If you’re an owner of an old air-cooled Volkswagen or a (liquid-cooled, I guess I may as well note) Corvette, chances are very good that you’re familiar with Mid-America Motorworks. I’ve been buying parts for my Beetle from Mid-America an looking through their catalogs for years and years. And while I’ve never owned a Corvette, I know they’ve been a huge part of that community for decades as well. That’s why I was excited to pass through Effingham, Illinois last year during our cross-country journey in that 375,000-mile ex-NYC taxi, where we stopped at Mid-America’s headquarters to check out the VW Funfest.
I mention all of these things because Mid-America’s headquarters has been absolutely obliterated by a tornado that wreaked havoc on Effingham yesterday evening. Based on news reports from the area, the headquarters, warehouse, and on-site museum, full of unique Corvettes and Volkswagens, is all gone.
Social media posts from eyewitnesses show the extent of the destruction:
That’s just the outside. Before we get to the inside, I’d like to just show a quick snapshot of what the museum looked like before back when I visited:
This video shows the inside of what was left of the museum; all of the Corvettes within appear to have been crushed by the collapsing building:
One of the museum pieces that was noted to have been destroyed is one I wrote about specifically last year, an incredibly rare and fascinating 1949 Volkswagen chassis cutaway, something made by the factory for training purposes and one of very few left in the world.
Mid-America founder Mike Yeager posted a video from the site of the destruction, where he also noted that the VW Funfest, which had been scheduled for this weekend, is, of course, cancelled:
Yeager also sent an email out to a number of Mid-America supporters, where he broke down some of what happened:
Last night a tornado scored a direct hit on the Mid America Motorworks campus in Effingham. Every building is a total loss. The museum, the cars, our 1910 gas station, inventory, and many of the outdoor signs from the collection are gone. From the photos I’ve seen, the last C4, the historic C5 Alpha and Beta prototypes, the CERV4b, and the rest of the collection are destroyed or badly damaged.
Here is the part that matters above all else: it happened in the middle of the night, no one was on site, and not a single team member was hurt. Everything else is just things. For that, Laurie and I are more grateful than I know how to say.
I won’t pretend I know what comes next or how long it will take. After 52-plus years, as of today we are out of business while we account for what’s left. My focus right now is two things — making sure our people keep getting their paychecks, and personally reaching the suppliers, partners, and friends who have stood beside us all these years.
It’s worth repeating that, thankfully, the tornado hit in the middle of the night, when the facility was empty, so no one was hurt. The company seems determined to rebuild, so I wish them luck on pulling that off.
Here’s a video of me geeking out at last year’s VW Funfest; it was all shot on the site where the tornado hit, and I remember how vast Mid-America’s property was. The destructive force of that tornado is truly terrifying.
This is a devastating event, no question, though as founder Mike Yeager noted, the Corvette and air-cooled VW communities are incredibly strong, and I suspect the company will have a lot of support as they seek to dig out of the rubble and rebuild.
We’ll be thinking as many positive and hopeful thoughts directed to not just Mid-America Motorworks, but to all the places in Effingham affected by this brutal weather. It looks like a 12 to 15 mile stretch of northern Effingham County was affected; incredibly, there were no reported fatalities. There’s lots of people without power, and a number of homes damaged, though the damage to Mid-America may be the most extensive.
Tornadoes are no joke, friends. Be careful out there.
(Top image: Derrek Johnson/Facebook)
Oh no! That’s tragic. 🙁
Crazy weather this year. My place in Maine was under a tornado watch yesterday! That is all but unheard of. And yet FL continues to not even have our usual level of thunderstorms so far, with predictions of another very quiet hurricane season.
I hope they can rebuild, sound like good folks.
Sad, but I bet a lot could be fixed.
Idk if it was the right call to cancel the FunFest. I think Autopians would have showed up to help start cleaning it up and organizing the chaos.
Liability. Not a chance I would take as a business owner, in today’s crazy litigious climate.
Man, that is a shame. I am familiar with the company, having seen many of their ads in car magazines over the years. I didn’t know that they were located in Effingham. I had never heard of Effingham before last year, when I had a work trip that took me to a customer located there. I was in town for a week last summer performing an equipment startup and headed home Friday evening. That weekend I was reading the Autopian and discovered that the Autopian had a meetup in Effingham the Friday that I left. I had been too busy during the week to read the site, I’m bummed I missed the opportunity.
Earlier this spring I had another trip to Effingham to perform some work for the same customer. I flew into Indianapolis, landing a little ahead of a major storm front that was blowing across Illinois at the time. It was late, I landed after dark, and by the time I got my rental car, there was an active Tornado Warning right along my path on I-70. I had no desire to drive through a Tornado Warning in the dark, so I found somewhere I could get dinner at like 9:00 on a Sunday evening and watch the progress of the storm. Thankfully the worst of it was no longer along the highway by the time I finished my meal.
Time for a Quonset hut or something that makes a red iron building hoop shaped. Especially as tornado alley has shifted east.You loose space in the corners and they suck to put up but I’ve see tornados go right over them.
That’s a real shame. I hope they are able to salvage at least some of the collection.
There is no real good word to say other than this sucks.
I am so sick of having to hide under my desk. Illinois apparently has had the highest number of Tornadoes of any state this season, and if there’s anything I don’t want to relive, it’s November 17th, 2013.
Also my Bug does have plenty of MAMW parts. Usually next day delivery no matter what just from proximity. Hopefully they get back on their feet again.
😮
Oh no! I’m glad nobody was hurt though
Horrible but they have the completely right attitude. Things are lost and that’s bad but people are okay.
I stopped there back in 2019, I was driving with my uncle and he is the type of guy that will make stops on random places. It was pretty cool that in the middle of nowhere someone had a museum like this. I was looking at my album from that trip, F tornados.
Illinois and Indiana have just been through the wringer this year with severe weather. Damn.
Getting ready for bed in central Indiana – feed the cats, shove them in their carriers, and head to the basement for 15 minutes.
Then just hope the alarms don’t go off again overnight.
Two years ago a ef 1 was enough to snap a tree in half, throw it 50 feet, and destroy my car.
I look at the dent in my gutter as a reminder of just how much worse it could have been 5 feet to the left
Be safe out there y’all
Between the sinkholes and tornados – Seems the Midwest isn’t such a great place to park your rare and vintage Corvettes….
One of my friends moved from San Antonio back home to Indianapolis after the completion of medical school. She’s spent most of her life in Texas and “I thought Indiana wasn’t part of tornado alley.” I lived there for 33 years before I moved to Texas and uh, it certainly is these days. I watched more than one go over my house growing up.
As an aside, does anyone else’s inner 12 year old read Effingham as an uncensored version of Effing Ham? I do every time I drive through there.
I’m pretty sure Ef’n Ham is a Bob and Tom bit from way back so…yes.
I might have heard it there first. RIP Bob.
Climate change is pushing tornado alley east and slightly south, which greatly increases the chances of tornadoes in populated areas.
An old joke my mother in law would tell about there was here folks would say, can i get some effing eggs with my effingham?
What a shame. This is my generation’s burning of The Library Of Alexandria. This started as a joke but I can’t think of a better burning of The Library of Alexandria right now.
This is pretty sad, I have some friends in Effingham who I hadn’t seen in years, and stopped by on my way back from Power Tour last weekend, have not heard anything since, its not a big place by any stretch, but tornadoes can also be highly, highly localized with their damage paths
That’s the thing. As someone that lives in tornado alley and has for 50 years: tornadoes aren’t scary.
They are like a fickle space laser that fires at random (but weights towards trailer parks). Something can be irreparable destroyed and any neighbor not in the path might be mostly fine.
I live in Delaware, this a far cry from tornado alley, but we had one come through what is technically my town a few years ago – knocked down half of a muffler shop and stripped the shingles off a couple of houses, but everything around them was fine. Even the other garage bays connected to the back of the collapsed shop were untouched
…you do say that about a mile-high (or so) funnel that literally shakes the ground, appears out of literally thin air, rushing towards you at highway speeds, demolishing human property without a care, and then disappears into nothingness. Something both ethereal and a real threat to life, limb, and property. I think I can be respectful and perhaps fearful.
I’ve seen what a high-end EF4 does. It’ll get you on the national news.
I have a theory about tornados targeting trailer parks – those are locations that, for whatever reason, tornados tend to target. Things may have been built there in the past and been razed, so boom – temporary housing.
The most disaster-prone land is the cheapest, and living there becomes a game of roulette. People often become trapped in a cycle of being able to save up enough to replace their trailer after every disaster, but not save enough to move somewhere better.
Tornadoes are not scary???? Apparently you’ve never been close enough to experience it personally. I was on the phone with my daughter the evening this happened and she about lost her mind. She said it was the loudest thing she’s ever heard and was beyond scared. Turns out the tornado was very close to her house (so technically a funnel at that point…) and took out a bunch of trees in her yard. Her entire neighborhood has many very large trees that were uprooted.
Take these things seriously, people! Yes – they generally have narrow bands of destruction – but not always. Also, you do not always get a lot of advance warning when they happen.
I lived in Wichita through several destructive tornadoes, including one that picked up over our house. I’m not saying don’t take them seriously, but other than hunkering down, I don’t see them as frightening.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Hawaiian shirts suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
(What I remember of one of the great comments (not mine) on the old site, in the Corvette sinkhole article.)
Midwesterners built different. East Coast people are sometimes spooked by the possibility of an earthquake but honestly, tornadoes are arguably, on balance, way worse in the aggregate.
Hard to say. A single earthquake can affect a wide stretch of territory (before we start talking about tsunamis) but proper engineering can mitigate the risk.
Tornadoes are extremely localized events. At the same time, there are no reasonable ways to fortify against wind speeds exceeding 150mph. The only feasible solution are storm shelters, so the people can be saved and they can start anew.
This day and age losing an important building (new build, code compliant) to an earthquake is inexcusable. Losing one to a tornado is… force majeure.
Yeah, building to survive earthquakes has been pretty well figured out by now, a 5-5.5 magnitude earthquake in LA is like a winter blizzard in Buffalo, a brief inconvenience, and then everyone goes about the rest of their day as normal
Yeah, I like to use the Northridge earthquake as the example of what modern construction can do to offset an earthquake’s damage and thus safety. That earthquake was a 6.8 and it was point blank right underneath the largest suburb of Los Angeles. One apartment building, clearly with some design defects that somehow evaded inspections, was responsible for 90% of the deaths. The bulk of the rest were older people, panicking, and having cardiac issues from the situation. It’s quite the contrast, for example with countries that don’t have many building codes in place, and you get tens of thousands of deaths from thousands of buildings collapsing, in similar sized shakers.
“At the same time, there are no reasonable ways to fortify against wind speeds exceeding 150mph. The only feasible solution are storm shelters, so the people can be saved and they can start anew.”
The problem there of course is the threat of flooding. As a great admirer and envier of the underground structures of the Midwest I’m still haunted by the footage from the great flood of 1993.
A single tornado may not cover a very large area, but the storm system that spawned the tornado my spawn dozens more tornadoes as the storm front moves across the country.
You can design structures to witstand wind speeds exceeding 150mph, the question is do you want to spend the $$ to do so?
This shit sucks what I always worry about any time there is bad weather around here in the Midwest of all things for a tornado to destroy, besides my pets or family, my vehicles getting destroyed would be devastating.
Fuuuuuuuuu… 😮
ck!!!!!!!
I guess they really are air cooled. Sad.
This reminds me an electronics shop near me. The type of place you could find new old stock of things long long gone and if you couldn’t find it there, you could not find it anywhere. The place burned down and they never rebuilt because most of the inventory was impossible to replace. Sad days.
How they come back stronger than before. Good to hear everyone if okay. Things are replaceable.
What I see from Mike Yeager’s quote is that he is not so much a CEO, Founder, or business owner, he’s first and foremost a leader. I wish he and his team and their families all the best as they recover from this.
Well said.
Effingham. Terribly appropriate name for that county now.
On the positive side, there are reports a wicked witch was found crushed beneath a VW Beetle in Oz.