The 1871 St. Louis tornado was an F3

Fujita scale

The Fujita scale , or Fujita-Pearson scale, is a scale for rating tornado intensity, based primarily on the damage tornadoes inflict on human-built structures and vegetation...

 tornado

Tornado

A tornado is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. They are often referred to as a twister or a cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology in a wider...

 that touched down in St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

 on March 8, 1871,at 3:00 PM. It traveled east-northeast at 70 miles per hour (113 km/h), cutting a swath up to 250 yards (229 m) wide and 5 miles (8 km) long into East St. Louis, Illinois

East St. Louis, Illinois

East St. Louis is a city located in St. Clair County, Illinois, USA, directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri in the Metro-East region of Southern Illinois. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 27,006, less than one-third of its peak of 82,366 in 1950...

. Thirty homes were destroyed and 30 severely damaged. Six railroad depots were destroyed with eight deaths in them. One death occurred on a bridge. Overall, 9 people were killed, 60 injured, and $200,000 damage occurred, inflated to $4.8 million.

See also

• List of North American tornadoes and tornado outbreaks
• St. Louis tornado history
  St. Louis tornado history
  The St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan area has a history of tornadoes. The third deadliest tornado, and the costliest in United States history, the 1896 St. Louis – East St. Louis tornado, injured one thousand people and caused 255 fatalities in the City of St. Louis and in East St. Louis. The...