108 years ago today, the deadliest tornado in Wisconsin history wiped out downtown New Richmond. No one who survived the tornado is alive today, but those few minutes of terror still define New Richmond’s history.

It started out as a beautiful summer day, but now it's known as ‘The Day the City Fell.’

“It was a festive day because the circus was coming to town,” says Mary Sather, the curator at the Heritage Center in New Richmond.

The cheerful atmosphere quickly turned deadly when two tornados met just south of town and became one of the strongest the state has ever seen.

“It arrived at about 6 o'clock and by 6 minutes after 6, the whole complete main street was wiped out,” Sather says.

This is what Main Street looked like before the twister roared through. Here's what it looked like afterwards. Because it was meal time, Mary says many people were cooking dinner over wood stoves. The tornado's fierce winds whipped the fires into a huge inferno, and most of the 117 victims burned to death.

“There was one really horrendous story about a man who had his let caught under a beam, and the fire was coming, and he was imploring everybody to 'Shoot me, shoot me. Please shoot me,'” Sather says.

Mary's husband Irv is one of the few people still living in New Richmond who had relatives in the tornado. Andrew Sather’s name is barely visible on this faded sign - he's Irv's grandfather. Andrew fixed bicycles at the O.J. Williams hardware store on Main Street. He was at the store when the twister hit. He got down to the cellar, but two store clerks never made it.

“Two girls did not go all the way down. They stood partially up on the steps, so that their upper torsos and heads were above the floor, and the cyclone came through and just wiped it right down to the floor level and they were two of the 117 people that were killed,” Irv says.

The tornado tore this bell out of the tower at the Methodist church, throwing it on the ground. It's the same one you see in this picture. Now, 108 years later, it’s hanging back at the Methodist church as a silent reminder of the tornado's unbelievable power.

Mary says the town got back on its feet quickly- six months and 100 new buildings later, the entire downtown was already rebuilt. Many of those buildings still stand in downtown New Richmond today.

The New Richmond tornado is classified as an F-5 on the Fujita scale. That’s the strongest level, with wind speeds estimated between 260 and 320 miles per hour.

The National Weather Service says the deadliest tornado in U.S. history killed 695 people in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana in 1925.