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The Sparrow Hawk: When Indians and Pilgrims Rescued America’s First Shipwreck Victims

In 1863, a storm uncovered the bones of a ship that might have been the Sparrow Hawk, sunk off Cape Cod in 1626. William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, had described it, making it the first recorded shipwreck in American history. And since both Nauset Indians and Pilgrims helped the survivors, it was also the first recorded mutual aid rescue.

Local people recovered the wreck and reassembled it on Boston Common. Then in 1889, 109 timbers of the Sparrow Hawk found their final home at the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Mass.

In April 2022, three scientists announced their finding that the wood discovered on Cape Cod had belonged to an early seventeenth-century English vessel. That made it extremely probable the wreck was, indeed, the Sparrow Hawk – the one described by Bradford.

For historians, the Sparrow Hawk was more than a shipwreck. The story of the victims’ rescue showed the Nauset and the Pilgrims had repaired their sometimes rocky relationship.

Wreck of the Sparrow-Hawk

The Pilgrims had antagonized the Nauset when they first landed. They did it by stealing a cache of their buried corn in Truro. Within the previous 20 years, European explorers had also not endeared themselves to the Cape Cod natives. Samuel de Champlain’s two visits had resulted in fights and deaths. Martin Pring and his men had to leave in a hurry after staying for two months. The worst, Thomas Hunt, had captured 27 natives from Cape Cod and Plymouth, taken them to Spain and sold them into slavery.

Then in 1621, a Plymouth teenager named John Billington got lost and ended up with the Nausets on Cape Cod. The colonists found out where he was. They were anxious about getting him back from the people they’d robbed, but their visit to the Cape ended well. They retrieved the boy, paid back the Nauset for the corn they’d stolen and made peace with Aspinet, the tribe’s sachem.

Following the Billington mission, several parties of Plymouth colonists travelled to the area to trade with the local Indians.

Then in December 1626, a ship from England bound for Jamestown, Va., ran aground during a storm in the waters off of Pleasant Bay, in what is now Orleans. William Bradford described the wreck in his history. The rescue began a heritage of shipwrecks and lifesaving that has endured for nearly four hundred years.

William Bradford

Mutual Aid

The first responders to this wreck were the local Indians, who approached the passengers and crew as they made their way to shore. The wariness of the survivors was no doubt ameliorated when the approaching Indians called out to them in English. Bradford describes the scene:

But shortly after they saw some Indians come to them in their canoes, which made them stand upon their guard; but when they heard some of the Indians speak English unto them, they were not a little relieved, especially when they heard demand if they were the Governor of Plimoth’s men or friends; and that they would bring them to the English houses or carry their letters.

The survivors sent two men and a letter with the Indians to Plymouth. Governor Bradford personally led the rescue mission. He assembled a crew, had a boat readied and traversed Cape Cod Bay to Namskaket Creek (now the border of Brewster and Orleans). He then crossed two miles over the future Orleans to the site of the wreck. They carried supplies and repair materials with the help of the Indians. After a failed attempt to repair the ship, they brought the survivors back to Plymouth.

The episode shows that relations between the colonists and Indians had improved significantly, and that the peace agreement reached in Nauset in 1621 was working.

Leander Cosby, of Orleans, Mass., standing with remains of the 1626 shipwreck Sparrow Hawk, on Boston Common. Cosby, an early visitor to the wreck site, helped excavate and preserve it. Photo courtesy Pilgrim Hall Museum.

Family Lore

The country was in the middle of the Civil War in 1863 when the remains of a ship surfaced in what was called “Old Ships Harbor” in the vicinity of the 1626 wreck. The shipwreck was recovered, and analysis at the time determined that the remains came from that first wreck described by Bradford.

A local resident named Sparrow reported that Indian legend, passed on to his family, indicated that the ship’s name was the Sparrow Hawk. Since the time the remains went to Boston, people have called it the Sparrow Hawk, though no record exists of the ship’s actual name.

Sparrow Hawk Identified

Three scientists have since tried to authenticate the 1863 findings. Their findings, published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, also included more information about the passengers on the Sparrow Hawk. The researchers are Calvin Mires, a maritime archeologist and researcher with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Aiofe Daly, an associate professor at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen; and Fred Hocker, research director at the Vasa Museum in Sweden.

They scientifically dated the wood using tree-ring analysis and a technique called wiggle-match dating, which put the ship’s construction between 1556 and 1646. They also concluded the ship’s timbers came from English wood, and that English shipbuilders had made the vessel. Those findings made it very, very probable that the ship was indeed the Sparrow Hawk.

“How many other early seventeenth-century English vessels are likely to have been lost in the same place?,” they wrote.

The Sparrow Hawk at Pilgrim Hall. Photo: Ron Peterson

More About the Sparrow Hawk

In their report, the scientists added more information about the passengers aboard the Sparrow-Hawk. Two of them, John Fells and John Sibsey, were English planters who hoped to build tobacco farms in Virginia. They had brought the rest, farmers and indentured Irish servants. During the six-week voyage, the captain had gotten scurvy and they ran out of water and beer.

The Pilgrims gave them some land to keep them busy and fed for nearly a year. Then they found passage on other boats to Virginia.

Today, the Sparrow Hawk’s timbers are on display at the Pilgrim Hall Museum.

End Notes

Images: Sparrow Hawk timbers PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21038030. Pinnace By Halfblue, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3697704. Pilgrim Hall Museum By Giorgio Galeotti – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50915900.

Ron Petersen co-authored this story. He is the chair of the Orleans Massachusetts Historical Commission. Ron has also served on the Orleans Community Preservation Committee, as chair of both the Orleans Historical Markers Committee and the 1918 Attack on Orleans Committee. He is a former board member and officer of the Orleans Historical Society, and is a board member and historian for the Orleans Firebirds of the Cape Cod Baseball League. Ron has written numerous published articles on regional history, and has lectured throughout Cape Cod on various historical topics.

This story was updated in 2023.

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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 Wallingford Tornado of 1878 Unleashes Terror on an Unsuspecting Town

The Wallingford Tornado of 1878 ranks as one of the worst natural disasters to ever strike Connecticut. It caused so much damage the ruined town center became a tourist attraction.

The town then was a burgeoning community of about 4,000 people along the Quinnipiac River. Many of its residents were Catholic immigrants who worked in two large silver factories.

The Wallingford Tornado wasn’t the only destructive tornado to hit Connecticut. The state has, along with western Massachusetts, a tornado alley that has experienced some of the worst damage in U.S. tornado history.

And in 1878, it took the Wallingford Tornado just moments to inflict terrible destruction on an unsuspecting town.

An empty shell left by the Wallingford Tornado. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

Connecticut Tornado History

Connecticut ranks only 43rd in the United States for tornado frequency, and most Connecticut tornadoes are weak. But occasionally an intense tornado strikes, and the state’s dense population gives the weather system more opportunity to wreak havoc. A Connecticut tornado can cause as much damage as its Midwestern siblings.

The first record of a Connecticut tornado happened in 1648. The settlers didn’t have much to say about it, other than on June 14, a ‘great tempest’ toppled trees somewhere near Hartford.

Then on June 20, 1682, a tornado destroyed forests in southern Connecticut. In the worst hit town, Shelton, the tornado left scarcely a tree standing along a half-mile-wide path.

During the Four State Tornado Swarm of 1787, at least five tornadoes starting in New Britain struck Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, killing two in Wethersfield. The first went from New Britain to Coventry in Connecticut, while another traveled from Killingly to Mendon, Mass. A third struck northeast of East Windsor and the fourth injured two while moving from Northborough, Mass., to Framingham, Mass. The fifth hit Rochester, N.H.

The Worcester tornado of 1953, one of the 25 worst tornadoes in U.S. history, killed 90 people in a 90-minute terror spree.

And back in Connecticut in 1979, the Windsor Locks tornado was one of the most destructive in history, killing three people and causing millions of dollars of damage.

Damage caused by the Wallingford Tornado.

The Wallingford Tornado

The Wallingford tornado struck furiously around 6 pm on Friday, Aug. 9, 1878. The black funnel cloud appeared over Mt. Tom and hit the Community Lake and created a 200-foot-high water spout.

Then it headed for the center of town.

Wallingford was completely unprepared for the disaster. The Wallingford Tornado ripped up trees from their roots, destroyed orchards and tore down at least 40 houses and 50 barns. It caused a fire to start, but fortunately rain put it out quickly.

The Wallingford Tornado also took off the top two floors of the new brick schoolhouse, wrecked the windmill, a brick factory and the Catholic church. The collapsing buildings killed most of the victims.

All that took two minutes.

In the end, the storm killed 34 people, mostly Catholic, at the rate of one person every four seconds. The tornado severely injured another 28 people and inflicted minor injuries on 42.

The Wallingford Tornado also uprooted telegraph and telephone wires, cutting off communication. A 12-year-old boy named John Hoey rode on horseback to Meriden, the next town, to seek help. Within an hour of the tornado touching down, trains began to arrive with rescuers. Seven doctors came a half hour later and turned Town Hall into a hospital.

Aftermath

The Catholic Church buried 25 of the victims on Sunday, two days after the Wallingford Tornado struck. Ten thousand people came to the funeral.

Over the next few days, special trains carried thousands more sightseers to see the destruction. They could buy refreshments to help raise money for the survivors. Factories in New Britain closed to workers could travel to Wallingford to view the carnage.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Mid-Century Modern Homes

Though people usually think of the quintessential New England house as a white clapboard farmhouse or Cape, we actually have quite a few mid-century modern homes. And we have even more of their successors, the ubiquitous ranch house.

Mid-century modern houses typically have big windows, open floor plans, integration with the outdoors and little ornamentation.

Frank Lloyd Wright, an early practitioner of mid-century modern homes, called it ‘Prairie Style’ or ‘Usonian.’ Refugees from Hitler’s Germany such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought their own modernist philosophy to America. The Germans called it Bauhaus, and they influenced a generation of architects who designed mid-century modern structures from about 1945-75.

Then mid-century modern fell into disfavor. In 1975, critic Tom Wolfe excoriated mid-century modern style as architecture that nobody liked in his book, From Bauhaus to Our House.

Today, however, mid-century modern homes are popular again and command high prices. In New Canaan, Conn., a 1,500-square-foot house designed by Philip Johnson sold for $2.3 million in 2015.

Here, then, are six mid-century modern homes, one (at least) in each New England state. If you know of others, please share them in the comments section.

The Glass House

The famous Glass House was built in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns.

Philip Johnson designed the Glass House in 1949 as a weekend retreat in New Canaan, an upscale suburb of New York. Johnson belonged to a group of modern architects known as the Harvard Five, who lived and worked in the town. They all followed Walter Gropius.

The Glass House is an extreme version of a mid-century modernist home. Johnson designed the kitchen, dining and sleeping areas as one glass room. He enclosed the bathroom in a brick cylinder, the only object to reach floor to ceiling.

Johnson lived in the Glass House – for a while. He could only do it because you can’t see it from the road. The house sits behind a stone wall and overlooks a pond. Johnson viewed the surrounding landscape as his wallpaper, once commenting, “I have very expensive wallpaper.”

Eventually he only used it for entertaining and stayed in another building on the property – a brick guest house.

New Canaan has about 80 other mid-century modern homes built between 1940 and 1960. Not everyone loved them, and tore down about 20. The town now tries to preserve them. You can visit the Glass House in the summer (for information, click here). You can see many of the rest of New Canaan’s mid-century modern homes in the 1997 film The Ice Storm.

Emily Muir Boat House

The Emily Muir Boat House

Deer Isle, a fishing community in Penobscot Bay, has a collection of 48 mid-century modern homes designed by Emily Muir. The Boat House is one of them.

Emily, born in 1904, was an artist who married sculptor William Muir. As a child she summered on Deer Isle and moved there permanently in 1939 with her husband.

She didn’t turn to architecture until she reached her own mid-century. Emily had no training in architecture and designed her first home for her mother. That got her hooked on architecture.
Her homes have exaggerated angles and large windows that let in plenty of light. Many, like the Boat House, are perched on boulders that overlook the water.She tried to use as much local granite and wood as possible.

People who live in them now say they love the views, but Emily didn’t cook and didn’t clean so the kitchens often need renovation and the closet space is limited. She designed the houses to be affordable so fishermen could buy them, but it was summer people who snapped them up.

Emily Muir died in 2003 at the age of 99.

You can rent the Emily Muir Boat House from the Island Agency (click here). Even If you don’t’ love mid-century modern homes, you’ll probably love the views.

Gropius House

The Gropius House stands as a symbol of modern architecture in Lincoln, Mass. But in 1937, Lincoln itself symbolized freedom to Walter Gropius, who settled in the historic town while teaching at Harvard. .

A Lincoln philanthropist, Helen Osborne Storrow, gave Gropius the land on which to build a house.

Gropius built a simple, efficient contemporary home that melded industrial and traditional New England architectural materials. He used a fieldstone foundation, white painted wood, a brick chimney and a screened-in porch. Many of the fixtures were ordered from catalogs. It cost $18,000.

He later said he wanted to take a contemporary approach to traditional New England architecture.

When finished, the Gropius House created a sensation. Composer Igor Stravinsky, lecturing at Harvard, was so anxious to see it that he and his new bride visited it scarcely an hour after their wedding in March 1940. Mrs. Storrow was so pleased with it she allowed other architects to build mid-century modern homes on her land.

For information about visiting the Gropius House, click here.

The Zimmerman House

The Zimmerman House.

Frank Lloyd Wright was designing mid-century modern houses well before mid-century, but he designed the Zimmerman House in Manchester, N.H., smack in the middle of the 20^th. In 1950. Wright didn’t just design the house. He also designed the interiors, the furniture, the gardens and even the mailbox for Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman.

The Zimmerman House is one of the few Prairie Style houses in the Northeast. They are typically small, single-story dwellings without a garage or much storage. The Zimmerman House has a carport – a mid-century modern concept and a word Wright came up with.

Like many Wright houses, the Zimmerman House has an L-shape. It also fits around a natural feature – a large rock near the front door.

The Zimmermans meticulously maintained the house, and bequeathed the property to the Currier Museum of Art in 1988. The National Register of Historic Places added it to its list in 1970 partly because of its craftsmanship and detailing.

For information about tours of the Zimmerman House, click here.

Ira Rakatansky Home

Ira Ratansky designed this mid-century modern structure as a synagogue, now the Rhode Island Hindu Temple. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Ira Rakatansky was Rhode Island’s most renowned modernist architect. The son of Russian immigrants, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1942. He then studied architecture under Walter Gropius at Harvard.

He subsequently set up his architecture practice back home in Providence, where he worked from 1947 to 1992. Rakatansky designed dozens of mid-century modernist homes, temples, offices, bowling alleys and drive-ins, mostly in New England.

A former student wrote a book about Ira Rakatansky. He noted ‘his brand of mid-century modernism blew a fresh breeze through staid colonial New England.’

He designed his own house on Everett Avenue in Providence. It features soaring ceilings, large windows that bring in the outdoors and open interior space.

Rakatansky died in 2014. You can take a youtube tour of Ira Rakatansky houses here. Sadly, we couldn’t find any Ira Rakatansky homes open to the public. But we did find a temple he designed, then known as Beth Am in Warwick, which became Am David.

Norwich, Vt., Mid-Century Modern Historic District

A mid-century modern home in Norwich, Vt.

You may not think of Vermont as a hot spot of mid-century modern homes, but Norwich has an entire collection of them. Located on Hopson, Pine Tree and Spring Pond Roads, the National Register of Historic Places listed the district in 1991.

The town lies across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College, which attracted academics open to mid-century modern design.

Norwich’s role in mid-century modern style may have started when another German architect, Walter Curt Behrendt, escaped Nazi Germany, according to the Valley News. He came to the Upper Valley, and Dartmouth made him artist in residence. He built his own home in Norwich in 1945.

Edgar Hayes Hunter and Margaret King Hunter, students of Gropius, taught at Dartmouth and designed several mid-century modern homes in the area.

And Keith and Edna Warner get credit for starting the mid-century modern trend in 1951. They bought a large piece of land and built a house on it. They then sold off parcels to similarly minded people. Many had their home designed by Charles McKirahan of Fort Lauderdale.

Typically they are generally set back from the roads. They also have a horizontal orientation, flat roofs and large glass windows looking out on the hills.

The Norwich Historical Society has an online exhibit called Mad for Mid-Century Modern. You can see it here.

Images: Glass House By Staib – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7797606; Zimmerman House By Jane023 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21316008; Norwich, Vt. Home By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72230045; Emily Muir Boat House courtesy The Island Agency. This story was updated in 2022.

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The John Rutledge Shipwreck: A Horrifying Ordeal and One Miraculous Survival

Just after midnight on Feb. 20, 1856, the first mate of the packet ship John Rutledge began scratching out quick log entries.

“Midnight, light winds and the ship making very little headway through ice.”

It had been a punishing crossing from Liverpool. Storm after storm pounded the Rutledge since it left the protection of the Irish coast for the open Atlantic. For days at the time, the hatches to the steerage compartments were shut. More than 120 emigrants – mostly Irish — existed in a hellish twilight of swaying whale oil candles, the sour stench of vomit and the taut grip of fear.

“4, morning, the same,” wrote the first mate.

The John Rutledge, bound for New York, was now caught in the vise of the North Atlantic’s Iceberg Alley, the dangerous corridor off Newfoundland for bergs and other floes carried south from Greenland’s glaciers. Many veteran mariners said early 1856 had the worst ice they had seen in generations, with towering bergs and smaller, but still fearsome, fragments known curiously as growlers.

“8, steady breeze, and the ship making more headway. Passed some very large ice-bergs. At 9, the I ….”

The log ends there. The first mate never wrote another word.

Tragedy at Sea

Gravestone of Alexander Kelley, who perished in the John Rutledge disaster.

Stories of sea tragedies and sea rescues were a staple of mid-19th century New England. Rarely, however, did both intertwine with such drama during that of the horrible winter of 1856 in the North Atlantic.

In the span of eight weeks in early 1856, four major vessels went down – the John Rutledge, the steamship Pacific and two clipper ships, the Driver and the Ocean Queen. All told, more than 830 were lost in the North Atlantic in 1856 before March was out.

Among the dead were two Cape Cod captains. Alexander Kelley (sometimes wrongly spelled Kelly) of the John Rutledge was on his first run in command of the ship on a return trip from Europe. On the steamer Pacific was the famed Capt. Asa Eldridge of Yarmouth Port, who achieved celebrity status at the helm of the yacht of uber-tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt and guests on a European cruise in 1853.

Only a young deckhand, Thomas W. Nye, of Fairhaven, Mass., survived.

Artist drawing in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in April 1856 depicting the John Rutledge and the lifeboat with Thomas W. Nye and the other castaways. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

The Nye Family

I first came across the story of Nye and the John Rutledge at a shipwreck exhibit in Centerville on Cape Cod, the hometown of the ship’s captain, Kelley. I soon learned, as the research into my book on the John Rutledge disaster took shape, that there was a much larger story to tell about those tragic months in 1856 and the questions about the 22-year-old Nye.

What was Nye doing as common seaman on a packet ship in the first place? He could have had the pick of any cushy shipboard job.

The Nye family whaling ships. Courtesy of Mystic Seaport Collections Research Center.

The Nye family was among the gentry in the seafaring pecking order of New Bedford and Fairhaven at the time. A fleet of whaling ships flew under the blue Nye flag. Nyes were merchant captains, diplomatic envoys in China, abolitionists and industrial innovators. They even owned a lubricant factory that still operates in Fairhaven.

The family traces its roots to 17^th-century Sandwich on Cape Cod with its own glorious lore. That includes the renowned Capt. Ezra Nye, who was presented with the gold chronometer by Queen Victoria for helping save the crew of a foundering British bark, the Jessie Stephens, in 1852. The Cape Cod Nyes also would remember for generations the lucky whaler Peleg Nye, who was snatched in the mouth of harpooned sperm whale and lived to tell the tale, earning him the nickname “the Jonah of Cape Cod.”

The John Rutledge

For reasons he kept to himself, Thomas W. Nye signed on with the John Rutledge out of New York for one of its regular roundtrip runs to Liverpool. The sail to England was fast – a 21-day run with a favorable wind. By mid-January, however, word began to reach Liverpool from arriving ships of intense ice in the shipping lanes about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland.

Capt. Kelley kept to his schedule. On Jan. 16, the Rutledge headed down the Mersey toward open sea with 26 crew, 123 passengers in steerage and one cabin passenger, a Philadelphia merchant.

The only apparent concession to the risks at hand was Kelley’s appeal to his wife, the former Irene Snow of Falmouth. Mass., to remain behind in Liverpool. The plan was for the Rutledge to return in May, and they could sail back to New York together in more pleasant weather.

More than a month later, on Feb. 19, the John Rutledge entered heavy fog in the treacherous area where the Gulf Stream bushes against the colder Labrador currents. The ice was thick and menacing – just as described in the early report that reached Liverpool before the John Rutledge set sail.

The next day, sometime around 9 a.m., an iceberg – as sharp and gleaming as enamel – gouged a huge hole in the bow just under the waterline. Within hours, it was clear the ship was doomed.

Lunatics

Kelley ordered the John Rutledge abandoned. All five lifeboats made it off. Kelley was in No. 4. The next and last lifeboat held Nye and 12 others – two shipmates, the wife of the first mate and nine steerage passengers, including three children. About 30 others, including the first mate Samuel Atkinson, were left on the deck to perish.

Thomas Nye’s home in his later years. Fairhaven, Mass.

The lifeboats were soon separated in the fog. Nye’s boat had a gallon of water and about six pounds of flour-and-water biscuits, known to soldiers on land as hardtack, and a bottle of brandy that Kelley gave Nye at the last moment.

The provisions were soon gone. Waves washed into the open boat. Sleet beat down.

Then it grew even more ugly. Nye later it later as being on a lifeboat with “lunatics.”

Thirst had driven them to drink seawater. It was now taking its awful toll: delusions, anger, violent mood swings. One man turned on his wife, ripping out her hair in clumps. A crew member bit into the arm of the wife of the first mate.

Some already were dead. The rest would soon follow.

Rescue

After nine days adrift, only Nye was left on Lifeboat No. 5. Four frozen bodies were cast around him. Nye knew enough not to drink the water even as unbearable thirst took hold. The decision likely saved his life. But he was now too weak to toss over the bodies.

Then, Nye saw a smudge on the horizon. It grew larger and began to take shape. Could it be a ship?

Nye signaled as best he could and praying the makeshift flags – shirts taken from the dead – would be seen.

Someone on the Germania, an American packet sailing from France, cried out. Lifeboat spotted, possible survivor.

At first, the Germania’s first mate, Charles Hervey Townsend from the Connecticut shore, thought it must be a corpse jostled with the waves. Who could survive out there in winter? he thought. Townsend adjusted his spyglass. Wait, he said. That looks like someone is alive.

Nye waved weakly. Townsend waved back.

It was even more astonishing that the Germania was there at all. It may have been the last vessel at those latitudes at the time. Most shipping lines, fearing the ice of 1856, had shifted to a more southerly crossing.

“Saw a boat with a man in to windward,” wrote Townsend in his log. “Hove ship to. Myself and four men went to his relief. Found him to be one of the boys of the ship John Rutledge bound from Liverpool to New York, which was lost in an immense field of ice … He being the only survivor of 13 souls having buried with his own hands 8, there being four others having died in the boat. 2 men + 2 women (consigned the dead to the deep).

Lat. 44.11

Long. 47.34”

Deliverance

Rescue log of the lone survivor of the John Rutledge shipwreck. The first line reads, “The young man’s name is Thomas Nye of New Bedford.” (Courtesy of Mystic Seaport Collections Research Center)

“Appalling Catastrophe at Sea,” said the headline in the New York Herald after the Germania reached port on March 24 and Nye’s story was told. Only careful medical attention by Sarah Wood of New Bedford, wife of the Germania’s captain, saved Nye’s feet from gangrene and possible amputation. In the end, Nye lost only two toes.

In 1903, then just a few weeks short of 70, Nye recalled to a reporter how he felt a sense of preternatural calm that leap year morning on Feb. 29, 1856, just before he saw the Germania. The calm, he believed, was his acceptance of death.

Gravestone of Thomas Nye at Riverside Cemetery in Fairhaven.

“I felt as though the voyage was done,” he said. “Just before noon I sighted a ship advancing from the leeward. I saw her mainsails hove up and the jibs lowered, and then I knew that I was seen and that my deliverance was at hand.”

Once the Germania brought him to shore, he never went back to sea.

******

Brian Murphy, with his wife Toula Vlahou, co-wrote Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived, about the John Rutledge disaster. Murphy has three other books. A journalist at the Washington Post, he worked for more than two decades as a correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Europe and the Middle East.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Great September Gale of 1815

When the Great September Gale struck New England in the fall of 1815, few could remember the last time such a devastating storm had hit. That was the Colonial Gale of 1635, which almost killed Richard Mather, the influential Puritan minister.

Historians place the September Gale of 1815 somewhere between a Category 3 and a Category 4, with winds that gusted up to 156 mph.

New England has experienced only three other Category 3 hurricanes since the colonists arrived: the September Hurricane of 1869, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in 1954.

The September Gale of 1815 damaged crops, buildings and ships, killed livestock and people, toppled forests and caused a water shortage for as long as six months in some places. Only the New England Hurricane of 1938 was more destructive.

But, unlike the other hurricanes, the Great September Gale of 1815 ushered in a second devastating weather event: the 1816 Year Without a Summer.

No wonder New Englanders began migrating west in great numbers.

Artists’ rendering of the Great September Gale of 1815.

The Great September Gale

It began on September 22 as a nor’easter, with torrential rain falling along the Atlantic coast for 24 hours. Then a fierce tropical hurricane collided at right angles with the rainstorm and made landfall on Long Island. It proceeded to wreak havoc in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the eastern half of New Hampshire.

Some people noted a respite between the two storms, then a hot, heavy wind that began to blow. In Abington, Mass., a sailor from the West Indies started frequently as if he knew what was coming. When asked why, he said there was a crackling in the air, just the way it had before a terrific wind.

John Farrar, science professor at Harvard, experienced the September Gale in Cambridge, Mass., and described it in a scientific journal.

He wrote that between 9 am and 10 am on Sept. 23, the hurricane began to cause alarm as it toppled chimneys and trees and hurled flying missiles – shingles, slates and wood fragments — down the streets.

“The Charles River raged and foamed like the sea in a storm, and the spray was raised to the height of sixty or one hundred feet in the form of thin white clouds, which were drifted along in a kind of waves like snow in a violent snow storm,” he wrote.

Howling Wind

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., experienced the storm as a seven-year-old living in Boston. Later in life he recalled ‘a general impression of a mighty howling, roaring, banging and crashing, with much running about, and loud screaming of orders for sudden taking in of all sail about the premises and battening down of everything that could flap or fly away.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Nine-year-old John Peabody was standing near the edge of the mill pond in Boxford, Mass., when a gust of wind picked him up, carried him 30 feet and dunked him in the water. His family rescued him.

The wind blew so strongly that people couldn’t keep fires lit inside their homes. It wiped out all kinds of structures from churches to sheds and uprooted orchards and forests.

Falling trees killed some people, while others drowned in shipwrecks along the coast. An estimated 38 people died in the storm, but the death toll was probably much higher.

The tempest smashed vessels from Eastport, Maine, to New York.

It swept away wharves, blew down steeples, destroyed 60 vessels in Boston Harbor and drove a schooner up Main Street in Cambridgeport, Mass.

In the port of New Bedford, the winds drove every vessel but two ashore. The newspapers reported they didn’t have enough room to record the maritime losses.

The wind knocked down 5,000 apple trees in the town of Dorchester (now part of Boston), destroyed the Neponset River Bridge and ruined the First Parish Meeting House beyond repair.

In Danvers, Mass., the Endicott pear tree, planted by Gov. John Endecott around 1630, lost half its branches.

Providence

The September Gale hit Providence hardest, as the wind blew directly up the Providence River. The storm surge caused an extraordinary tide 12-14 feet above high water. Stores and houses reeled and tottered, then plunged into the floodwaters.

The September Gale strikes Providence.

Boats and scows struggled against the churning waters to rescue panicked women and children as the water reached their windows. Vessels smashed against the bridge connecting the two parts of Providence until it swept it away.

The tide forced the ship Ganges against the third floor of the Washington Insurance Building. It drove a brig loaded with livestock onto a wharf, where it stuck. The trapped crew finally took the risk of abandoning ship and crawled along the roiling debris toward buildings still standing. Some people dragged the sailors into their homes through the second-story windows.

The September Gale completely destroyed 500 buildings in the city and left tangled heaps of furniture, lumber, candles, flour, cotton bales, coffee, grain and wrecked boats. When the storm ended, 300 armed men were stationed in Providence to prevent looting.

A Mr. Webb found a sloop standing up at his front door, while Gen. Lippett found a ship in his garden

Salt and Sand

The September Gale drove saltwater 40 miles into the country side. Houses turned white, and the leaves on the trees seemed lightly frosted. Wine grapes harvested in the aftermath of the Great September Gale tasted like salt.

Along the coast and in some places inland, the September Gale caused a shortage of fresh water for weeks, even months.

In Buzzards Bay, the tide rose so high that it covered farmers’ fields with sand. The saltwater made wells and streams brackish for months and killed corn, grass and trees in cedar swamps.

In Stonington, Conn., the tide rose 17 feet and deluged the town. It demolished the wharves, destroyed all 20 vessels in the harbor and left the town unrecognizable. Gardens and fertile fields turned into sandy beaches. The storm reduced a nearby island of several acres to a small rock.

The September Gale also caused considerable damage in New London, Groton and even Norwich up the Thames River.

No Angry God

By 1815, science was undergoing a transition. People began to pay attention to weather as a scientific phenomenon, rather than a reward or punishment from an angry god.

John Farrar was probably the first to write that the September Gale was a moving vortex and not, as previously thought, ‘the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes made a more prosaic observation in his 1836 poem, The September Gale.

It chanced to be our washing-day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the shirts and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,–
I lost my Sunday breeches!

This story was updated in 2023.

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