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Science and Nature

The Great Gale of 1879

The Great Gale of 1879 showed why Nantucket earned the nickname the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The storm, which began on March 31, disabled dozens of vessels in the waters off the island. The townspeople picked bodies off the beach for several days and cared for 40 shipwrecked mariners who were brought ashore.

Thomas Sandsbury earned a silver lifesaving medal and $25 for bringing one of them in. And then the U.S. Treasury gave him a gold medal.

The Great Gale of 1879

The Great Gale made landfall on the evening of March 31. The storm grew more violent though the night. Ferocious winds, dense fog and storm tides that nearly swamped the docks. The sea grew white and the elements raged, according to an Inquirer and Mirror story when it finally ended on April 5.

The U.S. Coast Guard later reported 68 disabled vessels off the coast of Nantucket on April 1. The island sat right on a busy maritime highway along the East Coast. There were schooners and brigs from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, New Jersey and Maine, and they were sailing to Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They carried coal, sugar, lumber and lime.

Dozens of vessels sailed past the north and south coasts of Nantucket every day. As the Great Gale of 1879 approached, they hunkered down in the lee of the storm. But when the fog lifted enough for people on land to see what had happened, they saw many, many vessels in distress.

At first light on April 2, 1879, Town Crier Billy Clark told Capt. Thomas Sandsbury that the storm had left four vessels in distress off the west end of Nantucket near Tuckernuck Island.

Lifesavers

Sandsbury volunteered for the Massachusetts Humane Society. The MHS, founded in 1786, relied on volunteers to risk their own lives to save others. As an incentive, the Humane Society awarded silver and gold medals, as well as cash, for heroic rescues at sea.

The federal government then created the U.S. Life-Saving Service in 1848, modeling it on the Humane Society.

By 1871, the Massachusetts Humane Society managed 78 lifeboats and 92 huts, boathouses and other structures along the coast. Like many Humane Society leaders, Thomas Sandsbury was later hired by the Life-Saving Service. He served for several years as the first keeper of the Muskeget Life-Saving Station beginning in 1883.

Town crier Billy Clark. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

But in 1879 Sandsbury was still a volunteer, and after he got the word from Billy Clark he summoned seven other volunteers. They would spend the next 32 hours out straight, rescuing mariners in distress.

Sandsbury hired a team, and the men hitched a dory to it and drove it six miles to Eel Point. There they launched the dory. The men rowed three miles through the fog and the roiling waters to Tuckernuck. They reached the island and then rowed to the schooner John W. Hall. The schooner had sought shelter in the sound, but the storm broke her anchor chains and she hit rocks near Muskeget. The John W. Hall crewmen had lashed themselves to the rigging until the rescue crew arrived. Sandsbury’s crew took four men off the schooner. According to one account, they carried them in the surfboat to Muskeget. Or perhaps they rowed with them to other distressed ships.

Emma J. Edwards

They then rowed out to the incapacitated schooner Emma. The crew wasn’t in grave danger, Sandsbury and his men then spotted a ship bouncing on the waves about four miles off Tuckernuck Island. They rowed out to it and found the nearly capsized Emma J. Edwards.

Fifty-eight years later, Marcus Dunham, the last surviving crewman, recalled the ordeal of rowing four miles in rough seas to the Emma J. Edwards.

“The seas kept breaking over us all the time we headed her into the wind. It was cold and the water was like ice. We couldn’t get anywhere near the schooner at first. She was lying on her side, her masts lifting to every sea and, as she had all sail set, every time she come down she’d sent the spray twenty feet into the air.”

A shipwrecked schooner

“The condition of this vessel was dreadful,” according to the Massachusetts Humane Society citation. “She was capsized and full of water. Enormous seas continually poured over her, and at each one she would roll, thrashing the water with her topmasts, which would rise again fifteen or twenty feet, and flail the water anew, so that it was almost impossible to get near her. “

They spotted a man lashed to the upper cross-trees, making weak hand gestures. Two dead men lay under him.

The rising and falling masts threatened to smash the surfboat to bits, but Sandsbury, with difficulty, maneuvered the boat out of danger. Then George Coffin fastened himself to a line, jumped into the water m to the cross-tree. He then cut loose the survivor, tied his line around him and lowered him into the sea. The others hauled him into the boat. Then, after some effort, he freed the dead bodies and lowered them into the sea where the others could retrieve them. Then he jumped into the sea himself and got pulled into the surfboat.

Sandsbury realized the overloaded boat couldn’t make headway against the violent wind and surf toward Tuckernuck. So they maneuvered the boat before the wind and rowed 11 miles to Nantucket.

More Rescues During the Great Gale of 1879

The men then deposited the bodies with the medical examiner and took the survivor to shelter. The storm still raged, and they knew they had more work ahead. So they wheeled a surfboat to Madaket on the western end of the island and rowed out to Muskegat Island. There they spent the night under the boat for shelter.

Muskegat Island

At daybreak they towed out to retrieve the crew aboard the Emma. According to some accounts, it was then that they took the J.W. Hall mariners off the vessel. They then rowed their overloaded surfboat back to Madaket, arriving at 3 p.m.
For their bravery, they each received $25 and a silver medal. Sandsbury also got the gold medal. You can see one donated by Marcus Dunham at the Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum.

With thanks to the “A Legacy of Infamy and Heroism” by Olivia Jackson for the Egan Maritime Institute. This story updated in 2024.

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The Wreck of the Famine Ship St. John (According to Thoreau)

On Oct. 7, 1849, the brig St. John struck Grampus Ledge off the coast of Cohasset during a sudden and furious storm.

The St. John was known as a famine ship because its passengers were mostly destitute Irish emigrants fleeing the great famine. An estimated 20 percent died of disease or starvation aboard the famine ships, but more than a hundred died in the wreck of the St. John.

Henry David Thoreau happened to visit Cape Cod as the victims were gathered and buried. His account forms the opening chapter of his book Cape Cod.

Wreck of the St. John

Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Mass., decided he wanted to get a better view than he’d had of the ocean. He and a companion, the poet William Ellery Channing, left Concord for Boston on Oct. 9, 1849. On reaching Boston they learned the steamship to Provincetown hadn’t arrived because of a violent storm. They saw in the streets a handbill that said, “Death! 145 lives lost at Cohasset.”

Henry David Thoreau

So they decided to take the train to Cohasset.

“We found many Irish in the cars, going to identify bodies and to sympathize with the survivors, and also to attend the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon,” Thoreau wrote.

When they arrived, nearly every passenger headed to the beach and many others flocked in from the nearby countryside.

“As we passed the graveyard we saw a large hole, like a cellar, freshly dug there,” he wrote. And “we met several hay riggings and farm-wagons coming away toward the meeting house, each loaded with three large, rough deal boxes. We did not need to ask what was in them.”

Thoreau learned the St. John, from Galway, had wrecked on Sunday morning. The sea on Tuesday still broke violently on the rocks. Thoreau probably did not then know that the captain, Martin Oliver, hadn’t exactly tried to save the passengers.

Martin Oliver

According to the Boston Daily Bee, before the ship smashed against the rock,

…the jolly boat was hanging by the tackle, alongside, when the stern ringbolt broke and the boat fell into the water. The Captain, second mate and two boys jumped in to get her clear, when about 25 passengers jumped in and swamped her. The twenty-five, together with the second mate and two boys, perished. The captain caught a rope hanging over the quarter, and was drawn on board by the first mate. When the long boat was got clear, a number of passengers jumped over to swim to her, but all perished. The captain, first mate (Mr. Crawford), and seven of the crew swam to and reached the boat.

Large Boxes

On the beach in Cohasset, Thoreau noted 18 or 20 of the large boxes lying on a green hillside and surrounded by a crowd. People had collected the bodies, some 27 or 28, and brought them there. “Some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths, for each body, with such rags as still adhered to it, was covered loosely with a white sheet.”

He witnessed no sign of grief, he wrote, “but there was a sober dispatch of business which was affecting.”

“I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen and mangled body of a drowned girl, — who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family,–to which some rags still adhered…”

Sometimes, he wrote, he saw two or more children or a parent and child in the same box. “On the lid would perhaps be written with red chalk, “Bridget such-a-one, and sister’s child.”

The shore along the border of Scituate and Cohasset.

The Remains of the St. John

Thoreau then walked along the beach and saw in a cove bits of a ship and a great quantity of feathers. A sailor told him that was the St. John. Then Thoreau looked out at Grampus Rock and saw part of the vessel sticking up.

In a second cove the wreckage on shore piled up several feet deep, with an occasional bonnet or jacket on it.

“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up,” he wrote. Sometimes they had to separate clothing fragments from the seaweed.

Thoreau then discovered a part of one side of the St. John behind some rocks. He estimated its size as 40 feet long and 14 feet wide.

“I was even more surprised at the power of the waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, than I had been at the sight of the smaller fragments before,” he wrote. “The largest timbers and iron braces were broken superfluously, and I saw that no material could withstand the power of the waves; that iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks.”

The Funeral

Then, in the afternoon, Thoreau and Channing saw the funeral procession at a distance. The captain and the other survivors of the St. John walked at the head of it.

Cohasset Central Cemetery

“On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected,” he wrote. “If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day.”

Thoreau concluded his essay on the wreck of the St. John with the observation that the victims had come to the New World as Columbus or the Pilgrims had.

“[B]ut, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence — though it has not yet been discovered by science…”

Most of the victims today lie buried in Cohasset Central Cemetery.

Take a sensory journey through Ireland’s past with this fascinating book about the history of the Irish people. An Amazon #1 New Release! You can order it in paperback now by clicking here.

Image: Cohasset shore by Chris Devers, CC by 2.0, via Flickr. Cohasset Central Cemetery Google image: 2021 MassGIS, Commonwealth of Massachusetts EOEA, Maxar Technologies, Map data 2021. This story updated in 2023.

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The Great Lakeport Fire of 1903 Destroys a New Hampshire Village

Laconia, N.H., suffered several devastating fires over the centuries, but none so damaging as the Great Lakeport Fire of 1903.

A fire in 1846 wiped out much of Laconia, then known as Meredith Bridge and comprised of mostly wooden buildings.

The Lakeport Fire of 1903

Then on Nov. 11, 1860 a fire destroyed two-thirds of Laconia’s downtown business district. It started in a hotel stable and quickly spread, ruining all but two dry goods stores in the town. The town had only two fire engines and Meredith Village and Sanbornton Bridge came to help put it out.

Two Disasters

In 1902, Laconia suffered the first of two disasters within six months when an explosion destroyed the Masonic temple. The most imposing edifice in town, it housed two floors of Masons, the post office, city offices and a hardware and dry goods store.

It started with a fire, probably caused by a gas leak, and then the powder magazine in the basement exploded. The blast prostrated spectators and damaged many nearby buildings. It seemed a miracle that the explosion didn’t kill anyone, and eight inches of snow on the roofs kept the fire from causing further damage.

Conditions that spring, however, proved ideal for a devastating fire in Lakeport Village.

Great Lakeport Fire

Lakeport in 1903 was a bustling village of factories, homes, churches and an electric plant, located a mile-and-a-half north of downtown Laconia. It’s also five miles south of the Weirs Beach resort. At the center of Lakeport sits a power dam on the channel between Paugus Bay, an arm of Lake Winnipesaukee, and Opechee Bay.

The spring of 1903 had been exceptionally dry, so dry the National Weather Service would have put out a red flag warning. Strong winds gusted on the morning of May 26, when a fire started in the H.H. Woods hosiery mill. The alarm sounded at 2 PM.

The fire quickly spread to a lumber yard and Laconia Electric Lighting Co. The wind drove it uphill, carrying embers as far as four miles to the north and east.

Help arrived quickly by train from Concord, Franklin, and Dover. Tilton and Meredith brought help as well. The Laconia firefighters had only primitive firefighting equipment, though, and mostly pulled the engines themselves.

Burning Itself Out

Within four hours the fire consumed almost every building within 150 acres. It quite possibly ran out of buildings to burn, and stopped climbing when it came to flat land, according to the History of the Laconia Fire Department. The fire pretty much burned itself out, and firefighters called the conflagration under control at 6 PM.

The fire destroyed 108 homes, two churches, two factories, two blacksmith shops, a vacant mill, the fire station and the electric light plant. For the second time in a year, Laconians miraculously escaped death. Losses were estimated as high as $461,000, and 650 people lost their homes.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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The Christmas Blizzard of 1909: ‘The Sea Never Gives Up The Living’

More than 50 people died in the Christmas blizzard of 1909, a two-day storm with disastrous effects from Pennsylvania to Canada. The worst carnage happened at sea, where the storm caught mariners unaware.

Mild weather had dominated December of 1909 in New England. The weather service reported 20 “ideal days” that month. But the string of mild weather came to a halt.

In New England, ships crashed onto the rocks, people drowned in their beds and bodies turned up buried in snow for weeks.

The Christmas Blizzard Starts

The snow started falling and gale winds arrived at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and would take some 24 hours to peter out, with two monster high tides. Snow totaled roughly 18-inches, but it varied from place to place along with the winds. In Boston, for instance, the highest wind recorded was 54 miles per hour, but on Cape Cod winds soared to 84 miles per hour.

Though not the largest blizzard ever, the Christmas blizzard of 1909 left a dramatic impact. All in all, the Christmas blizzard of 1909 did more than $10 million in damage and resulted in more than 50 deaths in the United States.

Chelsea and Everett Flooded

Chelsea and Everett, Mass., felt the most dramatic impact of the wind and tides. After initially holding strong, the floodgates at the mouth of the Island End River gave way at night as the storm surge pushed water higher.

Ocean water rushed into the streets, flooding low-lying homes and businesses in a matter of minutes. Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Harkins drowned while asleep in their bed, the newspapers reported, and Michael Callahan, an elderly man, drowned when flood waters invaded his home – on the second floor.

Forced from their homes, hundreds of residents waited in the raging blizzard as wagons slowly transported them to safety on higher ground. It would take weeks to rebuild the floodgates and restore people to their homes.

In all, 25,000 people fled their homes as the ocean waters pushed through the streets. Eighty acres of land flooded. At least four people drowned.

Connecticut and Rhode Island survived with less damage, though it took work crews days to restore telegraph and railroad lines.

The Christmas Blizzard at Sea

The ships at sea felt the greatest effects of the 1909 Christmas blizzard. The Seamen’s Journal reported 15 ships lost or severely damaged, with many more incidents not recorded. The Davis Palmer accounted for the most tragic loss of the storm.

Sister Ship to Davis Palmer werched in the Christmas Blizzard of 1909

Schooner Paul Palmer, Sister Ship to Davis Palmer wrecked in the Christmas Blizzard of 1909

As Christmas approached, the Davis Palmer, a five-masted schooner, made her way north around Cape Cod toward Boston Harbor. The ship was one of 14 that naval architect W.F. Palmer built and named for his children. The Bath, Maine, shipyards produced the Davis Palmer; she stretched more than 300 feet in length.

The crew aboard the Davis Palmer celebrated Christmas in style, oblivious to their fate. The barge Hop Along reported passing by the ship. The Palmer’s crew stood on deck singing and making merry as they headed toward their destination, loaded down with West Virginia coal from Newport News, Virginia.

The Wreck of the Davis Palmer

The ship worked her way through the gale force winds until she had nearly cleared the Graves, outer ledges in Boston Harbor. But the storm soon drove the Davis Palmer onto Finn’s Ledge. From there she drifted into Broad Sound and sank. Fourteen of her crew died in the wreck. Bodies would wash ashore in the weeks to come; some never turned up.

Other ships fared better. The schooner Maud Seward, from Deer Isle, Maine, lost her way off Cape Cod and washed up, wrecked, on Martha’s Vineyard where she rotted for years. But no lives were lost. The Ada Damon, from York, Maine, washed up at Ipswich, Mass. – probably a total loss, but the wreck injured no one. In the harbor at Plymouth, Mass., the storm damaged more than four vessels.

Chaos at Sea

Further out at the Five Fathom Bank, off New Jersey, sailors reported seeing the schooner George P. Hudson bound from Norfolk, Va., to Boston with a load of coal. The storm had badly crippled the Hudson, but her captain refused assistance. With people waiting in concern, the Hudson prompted great relief when she limped into Vineyard Haven, damaged but still afloat.

The schooner Wyoming

The six-masted Wyoming, the largest wooden ship ever built, left Bath, Maine, just days before Christmas – newly launched. Likewise, the F.W. Camp departed Boston for Norfolk. Both were missing for days before they finally turned up safe.

The Christmas gale of 1909, according to the Seamen’s Journal, “illustrates the force of the adage that ‘the sea will claim its own.’ It is said that ‘the sea never gives up its dead.’ It would perhaps be truer to say ‘the sea never gives up the living.’

“Christmas 1909 will long be remembered by the seamen of the Atlantic Coast as one of the most fateful days in the fateful history of those waters.”

Havoc Elsewhere

As the storm proceeded up the coast to Newfoundland, another 11 schooners from Newfoundland disappeared into the raging blizzard, carrying 60 more people to their deaths. “Worst storm in 50 years,” newspapers reported, with damage placed at more than $750,000.

After the storm, streets up and down the eastern seaboard remained blocked by snow for days as a cold front passed through, so cold that rivers froze over. Thousands of people filled the streets to remove snow and ice, restore electricity and help those trapped in their homes. Cleanup would continue into 1910. On January 25, rain in Pennsylvania revealed the corpse of a man who had frozen to death in a field, overcome by the blizzard four weeks earlier.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Silver Artifacts Discovered at Wheeler-Thoreau Shanty Site

The recent discovery of the Wheeler-Thoreau shanty site by Jeff Craig is revealing exciting new details as the archaeological evaluation of this historic site continues.

Henry David Thoreau and Charles Stearns Wheeler.

Charles Stearns Wheeler had built the shanty in 1836 near Flint’s Pond in Lincoln, Mass. His close friend and Harvard roommate, Henry David Thoreau, spent six weeks at the shanty during the summer of 1837, and it is widely accepted today that Thoreau got the idea to build his Walden cabin from his experiences living there. The exact location of the shanty was a complete mystery, until Jeff Craig launched an exhaustive search to find it seven years ago.

The search area for the lost Wheeler-Thoreau shanty site at Flint’s Pond

Search and Possible Discovery

After conducting research about the history of the “lost” shanty in early 2013, Craig spent several months searching for the site near Flint’s Pond. After identifying a possible shanty site foundation underground, archaeologists were brought in to help evaluate it. A “dry stone” foundation was confirmed at the site, and Ground Penetrating Radar was later conducted by archaeologists to help evaluate it.

Jeff Craig made a breakthrough in 2017 when he discovered unexpected evidence at the site.

The surprise discovery was the identification of a cistern, which was used to collect rain water, purify it and provide good drinking water to the inhabitants who lived there.

The cistern provided strong evidence that the builders of this shanty-size stone foundation had included a cistern because people were living there. The fact that the site was located in the area where a biography about Charles Stearns Wheeler had described it offered compelling justification the shanty site had been found.

Silver Artifacts Found in the Cistern

Wheeler used his shanty primarily during the summers from 1836 to 1842, and a more in-depth study of the cistern has provided new details of how the cistern worked. The cistern was located immediately adjacent to the southeast corner of the Shanty, collecting rainwater from the roof. Built in-ground, the cistern’s dimensions were approximately four feet by four feet.

The cistern was built with several compartments, and the water flowed through the compartments to ensure proper filtration and treatment.

Metal fragments were found in the cistern, and some of these fragments have now been confirmed as silver. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, it was understood that silver helped keep water fresh. Some settlers and colonists put silver coins in their rain barrels, knowing the silver helped keep the water drinkable. Wheeler utilized the same concept in his cistern, using small fragments of silver to treat the water, keeping it fresh.

In 1836, the actual scientific details of how silver treated the water were unknown. However, Wheeler’s motivation to use the best techniques for his cistern at the time (by using sand as a filter mechanism and silver to enhance the taste of the water) would be obvious to anyone who planned to live at the shanty for extended periods of time.

Today, silver is used extensively in modern water filters, providing silver ions to enhance taste and helping to prevent harmful bacteria. NASA utilized silver in a water purifier that was built specifically for the Apollo astronauts during their missions to the moon.

Silver artifacts discovered in the cistern at the Wheeler-Thoreau shanty site

Wheeler’s Motivation

With the shanty being built near Flint’s Pond, what was Wheeler’s motivation to build a complex cistern at the site? Distance may have been a factor, Wheeler’s shanty was over three times the distance to Flint’s Pond compared to Thoreau’s much shorter trip at Walden (where Thoreau drank his water directly from Walden Pond). Perhaps the water at Flint’s Pond was not potable, or the water tasted poorly due to a high mineral content. While both of these issues may have been motivating factors, consideration must also be given to the historical background of when the shanty was built.

Disease was an ever present reality in Wheeler’s time, and the knowledge that killers such as typhoid fever, tuberculosis, yellow fever, typhus and cholera were a real danger to one’s health was taken seriously in the early 19^th century. The causes of these diseases were poorly understood, and the medicines doctors used to treat them were largely ineffective.

By today’s standards, their medical knowledge was primitive. However, even in the early 1800’s, many scientists believed that polluted water was a potential health threat, and emphasized the importance of drinking clean water to avoid disease.

Wheeler was aware of these concerns, and it may have been another reason he went to the trouble of building a cistern. Having fresh water that was safe to drink at his shanty was obviously important to him. Wheeler’s family was also heavily involved in helping him build the shanty, perhaps one of his relatives provided the influence that led to the construction of the cistern at the site.

Unfortunately, no written record survives that describes the construction of the shanty, or why the cistern was built. However, many details about the shanty are known, including the new information that Craig’s discovery has provided.

New Details Revealed

Prior to Craig’s discovery, details about the shanty’s construction, dimensions and exact location were a complete mystery. With technical assistance from archaeologists at five major universities, important information about the Shanty has now been ascertained. Preliminary findings indicate the Wheeler-Thoreau shanty measured 22 feet by 22 feet. That made it larger than Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, which was 10 feet by 15 feet.

The larger size fits the historical narrative, because Wheeler also hosted other friends at the shanty during the summers from 1838 to 1841. Charles Hayward, Samuel Hildreth and William Davis were three of those friends, they were also in Wheeler’s 1837 graduating class at Harvard.

Like Thoreau’s Walden cabin, Wheeler’s Shanty was made of wooden logs, but no nails have been found at the site. This indicates Wheeler may have cut notches at the end of the logs and then locked them in place at right angles. He built the shanty foundation of stone, while Thoreau used a mix of old bricks and stone at Walden.

Wheeler used his shanty primarily during the summers, and the initial assessment is that it did not have a fixed fireplace and chimney. The Walden cabin, on the other hand, definitely did. Thoreau goes into great detail in Walden about how he winterized his cabin to stay warm during the two winters he lived there.

Due to the continuing scientific research at the Wheeler site, the exact location will remain confidential for the foreseeable future.

Jeff Craig addresses the Thoreau Society about his discovery in 2019

Historical Importance

Wheeler’s shanty was historically significant for several reasons. Not only did Thoreau get the idea he wanted to build his own cabin from living at Wheeler’s shanty, but Wheeler was also the first Transcendentalist to build an outdoor living experiment to get closer to nature. Wheeler had been actively working with Ralph Waldo Emerson before Emerson even published his influential essay Nature in September 1836. Nature helped define the Transcendental movement, and Wheeler was aware of Emerson’s beliefs about finding divinity in nature (and each individual) before the essay was published.

Emerson’s influence undoubtedly contributed to Wheeler’s decision to build his shanty in 1836, and the shanty was “the birthplace” of the Transcendentalists back-to-nature outdoor living experiment. The noted historian Paul Brooks wrote in his 1976 book The View from Lincoln Hill:

“Thoreau’s school friend and college roommate Charles Stearns Wheeler built himself a hut on the shores of Flint’s Pond in Lincoln while still an undergraduate; there Thoreau joined him for six weeks during a summer vacation and so got the idea for his later experiment at Walden.”

“Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind,” Emerson wrote in his History essay, “and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”

For more information about the Wheeler-Thoreau shanty site discovery, click on this web address: https://sites.google.com/view/wheeler-thoreaushanty/

Read more about Thoreau in Laura Dassow Walls’ Henry David Thoreau: A Life. This story updated in 2022.

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