Herbert L. Wilber Records the Great Atlantic Hurricane, 1944

Herbert L. Wilber (1890-1984) of South Middleborough was known during his life as a local pastor and teacher of Latin and Ancient History at Middleborough High School.  Less well known was the fact that he kept a daily diary for much of his life, beginning in 1919.  Among the many items Wilber recorded in his diary was the September, 1944, hurricane and its impact both at South Middleborough and Middleborough center.

Sept 14/44 Thursday  -  I am writing this by candle light.  The house lights failed about 8.20.  There was lightning at the time, but not much.  The hurricane is coming, and at present we are having a fairly good rain.  It rained last night and at times heavily.  Then there would be a lull.  There was a heavy, sultry atmosphere all day.  Several boys were excused from school to pick apples.  [Wilber's nephew] Kenneth was among them.  He told me that he picked 19 boxes of apples to-day....

Collected pay and got home as soon as I reasonably could.

Started to pick apples about 3.30.  Wife helped a little, and [Wilber's son] Philip, and in all we picked and put into the cellar 12 boxes of nice MacIntosh.

Sept 15/44  -  The hurricane has come and gone, and in our section did more property damage than [the 1938 hurricane] 6 years ago.  All the pines of the upper grove belonging to my mother are down.  Most of the lower grove are uprooted, and I have lost about half of mine below, and the Paull lot looked pretty sick as I passed it.

The heaviest part of the storm was from 11 to 12, and it eased enough by 1 A. M. so that I went to sleep.  Our best apple tree, in the back yard, is split in three with the largest piece broken clear off.  One pear tree is down.  I hate to think of what has probably happened to my other woodlots.  Is the White lot now prostrate?  Time will tell.  The country needs lumber, but who is going to cut this?  Who will haul it?  Who will saw it?

2/3 of the Baldwins are on the ground.  I will salvage what I can.  We are thankful that the house escaped injury with the exception of a very few shingles.  The barn windows and big doors were hurt a little, but not too badly.

Many houses below had shingles blown off.  My mother's, Smith's, the parsonage, the church - So. Midd, Sisson's too, I think.  Henry Guerin lost a good deal of his roof covering on the garage.

Many trees blocked roads.  Purchase St. was impassable.  So. Main was very bad.  No lights remained, and but few telephones.  Our phone seems out of operation.  We are using the outside pump.  I took up Kenneth to Middleboro, but there was no school, of course.  A score of slates had been ripped off the roof, but no trees were down [at the High School]....

Gangs were at work clearing the streets.  Ryder's Store [on Center Street] had a whole plate glass window shattered.  Clerks at the post office happily blamed the whole thing on the Democrats.

We came back and went to Tispaquin [Pond].  Bert Chase was standing disconsolately outside his house looking at about 3 ruined maple trees.  We could not go up Purchase Street, but crossed Carver's land to the pond.  The water level has come up 8 or 10 inches - back to Spring standards.  My dead pine and biggest dead oak are broken down and did practically no damage.  Other trees are bent but no other of mine is down there.

...Picked up over 4 bushels of windfall MacIntosh....

Cape Cod suffered this time.  Provincetown had to be evacuated.  Main St. was under water.

Little loss of life this time, on account of warnings.

While the concern for picking apples may seem misplaced in the face of a major hurricane, the storm occurred at the height of World War II when strict rationing of food was in effect, and so the salvage of any food item before it could be destroyed was critical.  As hinted by Wilber, one of the biggest impacts of the 1944 hurricane (along with its 1938 predecessor) was the destruction of large tracts of woodland.  Because labor was in short supply, much of this timber went to waste, and the hurricane would be responsible for hastening the decline of the local lumber industry.  

The Eastern New England Hurricane of 1869

Middleborough has witnessed its share of severe hurricanes, including the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635,the Storm of October 1804, the “Great Gale” of September 1815, the New England Hurricane of 1938, the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944, and Hurricane Carol (1954), among others. One of the most damaging of the 19th century hurricanes was the Eastern New England Hurricane of 1869, which struck Middleborough on September 9 of that year. Historically classed as a category 3 storm when it plowed into the southern New England coast, the hurricane passed over Rhode Island with its greatest devastation in that state and southeastern Massachusetts. Though believed to have been a compact storm, it brought fierce winds which did much damage at Middleborough. The town’s experience during the storm is recorded for posterity in the pages of the Plymouth Old Colony Memorial which originally excerpted the news from the Middleboro Gazette.

The Gazette contains an account of the storm in that place. Much damage was done to trees, and property. The most serious disaster occurred to the lately raised dwelling house of Charles Stratton (Tom Thumb) which had just been shingled. It seemed to have been taken up bodily and cast down, broken in fragments, into the cellar. In the fall of the chimney [smokestack] of the establishment of Messrs. Leonard & Barrows, down through the roof, a man named Perkins was injured on the head. The chimney on the house of the Pierce Brothers fell through the porch roof directly upon the laid supper table demolishing all thereon and the result of the girl’s day’s work upon the dresser, and injuring the girl slightly. The chimney upon Mr. Sylvester’s store descended through the window of the post office building adjoining. The Congregational church and weather-vane upon it and chapel adjoining the church received much damage, and the Baptist church steeple got a slight twist, and was looked upon anxiously by many curious ones who were fearful of its fall. We are told that the damage done to the property of Mr. Albert Alden, of the Bay State Straw Works, will approach $3,000, also that Mr. John B. LeBaron will sustain a damage of about $100. There are over 50 chimneys blown down. The morning of Thursday was indeed a ragged looking morning; trees, many valuable ones, small wood sheds, old barns, blinds from houses, glass and sashes from the windows, fences &c, lay around promiscuously. From all parts of the town the story is repeated.

Source:
Old Colony Memorial, "Middleboro.", September 17, 1869, page 2.

Great Gale of 1815

The arrival of late summer brings with it its usual threat of hurricanes, and Middleborough and Lakeville occasionally have been battered by tropical storms over the centuries, a number of which still remain within living memory of older residents, including those of 1938, 1944 and 1954. Among the most devastating hurricanes locally was the "big gale"of 1815. Believed to have been a high category 3 storm, the gale (the word "hurricane" had yet to be adopted to describe such storms) was then considered to have been the worst storm to have ever struck the region. While there remain few records of the hurricane locally, assuredly the best is an eyewitness account written in later life by local historian Granville Temple Sproat who was a young boy when he experienced the storm.

The storm began Friday morning, September 22, when dark storm clouds gathered and rain began to fall heavily. After noon, the wind gradually increased steadily, blowing in strong gusts, while the rain seemed to subside. Friday evening, the winds died somewhat and the storm appeared to have ceased, but the following morning, as the storm tracked over central Long Island and Connecticut, the wind returned with renewed ferocity in Middleborough and Lakeville, destroying buildings, uprooting trees and scattering unsecured objects throughout the day.

Apprehensive of the impending danger, residents of the Court End section of Middleborough, along with Sproat, gathered in the Wood House which stood on the site presently occupied by the Rite-Aid parking lot on South Main Street. The Wood House was a low squat gambrel-roofed structure which hugged the ground and, as such, was deemed a much safer refuge than any of the other houses in the vicinity which “were high, and trembled and rocked to their foundations”.

In the Wood House the neighborhood children were confined in the long, narrow rear entry where they occupied themselves playing Blind Man’s Bluff, blithely “unmindful of the gale.” When a terrific gust, however, came along and took with it both the woodshed and the outhouse which were attached to the rear entry, the children were promptly relocated to a more secure room. “The noise of the falling buildings brought our mothers to the spot, who quickly hustled us into the main dwelling”, wrote Sproat many years afterwards.

The storm destroyed numerous barns throughout town, scattering their contents in the process, and most recollections of the storm, including that of Sproat, contain an account of the loose hay which filled the air. “The writer remembered looking out, and seeing the heavens dark with floating hay from a barn, the roof of which had been carried away by the violence of the wind.”

Though many of the children were undoubtedly fascinated by the novelty of the tempest, the many ladies in the house were equally frightened by its immense and brute power. “A large apple tree, torn up by the roots in an adjacent orchard, was rolled through the streets as though it had been drawn by oxen, much to the terror of the women in the house. They feared it would be dashed by the wind against the walls of the building, and crush them in.”

Nor were the fears of the women allayed when the heavy front door of the house was blown open. “…The women could not shut it. Men had to come with planks to secure it.”

The ancient Morton House which stood in the middle of South Main Street opposite the Wood House surprisingly survived the hurricane, blessed as it was with its sturdy pegged construction. Sproat recalled that from his vantage point at a window in the Wood House he could spy the Morton House “surging and swaying in the blast.” The Morton House literally weathered the storm. “Its firm oaken timbers did not give way – they stood strong to the end of the gale.”
At the Green, the windows of the First Precinct Church were torn from the building by the winds and deposited in the midst of Meetinghouse Swamp, where they were later discovered “hanging among the trees, the glass gone.” Elsewhere about town, trees were uprooted and many buildings severely damaged.

Eventually, during the afternoon on Saturday, the storm subsided. “Much was the joy expressed when the violence of the gale abated, and we could return again to our own homes, and find them still standing, having braved the fury of the hurricane.” It is said that attendance at church that Sunday was off, many of the men and older boys absent in order to begin the process of clearing the debris left in the wake of the hurricane. Of the extent of the damage done in Middleborough, or the lives that were affected, we know nothing.

One later chronicler of the devastation brought by the storm touched upon this subject, writing “Just how many lives were lost, many of them being those of husbands and fathers, and how much property was destroyed cannot be ascertained. Neither can one know how many fond hopes were forever blasted, how many changes in life and its plans were caused, nor the pain of body and heart that followed.”

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Illustrations:

James Gillray, "The Three Graces in a High Wind", engraving, 1810.

While Middleborough ladies at the time of the 1815 hurricane would not have been dressed as fashionably as the subjects of Gillray's satirical print, they would have worn similar loose-fitting dresses which became cumbersome in the heavy wind and rain of the storm. Fortunately, most of the women residing in the vicinity of the Wood House had taken refuge there before the height of the storm on Saturday.

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Wood House, South Main Street, Middleborough, photograph, c. 1900.

Because of its heavy frame and squat structure, the Wood House became the refuge for residents of the Court End section of Middleborough during the hurricane of September 23, 1815. While the attached woodshed and outhouse were torn by the powerful winds from the house, the building weathered the storm and all those inside remained safe, including Granville Temple Sproat who would later record his recollection of the momentous storm.