A few years ago I was researching some Bath newspapers for 1938, and came upon a display ad from some utility… I guess the telephone company… thanking customers for having been so patient as they sent trucks and crews to help with the disaster.
*Well, I wasn’t around back then, but as I write it is eighty years today that the Great New England Hurricane exploded without warning onto the people of Rhode Island, Long Island, and Connecticut. A few hours later, almost 700 of those people were dead.
*Landfall made seismographs jump in Alaska, and a sixty-foot tidal wave drowned desperate people who had fled to their attics. Actress Katherine Hepburn fled her Connecticut home through waist-deep water. In Westerly, RI, ten members of the Mothers Club at Christ Episcopal Church were lost at once. The day had started out warmly and nicely, if a little breezy. Lots of people made one last trip to the beach for the season. No one had any warning at all.
*My mother wasn’t in school yet, but HER mother was terrified for my aunt (now 90, and still going strong), and insisted that my grandfather drive to school and get her, but he couldn’t get through for the fallen trees. A school bus finally got her home by a roundabout route, and a male teacher carried her in because the wind carried her away.
*My father was just short of 13; he and HIS father crawled on their bellies across the road (the wind being too strong for them to stand upright) to check on an older couple there. My grandfather was a chicken farmer, and each of his henhouses rested on sledge runners so that they could be moved from time to time, rather than let the guano foul a given spot. As the wind rose the hen houses moved… then flew… then flindered, littering the ground, the wreckage, and the trees with dead chickens. And that was the end of the poultry business.
*Providence flooded. New London burned. A lucky handful literally rode their houses across Little Narragansett Bay from Rhode Island to Connecticut. Phones were out. Power was out. Roads and railways were blocked, bridges were gone, boats were wrecked. No one knew where their loved ones were. In many cases, they’d never know.
*It would have been far, far worse, but it roared through quickly. Even in Vermont it was still a Category One hurricane, derailing a train, killing five people, and blocking 2000 miles of roads. My father-in-law, near the Canadian line in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, remembered finding sea salt in the rain and the spray.
*The devastation of my grandfather’s farm of course was bad news in the Great Depression, but he was also a carpenter, and those same minutes that had destroyed the henhouses created years of repair work for carpenters.
*Others would get years of work hauling all the treefalls out of the forest, converting them to lumber, charcoal, or firewood. The Hurricane stimulated commercial air travel, which was suddenly the only way to get between New York and Boston. Two pilot friends of ours now had plenty of work flying photographers, meticulously documenting the altered coastline so that it could be remapped. (They used a Curtiss Robin – see one at Curtiss Museum.)
*The Hurricane’s very destructiveness paradoxically created opportunity. One writer stated that the Hurricane effectively ended the Depression in Rhode Island and Connecticut. That’s probably an overstatement, but it must be pretty close to the mark.
*New England hadn’t had a major hurricane since the War of 1812, but from 1938 on they’ve visited every few years, and in some seasons every few weeks. From what I can see only two U.S. storms since have had higher death tolls: Hurricane Maria last year, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
*The connection with western New York is slight, I know. But it was a major national event, and those who survived it included people I loved. I thought they were worth remembering.