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The deadliest tornado outbreak in Indiana history — 137 killed in the state, more than 1,200 injured, forty-seven tornadoes across six states — reached St. Joseph County on the evening of Palm Sunday, April 11, 1965, and its county tracks are a matter of National Weather Service record. Three of the day's violent storms touched this county, all in its southern tier. The first, rated F3, ran 35.6 miles from northeast of Knox to south of South Bend, through Starke, Marshall, St. Joseph and Elkhart counties, killing ten and injuring eighty-two along its whole path: thirty cottages destroyed at Koontz Lake, and in this county severe damage at La Paz and at Wyatt, a church and a high school destroyed. The second pair belonged to Elkhart County's catastrophe at Dunlap: an F4 that began near Wakarusa, killed a child there, destroyed the Midway Trailer Park and killed fourteen on a 21.2-mile path; and, just over an hour later, the outbreak's deadliest single tornado, an F4 (first rated F5) that touched down southeast of South Bend at 7:10 p.m. Eastern and ran 37 miles to northeast of Shipshewana, killing thirty-six — twenty-eight of them in Dunlap's Sunnyside and Kingston Heights subdivisions, six at a demolished truck stop — after the first storm had knocked out the telephone and power lines that might have warned them. Both Dunlap storms were photographed as double funnels. President Johnson toured the Elkhart County destruction in the days after.
Osceola's and Penn Township's share must be stated exactly, because the geography is the finding. Every mapped 1965 track in this county runs through the southern tier — Koontz Lake, La Paz, Wyatt, south and southeast of South Bend, then east into Elkhart County. Penn Township is the county's northeastern township, across the river from those paths; no 1965 track in the Weather Service or Storm Prediction Center record crosses Penn ground, and no Osceola damage, injury or death from Palm Sunday appears in any source reached. The town's tornado day is therefore a near thing told at its true size: the worst weather night in the county's history passed a few miles south of the river, in full view of the same evening sky, and left this ground untouched. One counting conflict is printed whole, as this build's rule requires: the outbreak tables above give whole-path tolls (the F3 at ten deaths), while a county-segment compilation of the Storm Prediction Center database credits the 1965 St. Joseph County tornado segment with three deaths and twenty-seven injuries — the same storm counted two ways, by path and by county segment, and the two figures are not merged.
Sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana and Indianapolis — “April 11th 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak” (the confirmed-tornado table: ratings, paths, times, tolls); Fujita, Bradbury & Van Thullenar, Monthly Weather Review 98 (1970), as carried therein. NOAA Storm Prediction Center database, county-segment compilation (the three-death St. Joseph segment figure, printed in conflict). This build's The Land geography (Penn as the northeastern township) — the basis of the no-track finding.