Fairfield County Conn. Archives - New England Historical Society

It will probably be several centuries before the Northeast United States again suffers anything like the 1965 drought. It was the driest year of a 10-year dry spell that devastated farms and sent municipal leaders into a panic over the drinking supply.

There were actually two droughts: The agricultural drought, and the water-supply drought. Farmers tried to save their crops and fed their livestock in barns, while suburbanites were told not to wash their cars or take long showers.

There was a high pollen count, high fire danger and high prices for produce. Wells dried up. Rivers, ponds and reservoirs became stinking mud holes. The air was so dry foggy mornings disappeared along the coast.

According to climatologist W.C. Palmer, the 1965 drought was “such a rare event that we should ordinarily expect it to occur in this region only about once in a couple of centuries.”

The 1965 Drought

The 1965 drought actually occurred during 1961-69, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It began in 1960 in western Massachusetts, where precipitation was below average. Then in 1962 eastern Massachusetts dried up. The rest of the Northeast got little rain or snow.

From 1962 to 1966, 34 out of 46 months had below-average precipitation. The summer of 1964 was very dry. Overdrawn reservoirs weren’t replenished.

Then 1965 was the driest year on record since the late 19th century. The 1965 drought was most severe in northeastern Pennsylvania and southeastern New York. That year, Connecticut got only 29.45 inches of precipitation, far below the average of 46.15 inches. Maine was drier than in 1947, when fires destroyed nine communities and a quarter-million parched acres.

By July, communities were declaring water emergencies. Towns banned water use outside, but police and water departments were besieged by people calling to report neighbors who watered their lawns or washed their cars.

Sahara

Golf courses dug wells and dredged ponds. Fairways burnt up as watering was restricted to greens and tees. Brae Burn in Newton, Mass., “may as well be on the Sahara,” reported the Boston Globe. Brae Burn dug 20 test holes to find water. All were dry.

Part of the reservoir in Cambridge, Mass., oozed muck. In Norfolk, Mass., the 20-acre Kingsbury Pond was a stinking sea of mud. Commuters from the western suburbs in Boston rolled up their windows in summer to avoid smelling the stench of the Charles River. Usually water was discharged into the river to dampen the smell of the raw sewage that flowed into it. Not during the drought.

Herring couldn’t swim from the sea to fresh water to spawn. The Town of Pembroke, Mass., banned herring fishing and helped the fish upstream by carrying them in barrels. By fall, millions of herring spawned in fresh water couldn’t make it back to the sea in the dried-up streams. Trapped in ponds, the seagulls feasted on them.

Pastures, hayfields and cornfields were burned out by the 1965 drought. Dairy farms in Fairfield County, Conn., lost most of their pasture grass, and wells went dry for a third of them.

The honey crop in Vermont was smaller than usual. So was the blueberry crop in Maine. Shade trees, such as the Norway and sugar maple, were damaged. Along Rte. 2 between Concord and Cambridge, Mass., Red Pine needles turned brown.

Emergency

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a study to find out what the federal government could do to help New England. Cities and towns got loans of pumps and pipes to access the deepest arts of reservoirs. Some Massachusetts towns borrowed vintage World War II pipes from Fort Devens and Romulus Air Force Base to reach water beyond normal sources. It didn’t work. The pipe was too expensive to transport.

President Johnson

Rockport, Mass., got approval to use water from a quarry, so long as it was treated twice with chlorine. Also in Massachusetts, Randolph, Holbrook and Braintree banded together to get water from a gravel pit. Fitchburg hired a rainmaker.

The next month, 11 Massachusetts counties were declared drought disaster areas. More than a hundred Massachusetts towns restricted water. Hanover considered a moratorium on building permits. Sandy Pond beach was closed in Ayer after hundreds of dead fish floated to the surface, deprived of oxygen.

Scattered Relief

By September, some parts of New England got rain. In western Massachusetts, rain changed brown pastures to green and grass and alfalfa returning to some farms. Cranberry growers were skating by. Some reservoirs filled to capacity.

The 1965 drought eased in Northern New England except for coastal Maine. In Grand Isle County, Vermont, too much rain left standing water in fields.

Then temperatures dropped.

The water problem worsened in November because the cold locked precipitation above ground. In southeastern Massachusetts, a cold snap destroyed a quarter of the cranberry crop. Cranberry growers didn’t have enough water to flood their bogs and prevent the berries from freezing.

Test wells throughout New England reached record lows and nearly a dozen towns along the coast had to draw down their emergency supplies. On Nov. 1, 1965, the Quabbin Reservoir fell to 59 percent of capacity, a drop of 17 percent in 12 months.

Car washes, service stations and ski areas couldn’t get water.

The 1965 Drought Continues

Quabbin Reservoir after the 1965 drought

By April 1966, the rainfall shortage increased to nearly 37 inches since the drought started in 1963, reported the Boston Globe. That almost equaled a year’s supply of rain.

People thought the drought ended with heavy rain in July and persistent fog along the coast. A dry August ended that hope.

A Boston College scientist suggested detonating dynamite, creating tiny earthquakes, could end the 1965 drought. The disturbed soils would the presence of water and suggest areas for drilling, he said.

By October 1966, farmers said the drought had ended. But the water-supply drought had not. There wasn’t enough water in wells, water tables and reservoirs.

A wet spring in 1967 ended the drought. Above normal rain and snow from February to May filled the reservoirs. On April 25, 1967, Malcolm E. Graf, Massachusetts Water Resources Commissioner, stated the four-year drought, worst in New England history, was over.

Photo: Quabbin Reservoir By Solarapex at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11535183. Cracked mud By Rosser1954 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90076337. This story about the 1965 drought was updated in 2022.

In 1807 a fireball streaked across the New England sky, broke into pieces and scattered over Weston, Conn. The young Yale professor who rushed to the scene of the phenomenon pronounced it a meteorite.

Benjamin Silliman’s analysis of the Weston meteorite formed the foundation of modern scientific research in America — despite the skepticism of President Thomas Jefferson.

A fanciful contemporary woodblock print of the Weston meteorite.

The idea that rocks could fall from space was only recently accepted in Europe by a handful of chemists and mineralogists. Then in 1803, a huge meteorite shower in L’Aigle, France, forced more scientists to concede it could and did happen.

New Englanders had seen meteorites before. But more witnesses saw the Weston meteorite and documented it more thoroughly than any previous meteorite that flew over the region.

The Weston meteorite was a huge stroke of luck for the 29-year-old Silliman.

“I had become acquainted with meteorites and the phenomena that usually attend their fall,” he wrote. “I did not dream of being favored by an event of this kind in my own vicinity and occurring on a scale truly magnificent.”

Benjamin Silliman

Benjamin Silliman was born on Aug. 8, 1779 in a tavern in Trumbull, Conn. His mother, Mary Fish Silliman had fled British forces that invaded and burned her hometown of Fairfield, Conn. The British had captured her husband, Gold Selleck Silliman.

Benjamin Silliman earned a B.A. and then an M.A. from Yale. He was teaching chemistry and natural history at the college when the Weston meteorite fell on Connecticut.

Europeans then considered the college, along with every other American educational institution, a backwater of scientific thought.

The Weston Meteorite

At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1807, a red ball of fire about two-thirds the size of the full moon was seen by witnesses from southern Vermont to Fairfield County, Conn. They heard three loud booms followed by a rumbling like a cannonball rolling along a wooden floor. Witnesses heard a whizzing sound near the six places where the meteorite fragments fell.

Most of the fragments fell in parts of Trumbull, Conn., and what is now the town of Easton, Conn., then Weston.

From Albany to Fairfield County, the Weston meteor frightened farmers, milkmaids, schoolchildren and horses.

Judge Nathan Wheeler was taking his daily walk across his land in Weston when the sky illuminated his house, his barn, his trees and his stone walls. Dr. Isaac Bronson was traveling along the Boston Post Road when the inside of his stagecoach lit up and rocks clattered on the roof. In Rutland, Vt., William Page looked up from his doorstep and saw a meteor heading south, leaving a ‘vivid, sparkling train of light.’ A Mrs. Gardner watched it for 30 seconds from her bedroom window in Wrentham, Mass.

Selling Meteorites

When his friend Isaac Bronson told him about the meteorite, Benjamin Silliman dropped everything and bolted for Weston. He brought his colleague, classics professor James Kingsley, because of his skill at interviewing and writing.

Benjamin Silliman, National Portrait Gallery

Silliman and Kingsley immediately ran into trouble. The townsfolk of Weston were selling the Weston meteorite, piece by piece. Members of the William Prince family, for example, dug up a large fragment in their yard. They smashed it into fragments and sold it off.

The two professors did manage to collect meteorite fragments, interview witnesses and map the fall sites with help from the townspeople.

Silliman was excited to discover in the stones round grains, or chondrules, which he knew weren’t present in earthly rocks. He published his conclusion that the fireball had fallen from space in the Connecticut Herald on Dec. 29, 1807. He estimated the meteor to be a half-mile in diameter and to have traveled at a rate of 200 or 300 miles a minute.

A Skeptical Jefferson

View of the buildings of Yale College, 1807

The sensational story about the ‘terrestrial comet’ spread as other newspapers copied it. The discovery was deemed so important that another version of Silliman’s work was read before the Philosophical Society of London and in the Academy of Sciences of Paris.

When told of the Yale professors’ theory, Thomas Jefferson is said to have ommented derisively.

“It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven,” the president allegedly said.

Another writer alluded to the Puritan tendency to interpret natural phenomena as nightmarish supernatural visions. Washington Irving had one of his characters describe New Englanders as showing, ‘a keenness, a cleverness and a profundity of wisdom that savors strongly of witchcraft.’

And, he concluded, “it has been remarked that whenever any stones fall from the moon, the greater part of them is sure to tumble into New England.”

To defend his conclusion about the Weston meteorite, Silliman founded the American Journal of Science. As one of the preeminent scientists of his age, he distilled petroleum, the first to do so.

His son, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., also taught chemistry at Yale and played a large role in developing the petroleum industry.

You can see fragments of the Weston meteorite at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. They stand out as the first catalogued objects in the Yale meteorite collection, the oldest in the United States.

With thanks to A Professor, A President, and A Meteor: The Birth of American Science By Cathryn J. Prince. This story about the Weston meteorite was updated in 2021.

Fairfield County Conn.

The 1965 Drought, New England’s Worst Ever