As we brought in the bird feeders, stocked up on batteries, and
prepared for Hurricane Sandy, we remembered past hurricanes and storms. I’ll never forget my former brother-in-law
riding out the “Perfect Storm” of 1991
on board his lobster boat in Menemsha, Massachusetts.
(He survived!) My mother will never forget Hurricane Daisy in 1958 that
arrived just before her wedding. My father worked for Traveler’s Insurance, and
went to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Betsy as a claims adjuster in
1965. His letters to my mother describe
the devastation. According to Wikipedia it was “the first tropical cyclone in
the Atlantic Basin to cause $1 billion (1965 USD) in damage.” These stories
live on in our family history.
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| One of my favorite books about New England after the 1938 storm |
The hurricane of 1938 was expected to turn out to sea, but
instead it headed directly north into New England. The storm surge ahead of the storm caused
south facing bays such as Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode
Island to experience unprecedented flooding and loss of life. Here, further north, the damage was caused by
wind that caused entire forests to be flattened as far north as Maine and Nova
Scotia. The wind on top of Mount
Washington was measured at 163 mph. Gusts were measured above 180 mph in Rhode
Island.
New Hampshire had been hit by a huge flood in 1936, and then
the hurricane in 1938. In the middle of
the Great Depression, this was an unbearable hardship for many New Englanders. Whole neighborhoods along the coast were
washed away forever. The inland
landscape was forever changed when centuries old trees were uprooted, and
historic homes, churches and other buildings were destroyed.
The eye of the storm passed up the New Hampshire and Vermont
border, along the Connecticut River. The
storm hit Londonderry and Derry at about five in the afternoon, and continued
its fury all night. The next morning
townspeople woke to see the devastation.
In Derry the conservative estimate was 450 trees down. There wasn’t electricity to the area for
days, and Broadway in Derry was black for 48 hours. There was not a single death in Derry or
Londonderry. A woman from Derry, Edna
Clark, was vacationing in North Weare, New Hampshire and was swept to her death
when a dam gave way.
In his history of Derry Nutfield Rambles, Derry’s former
town historian, Richard Holmes, reported that Adams Pond was filled with
thousands of logs from the windblown trees, and were turned into boards at the
local sawmill. Two billion feet of
usable timber were felled by the hurricane.
60, 000 people in New Hampshire were made homeless, and thirteen lost
their lives. There was about $12 million
in storm damage to New Hampshire (1938 dollars).
It is hard to imagine the tree damage, until you learn an
entire project that built on the fallen trees from the Hurricane of 1938. That was the woman’s sawmill at Turkey Pond
in Concord, New Hampshire. In 1942 the
US Forest Service built a sawmill on Turkey Pond and hired women (while the men
served in WWII) to cut the fallen trees into boards for the war effort. This is New Hampshire’s version of “Rosy the
Riveter”, and was written up into the book They Sawed Up a Storm, by Sarah Shea
Smith.
These stories are passed along in our families. Make sure you record all oral histories, and
any other events that affect your family.
Someday your children or grandchildren will ask “Where were you during
Hurricane Sandy of 2012?”
For more information:
Nutfield Rambles, by Richard Holmes, Peter Randall Publisher,
2007
They Sawed up a Storm, by Sarah Shea Smith, Peter Randall
Publisher, 2011 . Place an order at http://turkeypond.com/
“Hurricane of 1938: Memories of the Last Big One”, Eagle Tribune, Lawrence, Mass., 30 July
2006 http://www.eagletribune.com/local/x1876247807/Hurricane-of-1938-Memories-of-the-last-big-one/print
From Rick Holmes, images of the 1938 storm http://www.londonderryimages.com/History/Historic-Derry-New-Hampshire/9242228_F35JLT/1001119225_A68an#!i=1001119225&k=wbNhGZp
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Copyright 2012, Heather Wilkinson Rojo
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