Des Arc’s better days flutter in minds like ghosts, popping up in personal memories and via Google Maps.
Some people remember when the wooden handle factory operated, and the tiny southeast Missouri town still had its school. Still more recall the version now captured in online images that show a town with shady trees and a quaint character.
Those memories and photos stand in stark contrast to the place I saw when I made my first visit to Des Arc in March. A year before, an EF3 tornado tore through, ripping away its bucolic existence in a matter of minutes.
The community still bears the signs of trauma. It was immediately clear as I stepped out of my car. I soon heard a house used to be near where I parked.
Telltale blue tarps — placed to cover roofs blown away — still contrast starkly with the rolling countryside. The trees are the biggest sign: Some snapped, others standing naked, their branches stripped away. And people are gone, too, I’m told by locals. Not everyone, of course, but the population is assuredly fewer than the 131 people noted in the last U.S. Census count.
Yet at the center of it all stands the Des Arc Museum & Community Center, a former church that survived the storm.
That’s what drew me to town: to learn about this place, which served as a hub in the immediate aftermath, but also helps keep the story of Des Arc alive after much of it was blown away.
“It lets people know we were once a viable town,” Jackie Brandmeyer, one of the museum’s leaders, told me. “When I come down here, as long as I’m inside, I’m OK. I go outside and it’s like … I still cry. I still do.”
Jackie Brandmeyer stands with her grandfather’s switchboard, which was once used in Des Arc. A young Brandmeyer is shown with her grandfather in the photo atop the board. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
How the Museum Came to Be
Des Arc was platted in 1871 and initially grew because of the timber industry. A couple of decades later, the oldest portion of the church-turned-museum was built. It long served the community as a house of worship, but a few years ago, it ended up in the hands of two local men after the congregation ceased meeting.
“One of them I knew really well,” Brandmeyer shared with me. “I told him, ‘You know, you’re gonna keep dropping the price and dropping the price, and someone will eventually buy it. They’ll put a fence around it, and they’ll throw some old rusty cars out there and some goats, and there you go. But you donate it to us, and we will keep it.’”
Eventually, he did donate it to be a home for the museum and community center.
“The building is not in anyone’s name,” Brandmeyer says. “It’s the Des Arc Museum and Community Center, and the board operates [it].”
Part of its purpose is history-keeping, but it’s also about memory-making. Locals can rent the former church’s fellowship hall for events like birthday parties and baby showers.
“We keep it low — we rent it for $40 an event so people can afford it,” she said. That space is personal in a can-do Ozarks way: When the board found the room was too loud, they deadened the sound by collecting local quilts to hang on its walls. Many of the creations have local ties. One was made by local lady pool players. Another was from the Baptist church for its pastor in the 1950s.
Vintage quilts help the acoustics in the community center. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
Most of those quilters are gone, but not from Brandmeyer’s memory and mind’s eye. The place is part of who she is: Her family came to the area in the 1850s, and it’s where she grew up.
“The Methodist church was across the street on the corner, and that’s where I went to church as a kid,” she says. “It was built one year after this one — it was built in 1886. Then, you know, there was a warehouse there that used to be a store; a general store. They used to have the old cylinder gas pumps in front of it. Then Mr. Stamps’ store was next.”
The native-stone school gymnasium — within shouting distance of the museum — was also a nexus for the community. Even after the school district consolidated with another in 1960, the gym was still used by the district for sporting events, where a younger Brandmeyer was a cheerleader.
Today, because of the tornado, the gym is a shell of its former self.
The Tornado’s Trip Through Des Arc
That tornado came through town on March 14, 2025.
According to the National Weather Service record:
“At approximately 10:20 p.m. a tornado began near Missouri Highway HH in the Clearwater Conservation Area to the northeast of Garwood, Missouri, in Reynolds County, and continued northeastward for nearly 30 miles before dissipating east of Jewett, Missouri, in Madison County around 10:57 p.m. The most significant damage occurred in Gads Hill and Des Arc, where a few residences were significantly damaged. This tornado was assigned a rating of EF-3 with a maximum wind speed of 155 mph.”
Tragically, several lives were lost in the area that night, but none were in Des Arc. Scott Oatman, mayor of a nearby small town called Annapolis and a local emergency management leader, says that was likely due to a homegrown emergency alert system. Oatman designed the system, he says, which involved soliciting information from locals about their contact info and emergency plan.
“We have a form that people fill out letting us know where they’re going to be if they get hit with a tornado, for their shelter location, stuff like that,” he said. “And they’ve gotten used to it because … a lot of news stations don’t cover us.”
Armed with that information, local emergency management does all it can to spread the word through channels such as Facebook and email. In this case, it worked.
“There was a lot that happened that night; that was a good thing and helped them,” Oatman told me.
“They heard us telling on these alerts that Des Arc needed to take cover, and they did,” he said. “Houses were completely gone. They had time to get to their tornado shelters. Some of them crawled in their crawl space under their house, and their entire house was wiped out.”
The collective damage was extensive: “Over probably half the whole area” was destroyed, he estimated.
Scenes from Des Arc in March 2026. A year before, a tornado wiped out a significant portion of the small community. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
Brandmeyer recalls driving into town with her husband, William, mere hours later.
“We came down the next morning at dawn,” she recalled of the drive. She didn’t even know if the museum would still be there. “From the devastation coming down what we call College Hill, I was just sick.”
Miraculously, in the middle of it all, the museum and community center still stood. There was some damage, but the building itself was intact.
“We were basically the only building standing,” Brandmeyer said. “We were able to gather generators up and fire up the generators and feed people.”
Fortunately, some of the food they first shared was originally intended for the community’s St. Patrick’s Day dinner, one of the museum’s annual fundraisers scheduled to occur soon after the night the tornado came through.
That effort transitioned to gather donations for further meals, and eventually was aided by Just the Crumbs, a nonprofit from Mississippi that served meals from a truck-turned-mobile-kitchen in the museum’s parking lot.
“They came and they stayed a month,” Brandmeyer shared. “They said, ‘You fix breakfast and we’ll handle lunch and supper.’ I just can’t say enough about them.”
Oatman talks of the support others gave in the aftermath. People such as Troy Silvy in Des Arc went “nonstop,” he says, and also points to Specialty Granules, Inc., a nearby minerals processor that leased and donated equipment for cleanup.
A year has passed. The cleanup crews have left, as have so many others.
“It just changed the whole town,” Brandmeyer said of the tornado. “People are gone, and there’s no place to come back to.”
Facing the Storm’s Aftermath
Hearing about the storm’s aftermath reminds me of stories of death. There is attention right away from many friends and distant relatives, but the attention fades, and loved ones are left trying to put the pieces back together. In this case, the locals I talked with said that they felt government assistance was limited.
“They didn’t help me none,” said Dwayne Silvy, a lifelong local. “FEMA told me I didn’t have enough damage.” He told me he ultimately used old tin from the fire department building to fix his own roof.
I reached out to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as the Missouri State Emergency Agency, to learn about the response. The emailed response from FEMA shared that “Once President Trump approved the Governor’s request for a major disaster declaration, FEMA opened a Disaster Recovery Center in Des Arc to provide Individual Assistance and meet one-on-one with survivors in the Iron County village.”
The federal agency then referred any follow-up questions to SEMA.
“When our State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) is activated and severe weather affects the state, we work together with our partner agencies to determine if resources are needed and how assistance can be provided efficiently,” Caty Luebbert, Missouri SEMA’s public relations director, emailed me. “For this incident, we also had staff from our Floodplain Management section assist with recovery efforts by helping the community conduct substantial damage inspections in floodplain areas that were damaged due to the tornado.”
Among other assistance, Luebbert shared that SEMA’s Operations and Procurement teams helped coordinate portable restrooms, dumpsters, and mobile cell and radio towers to assist with the local response. They also worked with other nonprofit partners, she said, to help provide food and recovery assistance, and hosted a two-day multi-agency resource center in a nearby community to assist 134 local families.
Looking to the Future
Regardless of what response came, no amount of support could put the town back how it was.
The cafe closed. About half the homes are gone. The post office isn’t listed on the USPS website any longer.
“Supposedly, the Postal Service says they will bring the post office back,” Brandmeyer said. “But I’ll believe it when I see it, because they’re trying to cut out all these little towns.”
Even the museum can’t bring those things back. But it can keep reminders of them in the present.
Rooms of the former church hold artifacts of a story linked by lives and this place. There is a set of glass dishware, given as gifts by the bank, and photos of community reunions — there’s one in Des Arc every May. Among other artifacts, household items, vintage photos, and memories of the school fill rooms.
And then there’s the set of post office boxes, a recent addition brought over after the tornado. They were left standing after the storm.
After the March 2025 tornado, the town’s post office boxes, sign and U.S. flag were moved to the museum. (Photo by Kaitlyn McConnell)
“When the Post people came to inspect the post office, we asked them if we could have the boxes, and they gave them to us,” Brandmeyer said. Next to it is the office’s tattered flag, photos showing the town’s before-and-after, and the remainder of its wooden sign. Splintered in two, it’s now a jagged piece of wood, about half the size it once was.
It’s perhaps the most fitting metaphor for the community that’s also left with about half its houses, yet still exists through people like Brandmeyer and others working to save its story for the future.
Through their work, the museum can hold space – literally and figuratively – for the town’s past, present, and future. At least for now.
Because, tornado or not, Des Arc faces the same challenge as many rural places with changing times.
“The young people aren’t really interested in this kind of stuff,” Brandmeyer said of the museum’s focus on local history. “It’s hard to get younger people, and we will have to eventually, or we’ll have to close, because we’re going to get to the age where we can’t do it anymore.”
The post Ozarks Notebook: After a Tornado, Des Arc Is Down but Not Out appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
