Parrish is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Cave Township, Franklin County,

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. It borders on Lake Michigan to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash River, Wabash and Ohio River, Ohio rivers to its ...

, United States. The community is located near

Illinois Route 34 Illinois Route 34 (IL 34) is a north–south state road in southern Illinois. It runs from a former ferry crossing to Kentucky Route 297 across the Ohio River in Rosiclare to Illinois Routes 14/ 37 in Benton. This is a distance of . R ...

west-northwest of Thompsonville.

History

Once a larger town, Parrish was destroyed by the

Tri-State Tornado In the midday and afternoon hours of Wednesday, March 18, 1925, the deadliest tornado in United States history and second-deadliest worldwide moved through Eastern Missouri, Southern Illinois and Southern Indiana, killing 695 people and inj ...

in 1925. The town, which consisted of roughly 250 residents and 40 buildings at the time, suffered a 27% casualty rate and lost all but three of its buildings: one house, the Primitive Methodist Church, and the Parrish School. 22 people were killed and 90 percent of the town was destroyed. As the tornado destroyed all of the town's means of outside communication, the disaster was only discovered by a passing

Illinois Central The Illinois Central Railroad , sometimes called the Main Line of Mid-America, is a railroad in the Central United States. Its primary routes connected Chicago, Illinois, with New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, and thus, the Great Lak ...

train, which returned to Thompsonville to notify the surrounding towns. Much of the town's surviving population moved away following the tornado, and the town never rebuilt its infrastructure; it is now a dispersed rural community.

References

Unincorporated communities in Franklin County, Illinois Unincorporated communities in Illinois {{FranklinCountyIL-geo-stub