Baldwin County recorded its third documented tornado in four years last Thursday morning, as a 100-yard-wide twister developed somewhere in the vicinity of State Dairy Farm Road before barrelling across Blandy Road.
After causing damage around Midway Hills Primary, the twister made its way through the stretch of woods between Georgia College & State University’s West Campus and the Baldwin County School District’s main campus. The tornado then crossed the bypass without looking both ways and skirted along the northern end of the West End projects. Its official 3.56-mile path ended around North Pickens Street and North Clark Street, where multiple trees were downed.
The National Weather Service classified the twister as an EF0, meaning winds never exceeded 75 miles per hour. It marked the first documented tornado in Baldwin County since late March 2023, when a seven-mile-long twister caused significant property damage along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, North Jefferson Street and Barrows Ferry Road. The Northside Baptist Church property was hit relatively hard. Classified as an EF1, with wind speeds reaching an estimated 105 miles per hour, the tornado crossed the river and eventually fizzled out around Lake Laurel and Black Springs Road. The two most recent tornados, the one from last week and the one from March 2023, are the only two in recent memory that went through wide stretches of the Milledgeville city limits. All others in recent memory have occurred in rural Baldwin County, including an EF0 tornado back in April 2022 that began in Hancock County and ran parallel to Deepstep Road for roughly a quarter mile.