On Sept. 21, 1938, New Englanders started out enjoying what looked like a decent fall day. No one paid attention to the superstorm headed up the coast, a behemoth that would be known 
orever after as the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. It was hands down the worst natural disaster to ever hit the region. No one can claim otherwise.
The storm itself was as powerful, or close to as powerful, as any other hurricane that made landfall in New England, including the devastating storms of 1635 and 1815. But no other hurricane had struck land after New England developed a modern infrastructure of utility wires, railroad tracks, dams and levees, dense urban neighborhoods, skyscrapers, highways and motor vehicles.
Hartford after the storm. Photo licensed under public domain by Wikipedia Commons.
Weather forecasters told those who paid attention the storm had turned out to sea. The worst they should expect? A breezy day. The Moore family had no reason to think they would take a miraculous ride across the Long Island Sound that day.
Charles Pierce, a rookie at the National Weather Bureau, predicted the storm would, in fact, follow the devastating track of New England’s worst hurricanes. But his superiors overruled him.
Storm surge from the 1938 hurricane against a seawall.
Photo courtesy NOAA/NWS.
The Great New England Hurricane of 1938
Estimates vary, but at least 400 people perished that day and maybe as many as 800. The hurricane leveled entire forests, uprooting an estimated 2 billion trees. And it destroyed 8,900 homes and damaged another 15,000.
THe monster storm first hit Long Island, then crossed over the Sound and slammed into New London, Conn., at about 3:30 pm. It then raced up the Connecticut River Valley at an unheard-of 50 mph.
Tobacco barn in Connecticut, 1938, by Sheldon Dick
The storm drove 18- to 25-foot tidal surges from New London to Cape Cod, destroying the fishing fleet all the way to Point Judith, R.I. In New London’s Ocean Beach community, 100-mph winds tossed cottages end-over-end, smashing them to smithereens. A five-masted schooner, Marsala, rammed a New London warehouse, causing an explosion and a fire that soon burned out of control, demolishing a quarter-mile section of the city’s business district.
When the storm passed the Milton Observatory in Massachusetts, 186-mph wind gusts were recorded. In New Hampshire, Peterborough went up in flames and part of the Cog Railway on Mt. Washington blew down. The hurricane dumped as much as 12 inches of rain on Vermont, flooding the Winooski, White and Connecticut rivers, washing out hundreds of bridges, miles of roads and rail lines. Small towns were cut off for days.
Rhode Island
Rhode Island got the worst of it. The storm’s fierce, clockwise winds pushed millions of gallons of water up the funnel-shaped Narragansett Bay with devastating force. The water, said one survivor, rose so fast in Providence it was as if you held a glass under a spigot. Parts of downtown Providence were under 14 feet of water, with people sheltering on the second and third floors of buildings. The headlights of submerged automobiles glowed under water and their shorted-out horns blasted incessantly above the moaning wind. Several corpses bobbed among the whitecaps that surged through the streets, along with rats and detritus from downtown stores
Storm surge flooding at the Washington Park Yacht Club in Providence, Rhode Island during the hurricane
The New England Hurricane of 1938 eliminated entire resorts along the coast of Narragansett Bay. The Napatree Point beach community vanished and only six of 200 cottages at Misquamicut Beach survived.
In Westerly, giant waves swallowed Watch Hill beaches and destroyed many of the town’s historic buildings. Waves swept away 39 cottages from Fort Point Road. They took 41 people with them. All told, 100 people in Westerly died in the storm.
Perhaps the most astounding story of the storm comes from the Moore family of Westerly, .
As the storm grew stronger, the family tried to evacuate their beachfront home, but could not. As the ocean waves began surging into the house, Catherine Moore recalls her father bracing against the front door literally trying to hold back the ocean. He had suffered a mild heart attack that morning, but he led them to safety.
The Miraculous Ride
As the family moved first to the second floor and finally to the third floor to stay above the storm surge, they watched as house after house succumbed. They saw neighbors washed away. Finally, the waves overwhelmed their own house, lifting it off its foundation.
“Next thing I knew, we were floating,” Moore recalled. “We were on the water with the waves crashing over us, and part of the house still attached, one of the walls still attached to this piece of floor, and it almost acted as a sail.” Hammerhead sharks followed them as the wind drove them across the Sound.
In all, 11 people clung to that bit of floor as it hurdled across the water to Barn Island in Connecticut, where the family spent the night sleeping on hay in an abandoned barn. A lobsterman rescued them the next morning. Only five others from Fort Point Road survived.
Newsreel footage of the 1938 hurricane can be seen here.
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Read more about how New England’s wild weather affected the course of history in New England Weather by the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copy today.
This story was updated in 2025.
Images: Providence Yacht Club By The Providence Journal – https://www.providencejournal.com/picture-gallery/news/local/2021/09/21/archives-photos-1938-hurricane-and-its-aftermath/5785471001/, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=171841606.
