[N]EWFANE — The high water and winds no longer are making headlines, but Stephen Long knows many people still are thinking about the hurricane.
No, not Florence, but the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which hit 80 years ago on Sept. 21.
“No one was anticipating this hurricane — it arrived without any notice whatsoever,” the co-founder and former editor of Northern Woodlands magazine says of the Depression-era disaster that struck before the dawn of computers and cellphones.
Eight decades later, the storm’s impact still can be seen throughout the state. Long recalls walking his Corinth woods with a forester shortly after purchasing the property in 1988 and noticing pockmarks known in topographical terms as pits and mounds.
“He told me they were a sign of the hurricane,” he recalls. “I found that utterly fascinating and decided I needed to know more.”
Long learned the 1938 tempest remains the only one to ravage Vermont as a hurricane (meaning its maximum sustained winds measured at least 74 miles per hour) rather than a strong-but-less-powerful tropical storm such as 2011’s Irene.
Historians have extensively chronicled the 1938 hurricane’s damage to the coast, where most of the storm’s 700 fatalities were reported and actress Katharine Hepburn’s Connecticut beach house was one of 8,900 buildings ripped away. But even though Long considers the disaster “New England’s most damaging weather event ever,” he couldn’t find as much in library texts about its effects on Vermont.
Launching his own research during a Harvard University fellowship in 2011, Long discovered the hurricane tore up trees that, if processed collectively, represented an estimated 2.6 billion board feet of timber — the equivalent of 400,000 truckloads or 65 years of production at New England’s largest hardwood sawmill, Cersosimo Lumber of Brattleboro.
“The rest of New England had turned to manufacturing, but so many communities in Vermont were still farming at that time,” he says. “Any place there were sugar bushes and woodlots, chances are they were blown down. It was just one more nail in the coffin of Vermont agriculture.”
A box built, Long adds, without the help of a chain saw, which wouldn’t reach the mass market for another decade.
“All of this work was done by hand,” he says. “If there was any silver lining, all the cleanup and wood processing and repairs to houses and buildings put people back to work.”
Long released his findings in a book, “Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England,” published by Yale University Press in 2016.
“Call it New England’s Katrina and you might be understating its power,” he writes in the preface. “The devastation to the region’s infrastructure required repairs costing $300 million in Depression-era dollars, approximately $5 billion today.”
Two years after his book’s debut, Long still receives requests to talk about it. Speaking to a capacity crowd at Newfane’s Union Hall this month, he asked how many attendees were alive during the hurricane. Much to his surprise, nearly half the audience raised a hand.
“The farther along we get,” the author says, “the fewer people who lived through it are still around.”
Yet with storms such as this month’s Florence and concerns about climate change continuing to make news, Long fears the state may someday face a new torrent of memories.
“Irene was a flood — 1938 was a flood and 100-mile-an-hour winds,” he says. “We may have another one next week or we may not have another one for 500 years. If it happens again, it’s going to be a serious bit of business. I hope it doesn’t for quite some time.”