Today's Daily Progress has an article about Hurricane Camille (here).Camille hit central Virginia on the night of August 19-20, 1969. My parents have talked about the hurricane for as long as I can remember, and it came up again several weeks ago when we had dinner at the new Devil's Backbone Brewery in Nelson.
They said that the amount of rain that fell that night was staggering, although no one in Charlottesville realized at first how bad things were in Nelson.
In 2006, Lisa Provence had an excellent piece about Camille (here). Here's an excerpt:
That Tuesday in 1969-- still known as "the 19th" in Nelson County-- dawned a dog day of August, far removed from the cultural watershed known as Woodstock winding down to the north, far removed from the carnage known as Hurricane Camille that had just killed 174 people as it steamrolled through the Gulf Coast. No one knew that Camille's fury wasn't quite spent.
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The picture is by Tom Gathright (it's from The Hook article) and is taken north of Lovingston, off of 29. It shows what my parents talked about: the majority of the devastation in Nelson County was caused by massive landslides which took out everything in their path.
