Long Memories: A History of Andover in Ten (or so) Trees: The Great New England Hurricane of 1938
In September 1938, while Andover residents were focused on war clouds gathering over Europe, the most powerful hurricane recorded in New England history slammed ashore without warning.
September 21,1938 was merely a “gusty fall afternoon,” South Church pastor Frederic Nuss wrote to his brother George1, who was working as a missionary in Japan. “There were rain clouds and some falling moisture, but nothing unusual. Suddenly, with a bellow, the hurricane arrived, wrapping the branches of a big maple around its straining trunk, shaking the house [where he was making a call] and filling the air with flying shingles. I grabbed my hat and departed at top speed for home, half a mile away. Twice I had to turn the car around and seek another street. Some trees came up by the roots, being gently laid away to their last rest as a mother lays down her children at night; others snapped off at the base with splintering crashes and great violence like soldiers going down in a rain of shells. The ruination of branches occurred right and left as the stoutest oaks and butternuts bent to the ground in the fiercest gusts.”
The story of the 1938 Hurricane (also called the Long Island Express, since hurricanes were not designated with girls’ names until the early 1950s) is a frightening one. Originating off the coast of Africa, the storm built to category-5 strength as it crossed the Atlantic mostly unnoticed. Meteorologists expected it to hit south Florida since no major hurricane had swept as far as New England for more than a century. There was no advanced technology, of course, such as radar or satellite imagery to warn of the storm’s intensity, and media attention was focused on the worsening Sudetenland crisis (in which the powers of Europe tried to appease Nazi Germany by forcing Czechoslovakia to cede territory). When the U.S. Weather Bureau realized the storm had changed direction and was moving north at a startling 60 mph, it was too late for a warning. The storm came ashore on Long Island at high tide (about 2:30 p.m.) as a Category 3 with waves 40 feet tall and winds over 100 mph.2 It regained intensity as it crossed Long Island Sound and clipped the Connecticut coast and Rhode Island. Wind speeds at the Blue Hill Observatory south of Boston reached an astounding 186 mph. By the time the storm dissipated over Canada about midnight, 700 people had been killed, mostly in Long Island, and many more injured. Homes, buildings, ships, railroads, farms and forests across the region were destroyed.
The full extent of the destruction in Andover was seen when the sun came up the next morning. More than 330 mature trees (heavy with leaves in late September) had fallen across town, blocking roads, damaging buildings, and bringing down phone and power lines. Much of Shawsheen Village was under a foot of water with the Shawsheen river, swollen by a week of rain, still rising. The old Tyer Rubber plant on North Main Street (where the fire station is now) had lost its roof and a section of its top floor. The steeple of the Baptist Church was leaning. The iconic Parker’s Wharf off Andover Street in Ballardvale was completely collapsed, and a large tree rested atop the ancient Abbot homestead, believed then to be the oldest house in town.
The town was lucky, especially as compared to other communities. “Andover has a great many things to be thankful for this week,” editor Grover wrote. “True it lost an awful lot of the town's beautiful trees which it will take decades, even centuries to replace, but the storm and the flood gave us a good many reasons to be grateful.” Townspeople had pulled together, as often happens during an emergency, and only a few injuries were reported. Police officer James W. Walker, a Scottish immigrant who lived with his family in Shawsheen Village escaped with only a dislocated shoulder when a tree fell on him at the corner of Locke Street and Main. Power company worker Henry Barry of Methuen suffered burns to his hand and “shock” when he picked up a live wire at the intersection of School Street and Main. The nearest brush with disaster seemed to be Abbot Academy French instructor Hilda Baynes who nearly drowned when the train car in which she was a passenger was overturned by an ocean wave in Stonington, Connecticut. Reeve Chipman of 5 Morton Street, on the same train, saw the 51-year-old Miss Baynes clinging to a tree before other men were able to reach her. When he returned home, he found the garage of his rented house destroyed, but it must have seemed relatively unimportant.
Frederic Noss and his family (wife Emily and daughters Letitia or “Tish” age 8, Lura Jane, age 6, and Marion Augusta or “Gussie”, age 3) lived at 39 Morton Street. Upon arriving home the afternoon of the storm, he gathered the little girls outside on the lawn to observe “with Muir-like admiration” the trees on the bank above their house putting up “a magnificent fight.” All their leaves were still green, Noss wrote later to his brother, affording a terrible purchase, and the roar of the battle sounded like the deepest notes of a gigantic organ. How that old wind gathered up its full strength and hurled itself upon them, time after time, tearing away a heavy branch here and there, storming in through the openings and grappling with the trunk itself. My neighbor had excavated among the rocks where a big red oak stood and weakened the root system. With a yell the storm broke upon that heroic tree, twisting, turning and battering it without ceasing. It seemed to have hold of the rocks only with its finger tips, like a human hand thrust but slightly into the safety of the ground. One by one the fingers of the roots snapped off, and still the trunk stood upright. There came a lull, and a patter of rain. The branches swung back in wide arcs against the lessening pressure. The tree shivered, and then with lightning suddenness flashed to the ground, full length, carrying with it a sixty-foot red oak of mine. The double fall came so suddenly that the eye could barely follow the movement and the noise of the wind had reached such a pitch that I heard not a sound of the fall, although my tree left a twelve-foot splinter still standing.”
I can assure you without reservation that although the strength and fury of the storm was beyond anything in my experience, that there was not the slightest taint of evil anywhere. I could have sworn that the sound trees enjoyed their struggle, and I could swear now that they will be all the better for Nature is ever kind at heart, though sometimes a bit boisterous. The woods can stand a storm far better than any woodsman's axe, however wisely used. And the forests of New England had a thorough overhauling that night, I can assure you too. Nothing unworthy remained to cumber the ground with sick and rotten trunk. The young and vigorous almost universally survived. Specimen spruce and fir suffered heavily, it is true, as witness the lusty Engelmann by my study door. Jane and I noticed it going slightly askew, shortly after its roots began to snap. I had rushed out to demolish with an axe a drunken staggering cherry which over-burdened with its falling top, a young Colorado blue. One by one with reports like a pistol we could hear them go. Then in increasing measure the tall spire of the Engelmann swept down closer and closer to the ground. Watching it we could see through the hurrying wrack a glimpse of blue sky now and again. Little fleecy clouds wandered softly high above our wild tumult. Jane began to cry, "I don't want that tree to go over. It's my favorite tree. I never go out the door without thinking about it." There and then I promised her that if it did not break but just turned over, I would rescue it for her on the morrow.”
I did, too, with her assistance. We drove the car around on the lawn and managed to back it between the garage and the pine tree. Our patient lay almost flat, so we got the extension ladder and strove to prop it up. It rose a little and the car's jack helped us a little more. Then we assembled every rope in the house. We took down the swing, we dismembered the rope bed, we tore down the clothesline (there was the deuce to pay for that) and joined them all together in one loose whole. These we attached to some one place on the fallen and fastened the other to the rear axle of the car. Jane became the flagman, and I manned the clutch. Slowly I drove ahead, but just as Jane signaled that the tree stood, the rope broke. Four times this happened, but we both grew more skillful and secured our prize at last. Propped and stayed, the Engelmann shows green and sound today, a monument to Jane's love and gratitude.”
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Thanks, as always, for reading!
Jane
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The Nuss Family papers are held in the Special Collection of Mount Holyoke College, (MS 0624). The full version of this letter was also published on the Wonalancet Out Door Club’s blog and describes the hurricane’s impact on New Hampshire’s Sandwich mountain range. You can read it here.
National Weather Service data. https://www.weather.gov/okx/1938HurricaneHistory
What a moving description of the local impact of the 1938 hurricane. Well done!
700 dead. That's sobering. When I lived near Savannah, GA, I saw the entire city evacuate in 1999, in advance of an anticipated Cat 5. The authorities came close to ordering us out, even though our town was an hour inland, and taking Savannah refugees. At least we have warnings now, but as we have seen (most notoriously during Katrina), acting on them can be painfully disorganized and slow.