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Kennebec River

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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New England’s Real First Thanksgiving – Maine Style

New England’s first Thanksgiving, at least the one celebrated by European colonists, wasn’t in Plymouth, Mass.

There actually were Thanksgiving-type holidays in New England long before the Europeans arrived. Indigenous people had held harvest celebrations of their own for many years.

But when the Europeans did arrive, they held the first Thanksgiving that they actually called Thanksgiving in 1607 — in Popham, Maine.

Site of the Popham Colony.

First Thanksgiving

The Popham Colony was a year-long effort to establish a British colony in Phippsburg, Maine, at the mouth of the Kennebec River. It began in the summer of 1607 and ended a year later in 1608. For one harsh winter a group of English settlers tried to stick it out at a small fort they built.

They did manage to build the first ocean-going vessel in North America, the pinnace Virginia.

During the winter of 1607-08, the group suffered a fire at its storehouse. The colonists’ president, George Popham, died, and so did several others in the group.

The colony also struggled because its leadership did not establish strong enough relations with the local Native Americans, who might have helped the settlers as they did in Plymouth. Nevertheless, there is a record of a 1607 feast — the first real Thanksgiving — with the locals.

The historie of travaile into Virginia, by William Strachey, tells the story of that first Thanksgiving, Maine style.

Illustration of the first Thanksgiving — in Plymouth Colony, years after the first Thanksgiving in Popham Colony, Maine.

Nahaniida

The Popham colonists had reached out to Nahaniida, a Native American, and invited him to come with friends to visit the fort. In the entry for October 4, Strachey records:

There came two canoes to the fort, in which were Nahaniida and his wife, and Skidwares, and the Casshabaes brother, and one other called Amenquin, a Sagamo; all whom the president feasted and entertained with all kindness, both that day and the next, which being Sunday, the President carried them with him to the place of public prayers, which they were at both morning and evening, attending with great reverence and silence.

The Native Americans received gifts from the colonists. Following the feast, they returned up the river to forest that sheltered them from the elements. The Popham colonists, however, stayed in their small fort near the ocean, which left them exposed to a harsh winter.

Sir John Popham

In May, a supply ship brought the disheartening news that their chief financial backer, Sir John Popham (George’s relative), had died.

The colonists decided to call it quits. Though the records indicate they had traded furs and found other natural resources, they had no will to remain.

When an English supply ship arrived, the remaining colonists – now leaderless – chose to return to England.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

Thanks to: The Holiday Book by Martin Greif. This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Popham Colony Site By Spyrosparx – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72956248.

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King of the Log Drives: The New England Riverman

In the vanished days of log drives, the riverman was the most special of the special breed of men who logged the great north woods of New England.

Rivermen on the Mooselookmeguntic Lake in Maine during the spring 1943 pulpwood drive. Courtesy Library of Congress.

His work was hard and dangerous and it paid little, but he did it with a courage and a pride that were a vital part of his life. He worked 14-hour days in icy water, slept in wet blankets, ate plain food and constantly risked his life. Some blew a season’s pay on a long, wild bender after the river drives were over.

The riverman’s job was to guide the logs from piles along the river to the sawmills of northern New England. He rolled and pried and dragged the heavy, slippery logs over rocks and ledges and away from the riverbanks into the current. He heaved and poked with pike pole and peavey to dislodge log jams sometimes so vast they lasted two years.

Log drive on the Kennebec River, 1922. Courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Riverman

Rivermen had to start early learning the specialized skills required of the job: to ride a log; to move quickly; to anticipate the logs’ behavior. They had to handle a bateau, a heavy, flat-bottomed boat with flared sides men used to carry gear and to clean out snagged logs.

More rivermen died in capsized bateaux than any other way, but they could also get crushed in an avalanche of loose logs. Or they could get sucked into the river through an open sluice gate. They wore boots with 63 spikes from a quarter inch to three-quarters inch long. If a riverman was killed on the river, his friends would nail his boots to a tree where they found his body.

According to an old logging story, a Hollywood movie outfit came to Maine to film an epic about logging. They heard the rivermen would ride logs through sluiceways along the Kennebec River. Spider Ellis was offered $5 to risk his life to ride a log through the sluiceway. He did it without falling off.

Then the movie outfit offered Ellis $10 — four days’ pay — to ride through and fall off in the white water. He took the dangerous ride, but didn’t fall off. When asked why, he said, “I’ve never fallen off in my life. I find I just can’t fall off one for less than $25.”

Bangor Tigers

The best of the rivermen worked the Penobscot River. They knew they were the best. Known as the Bangor Tigers, they earned top wages throughout New England and later out west.

Until they died out in the mid-20th century, log drives on New England’s spring freshets were a popular spectator sport. Crowds gathered at bridges and dams to watch downed forests of logs quietly float down the river. The local newspapers reported the drives, especially when the rivermen finished the spring drives and got into trouble carousing around the towns.

Woodsville, N.H., was a favorite haven for the rivermen. On May 12, 1899, the Woodsville News reported:

Judge Dow is doing a very good business at his stand. Two more cases of drunkenness and one of assault were brought before him Saturday. But this is the unusually busy season anyway.

In colonial times, men floated logs down the rivers of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont for shipments back to England for the king’s masts. Over the centuries many millions of spruce logs were driven from the remote north woods to sawmills along the the Kennebec, the White River, the Androscoggin, the Penobscot, the Saco, the St. John, the Ammonoosuc and the Wild Ammonoosuc.

Long Log Drives

From 1870 to 1915, rivermen drove logs 300 miles down the Connecticut River to Massachusetts sawmills. As the longest, toughest drive in New England, it earned the name ‘the Long Drive.’

Logs on a rollway, ready for the drive. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Long log drives disappeared, but the paper companies continued to drive four-foot pulpwood logs down the rivers. The Machias River ran log drives longer than any other river, until 1965. In 1976, the Maine Legislature banned drives because they polluted the rivers.

Robert Pike, the pre-eminent authority on New England logging, recalled watching a log drive on the Fifteen-Mile Falls on the Connecticut River as a boy.

Generally, wagons drawn by eight horses each arrived to select a campsite for the rivermen and to buy milk, eggs, food and hay. The kids from the village would help dig the beanhole and then hang around the cook tent, where the cook gave them immense sugar cookies and gingersnaps. “They would fairly worship him,” wrote Pike.

One spring the logs came before the wagon. A man who happened to drive past the schoolhouse told the children about the coming log drive. The teacher knew there’d be no more work done that day, and dismissed the students. Wrote Pike:

…we went racing down to the bridge. Sure enough, the logs were coming, not many yet, but steadily growing thicker and thicker, rubbing and nosing softly against each other as the swift current urged them on.

Watching the Drive

The boys watched until supper, fascinated by the army of wood. After supper they returned with their parents. They all lined the bridge with people who had come to see.

Presently, as we stood there leaning on the plank railing, with the cool breeze rising from the river and the sun setting behind us, from upstream around a bend a solitary riverman came straight into the red beams of the dying sun. His peavey point was stuck into the big log on which he rode, and both his hands were clasped around the top of the heavy handle. Seemingly oblivious to the slippery, unstable quality of his steed, poised in a splendid attitude of indifference to the many admiring eyes he knew were fixed upon him, he came whirling down the river, the twenty-foot spruce surging and lunging through the white water. By a miracle of good luck the log avoided all the rocks and the upright riverman swept grandly beneath us, so that we got a good view of him.

The Vanguard

Pike described the sweaty suspenders crossed over a red woolen shirt. He had heavy black trousers ‘stagged off about the tops of his spiked boots.’ He wore a torn, gray felt hat that revealed his eyes

…watchful as any cat’s, and by the look in his eyes and by the little bend in his knees we knew that while he appeared so nonchalant as he leaned there upon his peavey-handle, he was tensely alert. We almost wished that his log would strike a rock, so we might see what he would do, but really we were glad that it did not. So he went on, the vanguard of the drive, and disappeared in the fading light.

With thanks to Tall Trees, Tough Men, by Robert Pike. This story was updated in 2022.

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