people tried to evacuate from their homes and get to higher ground. Others, too afraid to face the storm, stayed inside their houses, praying the water would stop. But Hurricane Camille did not stop.
Homes built among Blue Ridge’s mountainous curves weren’t any safer than those below them. The rain caused mudslides to creep down the mountain, mimicking avalanches. Trees and rock began to slide, along with houses and people trying to escape.
Many families tried to wade their way out of the chaos, only to be swept away in the swift, ever-rising water. As the storm continued into the early hours of August 20, people, cars, refrigerators, furniture, and remnants of houses floated through town.
Survivors found themselves clinging onto debris or trees for safety, their clothes ripped off by the rapid flood waters. Sam Johnson was washed into a tree miles from his home. He found the strength to climb onto the tree’s higher branches and cling tightly for fear of falling back into the torrent. The water had stripped him completely naked. Reeling from the loss of his family, Sam was focused now on his own survival.
“I was as naked as the day I was born,” he would say later as he recounted the events of this fateful night. A few hours passed as Sam maintained a tight grip on the tree, rain beating down on his body. Suddenly, he heard someone cry for help.
Clinging to the base of the tree was a woman, who was also almost naked. Sam held on to a branch, reached down, and pulled her up. She was able to move onto the opposite side of the tree from him, hanging on as tightly as she could. The rain had started to lighten up a bit, but the flooding continued. The woman thanked Sam profusely for helping her and told him who she was. Her name was Emma Giles.
As they sat in the tree, Emma and Sam began to talk. Sam told Emma what happened to his wife and their daughter. Emma told Sam that her husband, Thomas, and her daughter Shy had been swept away. Emma’s mother was living with her at the time. The old woman refused to evacuate—she stayed behind in their house as it filled with water. Like Sam’s eldest daughter, Emma had two older daughters who were out of town.
Sam and Emma stayed in that tree until the next day, Thursday, August 21. They were eventually able to climb down out of it as the floodwaters began to drop. The Nelson County search and rescue team found them hours later. They were inspected, provided food and clothing, and eventually flown to safety in a helicopter provided by the U.S. military.
The rescue team began evacuating hurricane survivors to shelters in Amherst County. People whose homes were not completely destroyed went back to their houses, aghast at the destruction around them. Emma eventually joined her daughter Joyce in adjacent Amherst County. Sam stayed behind in Massies Mill to aid the rescue teams.
In the days that followed, the rescue team had other tasks—counting the dead and recording the missing. The body of Emma’s mother was found within a few days under some rubble not far from their home. The bodies of her husband, Thomas, and her daughter Shy were found days later. Sam’s wife, Virginia, was found dead in the middle of their shattered house beneath the tree that fell on her. Theresa was eventually found dead as well.
Within two weeks, the death toll in Nelson County was estimated to be more than 150 people. Many of the dead could not be identified.
The community of Massies Mill was brought together by tragedy. Regardless of race, people supported each other and collectively grieved. The survivors began to focus on rebuilding.
Ed Tinsley, a Virginia state trooper at the time, documented the aftermath of Hurricane Camille, including the search and rescue efforts, as an “audio diary.” These recordings were later used in a documentary film titled Portrait of a Disaster. It is hard to watch, with its images of dead bodies being recovered. One scene shows the discovery of a young boy’s body that had been stripped naked by the water, lying on some rocks.
It took several months for Massies Mill to show evidence of reclamation. Tons of debris and rubble were removed from the town. Several main roads and bridges were rebuilt, along with buildings and homes.
It was only after the flood that the schools in Nelson County were fully integrated, when white people stopped resisting it. People who couldn’t share water fountains or sit next to each other on the bus were suddenly forced to learn under the same roof. One of my former neighbors, Shirley, who is African American, often told stories about white children taunting her and her siblings in the 1960s.
“They would throw rocks at us on our way home from the grocery store,” recalled Shirley, “and would tell us to run. We would take off, dropping everything we had just bought. There was no way to avoid it. Almost every day, this same group of children would throw rocks at us and call us niggers.”
By late September 1969, the newly integrated Nelson County schools were open for classes. Mae, another former neighbor of mine, was a senior that year. She recalled what it was like. “There was plenty of racial tension at first,” she admits. “But we got along. We’d lost family and friends, and it kind of brought us together for a while.” Once the children were settled into school, the adult hurricane survivors began to get on with life.
Emma remained in Amherst County with Joyce, who was by then married with a young child. But Emma couldn’t forget Sam. She went to visit him a few months after the hurricane, and the two continued their friendship by visiting and writing to each other. It wasn’t long before they started dating.
“My mom just knew that Sam was put here for her,” says Joyce, now in her mid-seventies. They would describe their meeting as “miraculous.” Five years after being thrown together in a tree, clinging on for life, Sam Johnson, fifty-four, and Emma Giles, forty-five, were married at Oak Hill Baptist Church in Massies Mill. (The church, founded in 1869, had withstood Hurricane Camille with barely a scratch.)
Sam and Emma’s daughters, Joyce, Gaye, and Arlene, became close. “I was so happy to have another sister,” Joyce says. “No one could ever replace my little sister [Shy], but Arlene and I obviously shared a common bond.”
Sam and Emma lived in Lynchburg for the duration of their marriage. They regularly attended services at Oak Hill and supported all the fundraisers dedicated to the church and the improvement of Massies Mill. After Sam Johnson’s death, Emma Giles-Johnson lived in a retirement home for many years, suffering from dementia, before passing away in 2016. “She didn’t remember much,” Joyce says, “but she talked about my stepdad. She never forgot her Sam.”
Joyce, whose life history is tied up in the destruction caused by Hurricane Camille, has developed a healthy perspective about it. “You never know when a hurricane, or anything, may hit,” she tells me. “You can’t live life sitting and worrying about those things. You just have to go on and live the best you can.”
I consider her words often now that we all are living with the present dangers of the climate crisis. Hurricane Camille was a natural disaster in 1969. How long before Massies Mill, or a thousand small towns like it, are devastated again by a disaster due to human-caused climate change?
In the decades since Hurricane Camille, Massies Mill has seen its share of powerful storms. I can remember standing at the edge of the road with my family at age twelve when the water from the James River had risen several feet, covering the road. We watched in fear and awe as furniture from someone’s home floated by. We weren’t able to get out of the neighborhood for nearly a week.
Statistics show that 2020 was a record year for climate disasters, particularly hurricanes and tropical storms. The United States experienced thirty hurricanes and storms in all, costing billions of dollars in damages.
In the years to come, scientists predict that storms and flooding will increase, wildfires will be more rampant, droughts will worsen, and polar ice sheets will continue to melt. Climate disasters occur every day in many parts of the world, and we can only expect things to get worse.
In 2020, Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, signed the Virginia Clean Economy Act. The law will provide energy efficiency assistance to marginalized and low-income communities, create up to 13,000 jobs in the “advanced energy economy” each year, and help coastal communities reduce and prevent erosion. It also promises to eliminate carbon emissions from the state’s utilities by 2050.
Many hope 2021 will be the year the world will begin to implement changes to slow down and prevent future disasters, recover from an economic crisis, and push for meaningful social justice. We’ve all heard that the window to address the climate crisis is narrow. As the United States and other countries set their climate goals, activists and scientists everywhere emphasize the need to take swift action.
Massies Mill has survived natural disasters, racism, and economic struggle. The town’s residents are optimistic that it will be rediscovered for its history and beauty. They believe former residents who have moved away will return and retire here, or that people sick of living in cities will come and buy property.
“We’ve conquered it all,” says my former neighbor Shirley. “I don’t believe Massies Mill will disappear. No, we’re not going anywhere. I have faith.”