From the Archives: The 1938 Great New England Hurricane and Marblehead Neck

Hurricanes

The Great New England Hurricane of September 1938 was one of the most destructive storms to hit Long Island and New England in the 20th century. It caused massive damage to coastal communities and inland forests of a degree that no residents had ever experienced in their lifetimes. Throughout New York and New England, the wind and water dropped 275 million trees, seriously damaged more than 200,000 buildings, knocked trains off their tracks, and beached thousands of boats. Wind and rain damage extended as far north as Rutland, Vermont. Entire city blocks burned in New London and other industrial towns, and downtown Providence, Hartford, and other cities were flooded. 

New England had suffered from hurricanes before 1938, and several times since then. Even Governor Bradford of the Boston Bay wrote about such a storm in 1635 in his diary. I wrote about the 1938 hurricane in a 2022 blog entry, and you can read a longer article in the Journal of Coastal Research, available via BioOne Digital.

My father worked at Providence District of the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1938. But he had been assigned to stream gaging and inspection along the Connecticut river and missed downtown Providence being inundated by the storm surge. I found only a few negatives in his archives showing some damage to a shoe road in Winthrop, Massachusetts. And, surprisingly, I only found one Providence negative. Are there more in his boxes of negatives?

Providence, Rhode Island

This photograph shows Fox Point in Providence, Rhode Island. I thought I recognized the distant gas storage tank on the right. This, or newer tanks, can be seen near I-95 south of downtown Providence. But I could not find the railroad tracks on contemporary maps. 

It took some diligent detective work by a friend to positively identify the location. He looked at Cities from the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America by Thomas J. Campanella (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). Photographers of the Fairchild Aerial Survey company took these superb aerial photographs over a period of five decades. You can buy a copy on Amazon. The 25 August 1929 photograph of Providence told the story. The annotation shows the features that you see in my dad's view with the sailing vessel. Click the picture to see the details.

I was confused by contemporary Google maps because I could not find any evidence of the railroad tracks that you see in my dad's photograph. The tracks are now gone, and the right-of-way is probably buried under I-195, which runs east-west across the southern edge of Fox Point. But where did these former waterfront tracks go? Where was cargo shipped? I think there are two possibilities. 1. The tracks crossed the Seekonk River and ran south along the shore. Currently, this is the superb East Bay Bike Path.  2. The tracks crossed the Seekonk River, turned north, crossed the river again on a bascule bridge, and entered the East Side Railroad Tunnel. This is no longer in use, and almost all track infrastructure is gone. 

One can chase many interesting leads trying to identify features on old photographs.

Winthrop, Massachusetts

The surge and waves from the 1938 hurricane undermined the seawall and road foundation in Winthrop. Note how in that era, children and curious onlookers were free to climb on the rubble. 

Marblehead Neck, Massachusetts

Marblehead Neck is a rocky peninsula that projects into Massachusetts Bay. The geology consists of Late Proterozoic igneous and volcanic rocks belonging to the Avalon terrane. The rock has been modified by faulting and erosion, with glacial activity leaving the granite marred and exposed.

The Neck was considered an elegant place to have a summer "cottage" early in the 20th century. Today, it is lined with mansions, some of which are ostentatious and grotesque. The perils of wealth.

My dad took this picture from Castle Rock Park looking north. I have been unable to find any information about this unusual moderne beach home. Its spectacular setting on the rocks now hosts a more ordinary New England home. 

The mansion with the tower was called Questenmere. Mr. Fred McQuesten, a timber magnate, built the house in 1906. He died in the house in 1923. The house survived into the 1930s and had been renamed Tioga Towers, but I can't find any more information. 

This ends our short 1938 tour of the New England shore. Possibly there are more negative from this era showing Providence or the New England coast. 

These negative were from a film pack with 2¼ × 3¼"sheets. A film pack was a metal box containing 12 or 16 thin sheets. Each was attached to a paper pull tab. The photographer pulled the tab after he took a photograph, and the negative slid around the inside of the box to the back. I explained how this worked when I used 4 × 5" Versapan pack films. I wrote about them in 35mmc and on this blog. I scanned the negatives with an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo flat bed scanner using the Epson software.