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Mt. Washington

The Coldest Temperature Ever in Each New England State

New Hampshire poet Donald Hall’s grandmother once said, “Thirty below this morning. Seems like it might get cold.” It does get cold in New England, and the coldest temperature in the region was well below minus 30.

The good news about cold snaps in New England is that they don’t last long. “They have a tendency to be more short-lived than in other parts of the country,” wrote Gregory A. Zielinski and Barry D. Keim in New England Weather, New England Climate. Thus, “The socioeconomic impact is not as widespread or as great as in other parts of the country.” Still. “Heat waves and cold spells can be dramatic in New England,” concede the authors.

April may be the cruelest month, but January tends to be the coldest in New England. The coldest temperature in four of six New England states was recorded in January, and the other two close in late December and mid-February.

The January thaw provides some consolation during the bitter weeks of winter. It’s a climatic singularity — a climate event that happens every year at about the same time. The January thaw happens nearly every January, usually between the 21st and the 25th. Temperatures will rise from about January 22 to January 25 throughout the region.

“Snowy Night, Woodstock, Vt. Courtesy Library of Congress.

New England weather varies from the north to the south, andfrom the coast to the interior. The lowest temperature inland — in places like Caribou, Maine, Burlington, Vt., and Keene, N.H. — happen around January 17. In the south and along the coast — Hartford and Boston, for example — the coldest temperature happens around January 31.

The Lake Champlain region — northwestern Vermont — has the greatest daily variation in temperature in the country. Lowest temperatures vary day-to-day by as much as 10 degrees in January.

Here, then, are the places that recorded the coldest temperature in each New England state.

Connecticut’s Icebox

Norfolk, known as the “Icebox of Connecticut,” recorded the coldest official temperature in the state on Feb. 16, 1943. Unofficially, temperatures fell to 45 below zero in some northwest Connecticut towns. Subzero temperatures that night were also recorded in places as far south as Nantucket and New Haven.

“A chilly spot,” is how a New York Times reporter characterized the town in a Feb. 14, 1988 story. “It is the place where the snow is said to be deeper, the temperatures lower and the winters longer than elsewhere in Connecticut.” Norfolk also gets the most snow in Connecticut during an average year — 107 inches.

February 1943 was a frigid month throughout the Northeast, a time when World War II raged overseas. The government had just announced shoe rationing in order to make more leather available to the military. That spurred scare buying of apparel in early February. But then the Arctic cold that settled over the region put an end to the panic buying of clothing, the Times reported. The government, by the way, also rationed coal, the heating fuel used by most New Englanders.

Coldest Temperature in Maine

Hunting in winter is popular in Aroostook County.

The coldest cold in New England happens when high pressure in Canada pushes air from the North Pole into the region — the “Siberian Express.” It can drop temperatures well below zero for several nights and keep them below zero during the daytime.

The Siberian Express hit New England in January of 2009, a winter already colder than usual. On January 16 the thermometer read minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Clayton Lake, an unincorporated village in Aroostook County, Maine. That was two degrees colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded in Maine. So cold, in fact, that it triggered two meetings of the state’s Records Verification Committee.

The University of Maine’s Maine Climate News reported the committee brought together people from an alphabet soup of government agencies. They included the National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) in Augusta, the Maine state climatologist, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) in Ithaca, N.Y. and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

An instrument at the Big Black River station for the USGS had recorded the Arctic temperature. The climatologists then challenged the reading and had several instruments tested. In the end, the Records Verification Committee unanimously voted to accept the minus 50 degree verdict.

Henry David Thoreau had written about another cold Friday in 1810, but that was before alphabet soup.

Coldest Temperature: The Bay State

Aerial view of Chester, Mass., 1905

On Super Bowl Sunday in 1984, the temperature plunged to a record minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in Chester, Mass., a small town on the eastern edge of the Berkshires. Any Chester resident who braved the cold to attend a Super Bowl party that January 22^nd watched the Los Angeles Raiders beat the Washington Redskins, 38-9.

Chester also holds the distinction of being only one of three U.S. places that recorded the hottest and coldest temperature in its state. On Aug. 2, 1975, known as New England’s Hot Saturday, the mercury rose to 107 degrees Fahrenheit. (The other two are Millsboro, Del., and Warsaw, Mo.) That’s higher than the highest recorded temperatures in the Florida cities of Miami and Orlando.

Sargent’s Purchase (aka Mount Washington)

The White Mountains have a way of creating their own weather, and on Jan. 22, 1885, their highest peak, Mount Washington, came up with a doozy. The thermometer showed minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mount Washington, not known for its balmy weather, has recorded temperatures as low as eight degrees Fahrenheit — in June.

Mount Washington from Intervale, N.H.

The mountain’s mean annual temperature is near 26 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Zielenski and Keim. They call it “the ultimate New England example of how elevation affects temperature.” Temperature decreases at a rate of 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit every thousand feet up. Mount Washington is 6,288 feet high. It also averages 254 inches of snow every year.

Mount Washington also set a record, since broken for the highest wind speed. On April 12, 1934, observers recorded a gust of 231 mph — and lived to tell about it.

Rhode Island’s Coldest Temperature

The United States had entered World War II just six weeks earlier when Richmond, R.I., experienced the state’s coldest temperature: minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit. It was January 17, 1942, the day after a German U-boat sank the tanker Coimbra off Long Island.

It figures that the warmest coldest temperature would happen in Rhode Island. The Ocean State, along with southern Connecticut, has a mean average temperature higher than the rest of New England.

Rhode Island has widely varying weather, from day to day and from season to season, according to the state meteorologist, Lenny Giuliano.

But Richmond lies a few miles inland in the southwest part of the state. “Southwestern Rhode Island, from four to 10 miles inland, exhibits a coolness not suggested by the nearness to the ocean,” Lenny Giuliano, state meteorologist, wrote.

Subzero temperatures happen rarely in Rhode Island — typically, one day a year or not at all along the coast and five per year in most of the interior. But in cold winters, the southwest part of the state can get as many as eight below-zero days a few miles in from the coast.

Cold Comfort in Vermont

The tiny town of Bloomfield, Vt., shared the coldest temperature ever in New England with Clayton Lake, Maine, 75 years earlier. On Dec. 30, 1933, the weather service reported temperatures of −50°F in the Northern Vermont town of about 400.

Prohibition had ended that month, which may have stopped the smuggling of booze across the line from Canada. Rum running wasn’t uncommon in those lean times, and the line houses along the border were a little over 20 miles away from Bloomfield.

So when Prohibition ended that December, Bloomfield residents could warm themselves with a shot of brandy – legally.

This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Mount Washington By Harvey Barrison – originally posted to Flickr as White Mountains_12 30 09_81, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10396490. Snowy Night Wolcott, M. P., photographer. (1940) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night”. United States Vermont Windsor County Woodstock, 1940. Mar. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017802584/..

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The Highest Point in Each New England State

You might think the most challenging mountain climbing adventure in New England is to the highest point in the region: Mount Washington in New Hampshire. You would be wrong. It’s actually in Foster, R.I., but not because of its height.

New England’s high points are the subject of much lore and controversy. Henry David Thoreau climbed two of them. They’ve inspired literary works by authors from Nathaniel Hawthorne to J.K Rowling. One has a potato named after it. Another was supposed to be the place where God appeared in 1851.

Here is the highest point in each New England state, with a story to go with it.

Mount Frissell

Despite its location near the tony towns of Great Barrington, Mass., and Salisbury, Conn., Mount Frissell is the Rodney Dangerfield of mountains.

It just doesn’t get any respect.

Though the highest point in Connecticut is on Mount Frissell, Mount Frissell’s summit is in Massachusetts. And getting to Connecticut’s highest point requires climbing up two mountains, then climbing down to the high point.

Plus the trail to the summit (rather than the highest point) of Mount Frissell is near an attraction more interesting to some: the New York-Connecticut-Massachusetts tri-state marker.

Bear Mountain gets more respect than Mount Frissell because it’s the highest summit in Connecticut. Not only is it climbed more, but it’s on the Appalachian Trail. Some call it the fake Connecticut high point. Bear Mountain’s summit is 2,316 feet — 64 feet lower than the south slope of Frissell, which is 137 feet lower than Frissell’s summit.

Mount Katahdin

Mount Katahdin, near Millinocket, Maine, is only the 22^nd highest state peak in America, but National Geographic named it the country’s second best summit hike. Not because of its height or difficulty, but because it’s “the most inspiring peak in all of eastern North America.”

After Henry David Thoreau scaled it in 1846, he wrote, “This was the Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night.”

Katahdin made another literary appearance in the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles. The narrator, Gene, talks about his friend sleeping on top of Mount Katahdin, where “each morning the sun first strikes United States territory.”

Katahdin, which ends the Appalachian Trail, also has a potato, two U.S. Navy destroyers and a sheep named after it.

Mount Greylock

You can see five states from the summit of Mount Greylock in Adams, Mass.: Massachusetts, of course, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and New York.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling put a school of wizardry atop Mount Greylock in her 2016 story, the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It can be read on her Pottermore website.

Mount Greylock also inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to write The Unpardonable Sin. The snow-covered mountain reminded Herman Melville of a great white sperm whale, which he named Moby Dick in his masterpiece. Thoreau wrote about his climb in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

The mountain may have been named after an Indian chief, Gray Lock, who raided English settlements in Vermont and western Massachusetts during the last French and Indian war. Or it may have been named for the gray clouds that hover at its summit.

Greylock has extensive stands of old growth red spruce, and it’s an important bird area with 132 species of birds recorded on it. For more about recreation on Mount Greylock, click here.

Mount Washington

On a clear day, the view from the summit of Mt. Washington stretches 130 miles, to the Atlantic Ocean in the east and Lake Champlain in the west.

Today New Hampshirites proudly claim Mount Washington as the home of the world’s worst weather. On April 12, 1934, a wind speed of 231 mph was recorded on its summit, which is in Sargent’s Purchase.

In 1851, John Coffin Nazro made a bigger claim for New England’s tallest peak. Nazro, a devout Christian, announced that God would be appearing at the top of Mount Washington on July 4, 1851. He renamed it Temple Heights to signify its role as home to a new religious movement.

All it did was rain on that day. People who had come to see God told Nazro what they thought of him. Nazro gave up his religious movement and joined the Navy.

The Abenaki Indians also believed that the top of the mountain was a holy site. They declined to climb it in the belief that they would be punished with death if they did.

The first car to climb Mount Washington was a Stanley Steamer on Aug. 31, 1899. Co-inventor Freelan O. Stanley and his wife Flora drove to the peak in one of the earliest publicity stunts in the automotive industry.

For more about things to do on Mount Washington, click here.

Jerimoth Hill

No, the highest point in Rhode Island is not the 550-foot-high state landfill in Johnston.

It’s Jerimoth Hill, all 812 feet of it, in Foster, R.I. Some say it used to offer the most challenging climbing adventure in New England. The Highpointers Club, a national mounting climbing group, called it ‘America’s most inaccessible high point.’

The peak of Jerimoth Hill was owned by Brown University, which used it as an astronomy observatory location. The trail leading up to it, though, is on land once owned by a man who didn’t appreciate hikers traipsing across his property. Music teacher Henry P. Richardson posted signs saying, “Trespassing is a violation we take seriously.”

Richardson supposedly had a secret security system on his property. He enlisted a neighbor to report on any trespassers. One hiker returned from the summit of Jerimoth Hill to find his tires slashed. Another said Richardson tried to take his camera.A third claimed Richardson fired a warning shot with a shotgun.

In 2002, the Providence Journal suggested a solution for highpointers who couldn’t climb Jerimoth Hill: Shovel dirt onto 805-foot Durfee Hill in Glocester to make it higher than Jerimoth.

By 1999 the Highpointers Club negotiated four access dates a year with a friend of Richardson. Richardson died in 2001. The new owners opened the access trail on weekends.

The state bought Jerimoth Hill from Brown in 2014, and today you can climb it undisturbed by shotgun blasts. But manage your expectations. Jerimoth Hill is heavily wooded, has no views at all and is only about five feet higher than the highway.

You might think Rhode Island has the lowest high point in the country. You would be wrong. Jerimoth Hill ranks only 46^th.

New England’s honorary state, Florida, lies even lower even than the District of Columbia.

Mount Mansfield

From Stowe, Vermont, look toward Mount Mansfield and you may see a reclining giant’s face. Many a climber has tried to distinguish the giant’s chin, nose and forehead. The chin is the tallest point.

According to a Stowe newspaper in 1858, a giant was walking north and, “being fatigued with his journey, as night came on he laid him down to sleep, and unfortunately, he has never since awoke, but like the giant Rip Van Winkle sleeps on.”

The effort to make Mount Mansfield a regional mascot may have been spurred by competition with New Hampshire’s Old Man in the Mountain. In the mid 19^th century, Daniel Webster famously popularized the Old Man with the words: “God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”

A small monument can be found along the summit. A cairn called Frenchman’s Pile marks the spot where lightning struck and killed a man many years ago.

Photos: Mount Washington By wwoods – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1539623; Mount Greylock By Ericshawwhite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28407006; Jerimoth Hill By Fredlyfish4 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19337222. This story about the highest point in each New England state was updated in 2023.

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The Spy Who Came In To The Bretton Woods Conference

As World War II was ending, 730 delegates from 44 nations converged on the Mount Washington Hotel for the Bretton Woods Conference. They aimed to create the economic foundations for a lasting peace.

At Bretton Woods: Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes

The two key figures in Bretton Woods, N.H., during three summer weeks in 1944 came from opposite ends of the social scale. On the one hand, British economist John Maynard Keynes has been described as the ‘servant-reared scion of Cambridge academics.’ U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White, on the other hand, was‘ a brash, dogged technocrat raised in working-class Boston by Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.’

One was a Soviet spy.

Bretton Woods

The 22-day Bretton Woods Conference increased government power over markets and ended shortages of gold and U.S. dollars. It established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prevent the manipulation of exchange rates and to restrain dictators from economic aggression. It also created a predecessor to the World Bank.

Some people credit the economic reforms that emerged from Bretton Woods for the robust economic recovery after World War II. Others blame the World Bank and IMF for increasing poverty around the world.

The conference got off to a chaotic start at exactly 3 pm on July 1, 1944. The Mount Washington Hotel had been closed for two years, and its president needed to be persuaded to reopen it. The staff had only a month to get the hotel ready for the sudden influx of guests, and there were shortages of everything from beds to hot water.

Bit there was a political reason to hold the conference at the Mt. Washington Hotel: the Republican senator from New Hampshire, Charles Tobey.

Treasury Secretary Harry Morgenthau wanted an Eastern resort away from the heat and crowding of Washington, D.C. Charles Tobey faced a tough primary opponent. He was also likely to vote against the formation of a new international organization. President Roosevelt figured the conference would help Tobey win his primary, and he’d be more likely to vote for the Bretton Woods agreement when it came to the Senate for approval.

Mt. Washington Hotel

Harry Dexter White

Harry Dexter White was born on Oct. 9, 1892, the seventh son of recently arrived immigrants. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in France. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he entered college. He graduated from Stanford and earned a PhD at Harvard at 38.

After teaching for a few years, White accepted a job at the U.S. Treasury in 1934. Long fascinated by the Soviet Union, and in Washington, D.C., he met men working for the Soviet Underground, including Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers.

Whittaker Chambers

Officially, Harry Dexter White was a New Deal Democrat. Unofficially, he supported Soviet-style socialism. He believed it worked.

At Bretton Woods he served as the senior U.S. negotiator. He dominated the conference and prevailed over Keynes, who sought a central world bank and a reserve currency other than the U.S. dollar. White was solicitous of the difficult Soviets at the conference, but biographers say that didn’t affect his negotiations on behalf of U.S. interests.

Revelations

On Jan. 23, 1946, President Truman nominated Harry Dexter White as U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund. The Senate approved him two weeks later, unaware the FBI had White under investigation.

On June 19, 1947, Harry Dexter White abruptly resigned from the IMF and cleared out his office that day. The U.S. attorney general had just ordered a federal grand jury investigation into charges he had passed documents to the Soviet Union during World War II.

White testified that he was not a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Aug. 13, 1948. Three days later he died of a heart attack at his home in Fitzwilliam, N.H. He was 55 years old.

Aftermath of Bretton Woods

The World Bank and IMF have come under heavy criticism. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz argued their free-market reforms harm developing countries.

The Washington Consensus, reached in the 1990s by the two organizations in the 1990s, also has a growing chorus of detractors. The Consensus preaches deregulation, privatization and shrinking of government. Critics call those “failed neoliberal policies” and charge they have exacerbated poverty.

With thanks to The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Mt. Washington Hotel By rickpilot_2000 from Hooksett, USA – Mt. Washington HotelUploaded by jbarta, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26447136.

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Maine Twins Invent the Stanley Steamer, Climb Mt. Washington

Freelan O. Stanley and his wife Flora climbed Mt. Washington in a Stanley Steamer on Aug. 31, 1899, in one of the earliest publicity stunts in the automotive industry.

Stanley Steamer climbs Mt. Washington.

It was also the first time any automobile had climbed the mountain, the tallest in the northeastern United States. It took two hours for the Stanley Steamer to climb the 7.6-mile Mount Washington Carriage Road in New Hampshire.

“We went on, and up, up, still up, the continuous climbing being varied only by a steepness so excessive that we felt a sickening anxiety lest each brilliant dash should be our last,” Mrs. Stanley wrote.

Freelan O. Stanley and his twin brother Francis Edgar, known as F.O. and F.E., made several brilliant dashes during their uniquely inventive lifetimes. They pioneered automobile manufacturing, carved concert-quality violins, invented the airbrush, developed the first practical dry photographic plate process and built a hotel that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining.

Maine Beginnings

F.E. Stanley

The Stanley twins were born in tiny Kingfield, Maine, on June 1, 1849, to Solomon Stanley and Apphia Kezar French. Their grandfather, Liberty Stanley, taught them to carve concert-quality violins by the time they were 10.

They attended Western State Normal School, now known as the University of Maine at Farmington. Both then went into teaching, but didn’t last long.

F.O. made school mechanical drawing kits on the side in Mechanic Falls, Maine. The factory burned down, and as F.O. had no insurance, he joined his brother in the photography business in Lewiston, Maine.

F.E. had bought a photographic studio in 1875 for $500. Together the brothers developed the photographic dry plate process, which would revolutionize photography. Then in 1888, they moved their business to Watertown, Mass. The move changed the direction of their lives and their business.

Horseless Carriage

In 1896, F.O. and F.E. Stanley went to the Brockton Fair and saw a horseless carriage. They were intrigued.

F.E. was familiar with steam engines, and the brothers went to work building their own steam-powered car in 1897 — the first Stanley Steamer.

In 1898, F.E. broke a world speed record with the car in front of 5,000 spectators. He drove around a track at an average speed of 27.4 mph without a breakdown. Soon they were swamped with orders for Stanley Steamers. They decided to sell their photography business and concentrate on cars.

F. O. Stanley, Stanley Steamer co-inventor

The twins sold their company and patents to the Eastman-Kodak Co. for $500,000. Then they started building the Stanley Steamer in an old bicycle plant in Watertown.

Headquartered in Newton, Mass., they produced 200 Stanley Steamers within a year. They were the first to sell commercial quantities of automobiles. Between 1897 and 1914 they made and sold more than 10,000 Stanley Steamers.

Upside-Down Canoe

F.O. and F.E. built a steam-powered race car in 1906 that set a record unbroken for 103 years.

In their Watertown plant they used an aerodynamic design in a race car they called the Stanley Rocket. Three feet wide and 16 feet long, it was described as an upside-down canoe. Race car driver Fred Marriott in 1906 drove the Rocket 127.66 mph on the hard sand of Ormond Beach, Fla., setting a world speed record. A gasoline-powered car went faster four years later, but it wasn’t until 2009 that another steam-powered vehicle broke the Stanley Rocket record. Charles Burnett III did it by reaching 136 mph and 151 mph in the Mojave Desert.

But by 1914, the technology of gasoline-powered automobiles eclipsed that of the steam cars. The twins sold the Stanley Motor Carriage Company in 1917.

F.E. died on July 13, 1918, in Ipswich, Mass., when he crashed his Stanley Steamer into a woodpile while trying to avoid farm wagons driving side by side. Newspapers made much of ‘inventor killed by his own creation.’

F.O., who suffered from tuberculosis, built a hotel in Estes Park, Colo., and lobbied for the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park.

He died at home in Newton, Mass., on Oct. 2, 1940.

You can visit the Stanley Museum in Kingfield, Maine, Tuesday through Sunday afternoons in the summer.

Fred Marriott in the Stanley Rocket

If you enjoyed this story about the Stanley Steamer, you may also like to read about Vermonter Henry Martyn Leland, the forgotten car king here. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950

Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1950, New England was hit by a monster that was part blizzard, part hurricane. The storm became known as “The Great Appalachian Storm” and “The Storm of the Century.” Some call it “The Great Appalachian Wind Storm.”

A woman digs out after the blizzard. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Unlike most New England nor’easters, the winds came from the south, earning it another nickname: “The Great Sou’easter.” One of the oddest features of the storm, in fact, was that it moved from east to west. More than 99 percent of cyclones move the other way — from west to east.

Great Appalachian Storm

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the Appalachian storm one of the most ‘meteorologically unique’ storms ever because it produced both record high and record low temperatures. At 6:30 pm on November 25, snow battered Pittsburgh and temperatures fell to 9 degrees. But in Buffalo, 200 miles away, temperatures reached a balmy 54 degrees.

As a result, the Appalachian Storm was called ‘perhaps the greatest combination of extreme atmospheric elements ever seen in the eastern United States.’

The monster storm formed on November 24 as an extratropical cyclone in southeast North Carolina. It brought warm Atlantic air northwestward even as an Arctic front moved to the southeast through Ohio. The storm caused high winds, heavy rains and coastal flooding from Maine to Florida.

It stretched as far west as Ohio. Blizzards struck the western slopes of the Appalachians, dumping the most snow ever recorded on the mountainsides.

The storm blanketed Ohio – including Columbus, where Ohio State and the University of Michigan played their annual game despite the weather.

The 1950 Snow Bowl. Michigan won, 9-3.

Howling Winds

In 1950, weather satellites had yet to come into use, and people had few weather reports. So much of what happened came as a surprise.

To the east, the Great Appalachian Storm produced gale force winds — at least 39 mph — for an extraordinary 12 hours. Boston had a sustained one-minute gust of 80 mph, and Concord, N.H., recorded a wind gust of 110 mph.

Hartford clocked a gust at 100 mph with sustained winds of 70 mph, the highest on record. And then on one amazing day, Hartford experienced winds of 38 mph for an entire day.

FM broadcasting station WMTW’s ice-covered Mount Washington transmitter site. It’s windy there, too.

As you might expect, the storm’s highest wind was observed at the home of the world’s worst weather — Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Gusts reached 160 mph.

Along the coast, the violent winds produced the highest tides since 1821. In Bridgeport, the weather station was inundated with as much as 5 feet of water. Some places sustained more damage than they had in the hurricane of 1938.

On the Connecticut shoreline, the Appalachian Storm washed away houses, beaches, cottages and railroad tracks. People who refused to evacuate had to be rescued from their homes. Winds blew off roofs at the University of Connecticut .

The Damage Done

Winds blew so much beach sand onto the roads that plows had to remove it.

The storm hit 22 states, knocked out power to 1 million people, killed 353, injured 160 and caused $66.7 million in damages. U.S. insurance companies paid out more claims for the Appalachian Storm than any weather event to that date.

The National Centers for Environmental Information ranked the Great Appalachian Storm as the ninth worst in the Northeast out of 211 analyzed. Thirty inches of snow affecting 1.3 million people contributed to the storm’s ranking. In the Ohio Valley, it ranked as the all-time worst storm of 217 studied.

Cyclone researchers Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini said the Appalachian Storm “is the bench mark against which all other major storms of the 20th century could be compared.”

This story about the Great Appalachian Storm was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed reading it, you may want to read about the snow hurricane of 1888 here.

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