With much of the Northeast United States enveloped in a weird, thick yellow smoke from the wildfires of Canada, the Nerds thought they would share an example of a similar event that struck Massachusetts and most of the northern colonies on May 19, 1780.
The sun rose, as usual, that day, but then the skies over New England quickly darkened. According to a 19th century account, “a dark dense cloud gradually rose out of the West and spread itself until the heavens were entirely covered, except at the horizon, where a narrow rim of light remained.”
In Weston, Massachusetts, merchant Samuel Phillips Savage marveled that a veil the color of cider had descended “over the whole visible heavens.”
George Washington, stationed in Connecticut with the Continental Army, reported the "Dark Day" in his diary. He wrote "Heavy & uncommon kind of Clouds--dark & at the same time a bright and reddish kind of light intermixed with them--brightning & darkning alternately. This continued till afternoon when the sun began to appear. The Wind in the Morning was Easterly. After that it got to the Westward."
The darkness was so complete that candles were required from noon onward. Connecticut’s Joseph Joslin was forced to abandon work on a stone wall for want of light.
Could your thunder buddy have saved you during the 1780 Day of Darkness?
Samuel Phillips Savage noted that a neighbor stopped shoveling manure when he realized he couldn’t “discern the difference between the ground and the dung.”
“The fowls retired to roost,” Harvard professor Samuel Williams wrote, “the cocks were crowing all around, as at break of day; objects could not be distinguished but at a very little distance; and everything bore the appearance of gloom of night.”
Panic, confusion, and terror quickly spread among the residents of many New England communities. Men prayed, and women wept. Many waited in great fear for the arrival of the Four Horsemen.
Schools were closed, and hundreds of colonists left off work to seek refuge in taverns or churches. In Salem, the Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker warned that the Dark Day was the Almighty's wrath for the congregation's sins. Lawyer William Pynchon noted that a group of booze-soaked sailors “went hallooing and frolicking through the streets” of Salem and encouraged the town’s ladies to strip off their clothes and join them in morbid celebration. “Now you may take off your rolls and high caps,” they said, “and be damned.”
At some point, a rainstorm passed through the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts. Period accounts described the rain giving off a strong soot smell while the Merrimack River near Amesbury and Newburyport was coated in a black oily film.
One eyewitness described Boston as smelling like a coal kiln.
A Young Woman Shucking Oysters by Lamplight by Robert Morland
Save for a few peeks of sunlight in the afternoon, the shade lingered over the Northeast for the rest of the day. The night that followed was remembered as one of the darkest on record. New Hampshire’s Samuel Tenney deemed it “as gross as ever has been observed since the Almighty fiat gave birth to light…A sheet of white paper held within a few inches of the eyes was equally invisible with the blackest velvet.”
People slept fitfully, and many worried they would never see daylight. Much to the relief of New England, the shroud of darkness had lifted by the following morning.
What caused this unusual event? A scientific study of old trees in the Algonquin Highlands, Ontario, confirmed what many historians suspected - a massive wildfire in Canadian forests.
After careful examination, scientists found ‘fire scars’, (the presence of charcoal and resin) in the growth rings of the trees. These scars were dated to the same period as the so-called “Day of Darkness”.
