After an EF4 tornado devastated the city of Mayfield, Ky. on December 10, 2021, the sights and sounds will forever be etched in the minds of community members who were there that night.
“It was unbelievable the destruction that we saw on this town,” recalls Steven Elder, director of the Mayfield Community Foundation. “Then, you saw people coming out of their homes. People were literally just walking down the streets that you can see through here. Because their homes were completely blown away.”
The moments after the tornado hit, Elder, with a camera in hand, documented the havoc that blanketed Mayfield one year ago.
“The water tower, just over there, fell,” says Elder. “ And if the wind didn’t blow their house down, the water just washed their home down the street.”
Elder describes the scene as “total devastation” a few streets from downtown. People lost everything.
“The days never ended. I mean, it was one right after the other because people needed so much, so quick,” he says.
Generosity Through GoFundMe
Elder admits those weeks following the catastrophe were a blur, but what happened in midst of the rubble, may be what defines this town for generations.
“We put a GoFundMe out there, and I thought, ‘if we get $25,000, we’ll be able to do something.’ Well, little did I know, over $1 million came into the GoFundMe, and it’s overwhelming just to say that.”
A community foundation that started in 2018 was still small and fairly new, but Elder says it was the best vehicle to put out the call for help to the rest of the world.
“We knew we could accept donations, and then we could get those donations directly into the hands of the people that were affected,” he says.
And that’s exactly what Elder and the entire Mayfield Community Foundation did.
“That money came pouring in from all over the world,” says Elder. “And we started helping people with their windshields, because one of the things you don’t necessarily notice or see is, maybe your home is okay, but there was so much debris in the air, that now windshields were busted out and people couldn’t get to work. And so we went into the kind of the windshield business of replacing those.”
The Foundation also purchased necessities like mattresses. In homes where the roof was torn off, the items inside were ruined. So, the Foundation purchased those necessities from a local furniture store.
Another void was meat. Elder says people could go to areas and pick up food, but where there were items like Hamburger Helper, there was no hamburger. So, the Foundation bought beef from a local producer and got it to people who couldn’t find meat in the area, since local grocery stores were also without power for so long.
“We just did the small things, just to try to get people back up on their feet and getting back going, even helping with utility bills,” says Elder. “We did just a number of things, real quick things, to help people get back going.”
Homes for Hope
While some of the $1 million was immediately put back into the community, the Foundation’s work was far from done in the immediately months after the tornado. In fact, that work still hasn’t stopped. With all the homes lost, it left many families homeless… a big task, but one the foundation was willing to take on.
“To think that what we were imagining we could do, and what we’ve done now, almost a year later, we were the first supporters of Homes for Hope for Kentucky, and we’ve just built our 19th home,” says Elder.
Now working with a long-term recovery group, the goal is to build or repair 25 new homes by Christmas. It’s that work—along with state and federal aid—that’s helping to start to get this community back on their feet.
“On the same day that the RVs came from the state government, and the governor was here, we gave keys to four or five of those away that day, they also broke ground for the first homes,” says Kathy O’Nan, mayor of Mayfield.
Downtown Mayfield’s Daily Reminder
While rebuilding has started, downtown Mayfield is still eerily vacant. Scars of the tornado are in the form of rubble, stoplight poles mangled on each corner of the square and the courthouse now missing from the iconic square.
“The commerce in the community, you’ve got to get the dollars flowing in the community if people are going to stay,” says Elder. “And so where we’re at, the Square, is where commerce happened. This is where it’s a traditional downtown area that anybody would have in a small community. And all these buildings through here are just completely gone.”
This desolate downtown is a daily reminder of the work left to be done.
“You always get that sense of ‘are we going to make it?’ And I believe that we’re going to make it and you got to cast those doubts aside,” says Elder. “But it’s hard when you see this much commerce and this much destruction. How is the next generation, how are we going to keep these dollars flowing within this community, if there’s no place to do a whole lot of business in the downtown area?”
Elder and other community leaders are confident Mayfield will turn tragedy into a comeback story, as planning is already underway.
“We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to redefine ourselves and how we’re going to commit to rebuilding so that the next generation does have the opportunity to stay here,” says Elder.
“As we move forward to the spring, we’re going to hear lots of hammers, and I hope it’s deafening. And that it does give us hope,” adds O’Nan.
True Christmas Spirit
Years of work are ahead, as buildings are still being torn down so the rebuilding can begin, but it’s a Christmas comeback actually started last year.
“The elves came from all over,” says O’Nan. “We had so many toys brought to this area. We still have some toys. We had a toy giveaway.”
“The number of gifts that the kids received was overwhelming,” says Elder. “And I heard so from people at that event. I mean, there were 1000s of people there, that some of them were saying that was the best Christmas ever. And you start to get emotional when you think about that, because a lot of people in the community that were here, they had very little to begin with. And the little that they had, they lost it all.”
From food trucks to others, in the months after the tornado, proved Christmas doesn’t come from a store… Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.
“Having that event and seeing those smiling faces, they wanted to have Christmas like that every year. Nobody wants a tornado to come through their town, but they were so blessed and so appreciative of how much the community did. It was a blessing to them, even as tragic as the tornado was for them,” says Elder.
“It was truly amidst all this rubble, and all this heartache, the true spirit of Christmas showed, because at that point, it wasn’t about presents. It was about that spirit that was within us. And then we were receiving it so much from people who came to help,” says O’Nan.
While so much has been done in the year since the tornado hit, Mayfield has a long road of recovery still ahead. To help with the long-term recovery efforts, you can donate here.
