Wedding Dress Blown Across Mississippi River by Tornado Returned to Illinois Woman

Eric Chaney
Published: March 21,2016
A tornado took half of the roof of Jill Stawicki’s Illinois home last week.
The same tornado tore apart her mother’s house, scattering her possessions and leaving her East Moline home ”unrecognizable,” ABC News reports.
"We hid in the closets of my home," Stawicki told ABC. "You could feel the house quivering and hear it being ripped apart."

Jill Stawicki thought her wedding dress, a family heirloom, was lost forever after a tornado damaged her home and blew the dress away.
(Screenshot courtesy of WQAD)

But the storm that took so much eventually gave something back, a family heirloom that held special significance to both Stawicki and her mother, Donna Morford.
Their wedding dress.
The EF2 tornado, with winds speeds of up to 130 mph, ripped the boxed gown from the attic of the home Morford’s family has lived in since the 1800s.
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"We thought we'd lost it forever", Morford, who wore the dress at her wedding in 1958, told WQAD.
But the twister, which tracked 4.8 miles through upper Rock Island County, eventually laid the dress down about 2 miles away in Le Claire, Iowa - across the Mississippi River.

Both Stawicki and her mother wore the dress at their weddings, in 1958 and 1987 respectively.
(Screenshot courtesy of WQAD)

A newspaper carrier on his morning rounds found the box in perfect condition Tuesday morning on a hill in Le Claire overlooking the river, WQAD reports.“I’m not an expert in wedding dresses but it [did] look like an older dress that might have been a family heirloom or something,” Le Claire Police Chief Shane Themas told ABC News. “It’s amazing the amount of debris that we’ve located that came from the Illinois side.”
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Le Claire PD spread the word on its Facebook page, and eventually a friend of Stawicki's daughter, who herself recently got married, saw the message and passed it along to the women, who were estactic.
"You have no idea,” Stawicki told WQAD. "When everything is gone and it's a little piece, a little piece that comes back.”

The dress was found, undamaged, in Illinois, across the Mississippi River from Stawicki's home in Iowa.
(Screenshot courtesy of WQAD)

Stawicki told ABC News she had a “happy meltdown” when she went to the police department to pick up the dress she’d worn at her wedding in 1987. "The tornadoes took … our houses, all these trees and whole neighborhoods, and yet, [they] just blew away this dress and gently laid it down. It wasn't soiled at all, and the box still had the protective plastic wrap around it. It is so incredible.”
Stawicki and her family are currently living in a


































 hotel, but she told ABC News that they still have a lot to be thankful for.
"Every single day, God has put something at our feet and hands to remind us how lucky we are," she said. "We are still so blessed."

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