Cassville resident Morgan Williams says she was never afraid of storms before, but that changed after the May 26 windstorm that snuck up on Cassville residents in the wee hours of the morning.

Williams, her husband Trevor, and the couple’s two teenage sons — who live in the Sherwood Forest addition on the north side of Cassville — were asleep when the storm rolled into town around 3 a.m. that morning.

“The hail woke us up,” said Williams, who, along with her husband, got up to look out the windows during the hailstorm, which grew progressively more intense. “It was the largest hail (golf- ball-sized, say most residents) and longest-lasting hailstorm I’ve ever seen, but then it quit and got really quiet for a minute. Then the wind started to blow.”

The power went off, Williams said, and when she and her husband heard trees on distant properties begin to crack and fall, they prepared for the worst.

“I told our sons to get dressed and get their shoes on quickly,” she said. “And then, I ran back into my bedroom to do the same thing.”

As Williams turned to leave the bedroom after slipping on her shoes, she was frozen in place by the sound of a monster tree crashing through the roof trusses above where she stood.

“I instinctively threw my arms over my head,” she said. “Trevor yelled to ask me if I was okay, and I yelled back that I was, then I made my way out.”

When Trevor Williams went back into the bedroom to get a shirt out of the closet, he discovered that rain was pouring in through the opening in the top of the house, and knew that the family would have to abandon it.

“We weren’t sure how stable the rest of the house was or how long the storms would continue,” Morgan Williams said. “We finished getting dressed as quickly as possible, then got in our car with plans to head to my parents’ house, but we discovered we couldn’t get out of the neighborhood because trees had fallen across both roads leading out.

“We ended up driving through someone’s yard just to get out.”

Morning’s light revealed the chaos.

Multiple large trees lay uprooted across downed power lines and the handful of homes that took a direct hit from the trees. Many other homes could be considered “near misses.”

Just up the street from the Williams’ home, a neighbor’s house was sliced by a massive tree that, for a time, left the homeowners trapped in their bedroom.

Property damage was not exclusive to Sherwood Forest. Across Cassville, west to Exeter and southward to the Arkansas line, trees lay toppled like dominoes, including the sentinel pine that fronted the Bayless House on Townsend Street in Cassville.

A few blocks northwest of the Bayless House, the home of Charlea and Isaac Estes-Jones on Sky Street was possibly the hardest hit, with three large trees falling on the residence, one through the roof and into the house.

“What woke me up was the wind,” Charlea Estes-Jones said. “It was incredibly loud. We heard hail hitting the house, and it seemed like it was coming from every direction, and we had hail damage on every single side of our house..

“That’s what woke me up first, and there was all this crazy lightning. We told the kids to just stay in bed. The siren wasn’t going off, so we thought it was just a really severe storm.”

What happened next was nothing like the family had ever experienced.

“All of a sudden, it was like an earthquake, like so loud,” Estes-Jones said. “It sounded like a freight train had broken through our house. And it was just one after another, like boom, boom, boom. We were all kind of in shock and still sitting in our beds, and my daughter comes in our room and goes, ‘Mom, there’s a tree in our house.’” After retrieving flashlights, Estes-Jones discovered a tree had fallen at least 8 feet through the house, ripping through the ceiling and allowing the storm to pour into the residence.

“The storm was still raging, so we didn’t really know what to do,” she said. “We just kind of sat and panicked, then kind of got everybody together. Around that time, it kind of started to die down and we kind of got everybody calmed down.”

Estes-Jones’ son and mother, who lives in the home, were in the basement floor and had to climb around the fallen oak to reach safety.

“The next morning we got up, and that’s when we saw that three massive trees had fallen on our house and done significant damage,” Estes-Jones said. “And thankfully, the tree that did the most damage wasn’t over living space. It was over a hallway. We were really, really fortunate that everybody was okay. We just keep reminding ourselves that that we’re really really fortunate that everybody’s okay, stuff can be replaced.”

Realizing the scope of the damage to the house, what happened next was a question mark. Unable to get in contact with her insurance on a Sunday, nor the Memorial Day holiday the Monday after, Estes-Jones scrambled to get housing for herself, her husband and her mother.

“My kids went to go stay with their dad, so it just left, myself and my husband, my mom and our animals,” she said. “I called to get a hotel room and couldn’t find one, but the other one in town’s phone lines were down, so I jumped in my car and drove to see if they had rooms, and they had a couple left.”

Since then, the family has stayed in another local hotel and eventually pulled a camper onto their property before finding a rental. Estes-Jones’ mother, in the meantime, has been staying with a family friend. Estes-Jones is still working with insurance on her next steps regarding the house.

Just north of the high school on Y Highway, the yard of Bill and Doris Easley appeared to have been singled out for destruction.

“We woke up during the overnight hailstorm,” Bill Easley said. “But, when the hail quit, we went back to bed. We thought the worst was over.”

Unbeknownst to the Easleys at the time, however, the storm wasn’t through with them.

When Bill Easley looked out of his window Sunday morning, after sleeping soundly after the hailstorm passed, he discovered that the majority of the 200 once-towering trees in his five-acre yard were lying uprooted, blown over helter-skelter, on the ground. Giant trees blocked both his driveway and his front door, and covered almost all of the ground in his yard.

“About 90 percent of the trees in my yard suffered some kind of damage,” Easley said. “If they weren’t on the ground, uprooted, they had broken limbs or damage they won’t recover from. It’s unbelievable.”

Some of those 180 toppled and torn trees, Easley said, were 200 years old.

Given the staggering number of trees that were destroyed on his property, his home suffered relatively little damage.

Unable to help with yard clean-up efforts, Easley, who is 86 years old and has difficulty walking, sat in a lawn chair outside his garage and stared philosophically at the mayhem surrounding him. He’s deeply grateful for the help he’s received, he said.

“We had lots of volunteers come in with chainsaws to help get my driveway cleared,” Easley said. “At one point, I counted six chainsaws running at the same time. I’d hate to name any of the people who helped me, for fear I’d leave somebody out.”

Easley, whose grandson Jesse Anthonysz’s land-clearing crew is still working to clean up his yard, said anyone who wants free firewood is welcome to reach out to him. “The only stipulation is that they’ll need to bring their own chainsaws and cut it up and haul it off themselves,” he said Williams and Easley say they don’t anticipate that insurance will cover the cost of tree removal. Easley says he expects clean-up at his property to be in the neighborhood of $50,000, while Williams says she’s already spent $14,000 to have the tree removed from her house.

Neither party is complaining.

“I feel blessed to be alive,” Morgan Williams said.

Estes-Jones shared that sentiment and more, saying the community response in the aftermath of the storm has been an inspiration.

“My biggest takeaway is that life is about perspective and how we look at stuff,” she said. “It’s really easy to get really bogged down with how sad everything is and how hard it is, and to see something that you worked so hard for to get wrecked in an instant. But, as someone who’s not from here, it’s been very humbling to feel like an outsider and have so many people step in to help and tell me that they’re glad our family is OK and all the help they have offered. We’ve always tried to be that family for other people to support people and give them that space.

“As hard as it is for me to accept those things, it’s definitely shifted my perspective of the community I live in. Everyone really did come together to help in whatever way they could. So, I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is gratitude — that I’m still here, that my family is still here and that we are OK because we have great connections and friendships and we’ve made family with people here that have just been there for us. We just try to be grateful for every one we have and realize that in the grand scheme of things, it was really scary, but it’s only a moment, and we pick up and we move on. It could have been so much worse. And we’re so fortunate that it wasn’t.”