1815 — Sep 23, Hurricane, “Great September Gale of 1815,” L.I., NY, New England —     38

Compiled by Wayne Blanchard; last edit 7-15-2024 for upload to: http://www.usdeadlyevents.com/

—   38  Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, NOAA. “200th Anniversary…”

— ~38  Wikipedia.  “Great September Gale of 1815.”

Narrative Information

Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, NOAA:

“On the morning of September 23, 1815, a severe storm struck Long Island and New England.  It had been 180 years since the last recorded hurricane had hit the area so the term ‘hurricane’ had fallen out of use and the newspapers referred to the tempest as a “Great Storm” or “Great Gale”.

 

“The prior history of this hurricane is not known, as it does not appear to have affected any ships or islands previous to its main landfall.  The storm was observed by John Farrar, a Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (Science) Professor at Harvard.  In a description of the storm published four year later, he noted that the hurricane was preceded by rains that began the previous day, but the barometer did not begin to fall quickly until the morning of the 23rd.  He and some friends ventured out into the storm to take observations and noted that, “While abroad, we found it necessary to keep moving about, and in passing from one place to another, we inclined our bodies toward the wind, as if we were ascending a steep hill.”  He recorded that 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 made particular note of the changing direction of the wind, shifting from NE to SE and then S.  When the wind was out of the south, he noted that the rains slacked off and that clear sky was observed even as the winds were at their worst.  This indicates that Boston experienced the eyewall with the eye visible to the west.  From accounts from New York he learned that the storm had hit there two hours previous to Boston and that the winds had backed counterclockwise there instead.  This led Farrar to conclude that the storm “appears to have been a moving vortex, and not the rushing forward of the great body of the atmosphere.”  The prevailing assumption of that time held that hurricanes were great forward, straight-line surges of wind that originated in the Tropics that came rushing northward until they encountered land then blew themselves out.  Farrar’s notion of a moving vortex would not become fully accepted until nearly twenty years later with the publishing of a paper by William Redfield.

 

“The hurricane did considerable damage to the foliage and to roofs in Boston, but the worst destruction came from an 11-foot (3.4 m) storm surge that pushed up Narragansett Bay into Providence, RI and wrecked many ships in the harbor.  38 deaths were attributed to this storm and an estimated US$12.5 million (roughly US$160 million today) in damage was done throughout the region.”[1]

 

Sumner: “September 22-23, 1815. The ‘Great September Gale’ of 1815 was one of the most destructive hurricanes to reach New England.  Heaviest damage occurred in Rhode Island and central Massachusetts.  On the coast of Connecticut high tides and hurricane winds destroyed many buildings and numerous vessels were driven ashore.  The storm began on September 22 and reached its height shortly before noon on the following day….A survey of the damage caused by this hurricane convinced W. C. Redfield that the storm was a ‘progressive whirlwind,’ and as a result he began his study of cyclonology.” (Sumner, H. C. “The North Atlantic Hurricane of September 8-16, 1944.”  Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 72, No. 9, December 5, 1944, p. 188.)

 

Wikipedia: “The Great September Gale of 1815 (the word “hurricane” was not yet current in American English at the time), is one of five “major hurricanes” (Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale) to strike New England since 1635. At the time it struck, the Great September Gale was the first hurricane to strike New England in 180 years.

 

“The storm struck Long Island on September 23, 1815, probably coming ashore near Center Moriches (Ludlum); on the South Shore of Long Island it broke through the barrier beach and created the inlet that still isolates Long Beach, which had previously been an eastward extension of The Rockaway’s. Then in New England it came ashore at Saybrook, Connecticut. The storm delivered an 11-foot (3.4 m) storm surge that funneled up Narragansett Bay where it destroyed some 500 houses and 35 ships and flooded Providence, Rhode Island, where a line marked on the Old Market Building marked the storm surge that was unexampled in the city until the New England Hurricane of 1938, which brought a 17.6-foot (5.4 m) storm surge. There is still a worn plaque on the Rhode Island Hospital Trust building (built in 1917), along with a newer plaque showing the higher 1938 hurricane water level. At Matantuck, Rhode Island, sediment studies have identified the over wash fan of sediments in Succotash Marsh, where the 1815 hurricane storm surge overtopped the barrier beach.

 

“In Dorchester, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, local historian William Dana Orcutt wrote in the late 19th century of the hurricane’s impact: “In 1815 there was a great gale which destroyed the arch of the bridge over the Neponset River. This arch was erected over the bridge at the dividing line of the towns [Dorchester and Milton] in 1798.” Dorchester’s First Parish Meeting House was too badly damaged to repair.[2]

 

“The eye passed into New Hampshire near Jaffrey and Hillsborough.”  (Wikipedia.  “Great September Gale of 1815.”)

Sources

 

Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, NOAA. “200th Anniversary of the Great September Gale.” Accessed 7-15-2024 at: https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hurricane_blog/200th-anniversary-of-the-great-september-gale/

 

 

Sumner, H. C. “The North Atlantic Hurricane of September 8-16, 1944.” Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 72, No. 9, 12-5-1944, pp. 187-189. Accessed 11-13-2017 at:  http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/lib/lib1/nhclib/mwreviews/1944.pdf

 

Wikipedia. “Great September Gale of 1815.” At: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_September_Gale_of_1815

 

Additional Reading

 

Snow, Edward Rowe. “The September Gale of 1815,” pp. 95-98 in Storms and Shipwrecks of New England. Boston Printing Co., 1943.

 

Snow, Edward Rowe (updated by Jeremy D’Entremont). Storms and Shipwrecks of New England. Carlisle, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2003. Accessed 7-13-2024 at: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Storms_and_Shipwrecks_of_New_England/GdEDSnredWgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Storms+and+Shipwrecks+of+New+England&printsec=frontcover

 

[1] Cites as references: (1) Farrar, J., “An Account of the violent and destructive Storm of the 23rd of September, 1815”, American Philosophical Transactions, Article XIII, p. 102-106,, 1819; and (2) Redfield, W. C. “Remarks on the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast of the North American States.” American Journal of Science and Arts, 20, p. 17-51, 1831.

[2] Cited is Peter F. Stevens. “When Hurricanes Hit Dot.”   Dorchester Reporter, Sep 8, 2005.