Perhaps if Dorothy had known she was in the middle of “Tornado Alley” she would have better prepared for one and not gotten carried away with the rest of her house. The better part of Great Plains, from Kansas westward to Ohio and down into Northern Texas comprise the Tornado Alley region, where the frequency and intensity of twisters is the highest. Decades before the name came to be, climatologists began noticing patterns of tornadoes over those states.

On this day, June 5, in 1805, a tornado twisted in from Franklin and Jefferson counties of Missouri across parts of southern Illinois, marking the first ever recorded tornado in the land and the first one in Tornado Alley.

Tornado Alley got its name in the mid-1950s from a project of the same name set up by two officers from the Air Force Severe Weather Warning Center. The officers were to monitor and record tornado outbreaks from Lubbock, Texas, to Colorado and Nebraska, and their reports introduced the term into popular culture. Illinois was notably far outside the monitored zone, which shows the inexactness of the outlines of the the so-called “tornado alley”.