In 1938, the era before hurricanes were named, the people of Windham County were surprised by a weather system 125 miles wide.
Its course had already taken the Sept. 22 weather system from the Bahamas, to Long Island in the afternoon, then to Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.
Around 5 p.m., the storm hit southern Vermont and New Hampshire. Because telephone poles and telegraph wires came down in the hurricane's wake, the remaining states could not be warned of its coming.
And because of this lack of communication, between 682 and 800 people died in the hurricane's wake nationally, including five people in Windham County.
It had already been a wet summer, and heavy rain preceded the hurricane's arrival for four days. Unlike Hurricane Irene, heavy winds accompanied this storm. Like Irene, flash flooding was also a part of the disaster.
The Whetstone Brook went over its 1936 level and inundated Flat, Elm, Frost, and Williams streets and sections of West Brattleboro, forcing many families to flee their homes.
Some people were carried to safety by squads of police and volunteers. In West Brattleboro, Ernest Fairbank's mink ranch lost 700 out of 800 of his mink. They were swept down the Whetstone and finally dumped into the Connecticut River.
Lower Main Street was roped off by police when it was feared that part of the roof on the Wilder Block and the nearby Hotel Billings would crumble onto the street.
Electricity in the downtown area went out at 5:30 p.m. For some Brattleboro residents, it would not come back on for over a week. For outlying towns, it was two weeks; for others, months.
The new Latchis Theatre had to delay its grand opening because of the damage to the lower end of Main Street.
The Connecticut and West rivers, in the days before dams were built upstream, continued to rise for several days. After they crested, a tremendous amount of damage could be viewed, especially along the West River and on roads in Vernon. At least one tree on every street was blown down, and on many streets the trees went down in row upon row.
Hundreds of thousands of trees were blown down in the county: shade trees, picnic groves, and parks built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the years of the Great Depression were gone in minutes in the heavy winds. Only one maple tree in ten survived the storm, almost wiping out the maple sugaring industry.
The Brattleboro Reformer reported one of the many rescues of people from their homes.
“One of the rescues effected was the removal of three persons from the Ernest Plante place on Marlboro Road. As the rampaging Whetstone completely surrounded the house, firemen used ropes and ladders to carry Mrs. Plante, her six year old daughter and a hired man to safety.”
Stephen Baker was an eight-year-old living on Chestnut Hill.
“My father was driving our cleaning lady home to Belmont Avenue in a convertible,” Baker recalled. “My mother got very nervous because the wind was picking up and it was raining. There was only a canvas top on the car.”
Baker's mother “had us kids under the kitchen table saying the 'Our Father' as the winds were blowing. He finally came home, and right after he came inside, pine trees two to three foot in diameter came down like toothpicks.”
“We were without power for almost a week, two weeks for the telephone,” Baker recalled. “We had a great time playing cops and robbers in the fallen trees. There was no warning whatsoever. This was true all over New England.”
On Oct. 3, the New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. placed a quarter-page ad in the Reformer, which read in part, “To those still without telephone service. During the most difficult days of our history, nothing has heartened us so much as the splendid cooperation and patience of you, our customers....we are arranging to credit your account for each day you were unable to use your telephone knowing that the inconvenience you may have experienced is more important than the amount to be credited.”
The company worked to restore service in southern Vermont, requiring 22,000 poles, 27 million feet of wire, 320 miles of cable, whole trainloads of miscellaneous equipment, 6,000 trained men (who came from as far away as South Dakota to help), and 1,500 fully equipped telephone trucks.
The work took many months to complete, especially in the rural parts of the county, some of which were cut off from the world for weeks and months.
The terrified parents of Madeline Moore, 17, who disappeared just before the storm, learned three days later that she had not died. She had eloped with the chef from their restaurant and had gotten married in Winchester, N.H.
The town of Wilmington was a sorry site on the morning of Sept. 22, as the Reformer reported.
“Proud citizens found that the fine cement bridge in the center of the town, built only four years ago, had dropped down on the west side, smashing the water main and cutting off the town's water supply.
“Bridges in all directions were likewise badly damaged or washed away and gaping holes in roads everywhere testified to the fierceness of the flooded streams and torrents of rain.”
Wilmington suffered damage more serious than any other town in Windham County.
Communication was completely cut off, and the only information available came from two men, Raymond Cooke of West Brattleboro and William Stafford of New York, a guest at the Childs Tavern.
Stafford came to Brattleboro on his bicycle, pedaling all the way over a road impassable to automobiles.
Cooke reached his home by walking several miles before he was picked up by a passing car.
Both men were interviewed by the newspaper, giving readers their first news from Wilmington after the hurricane. They told of families stuck in their homes in the second stories, yelling for help. The described the Wilmington branch of the Vermont Savings Bank, where water had risen six feet and had reached to the windows on the first floor.
The local drugstore had been swamped from water under the building, causing the counters to tip over and toppling a huge 1,000-pound safe.
Huge slabs of the bridge had been deposited on the lawn of the Child's Tavern, which was missing 75 feet of its foundation wall.
“I lived off of Sherry Hill in Wilmington at the very edge of the town next to Marlboro, five miles from the center,” said Herbie Hewes, then four years old, who said his first memories were of the 1938 hurricane.
“I lived with my parents, Henry and Helen Hewes. We had a run-down shack that had two rooms downstairs and a loft upstairs,” he said. “We had a couple of cattle and a pig, no electricity and no running water, and an outhouse.”
“I was worried about our cows. Living out in the country, you make friends where you can.
“I worried all night about the cow, and the next morning after the hurricane was over, that was the first thing I did.
“Of course, the road to town was blocked solid with trees, and somebody came in and asked my father, who was 58 and crippled from a logging accident, if he wanted to help take the job of cutting all the trees out to the town of Wilmington.
“He had a saw and an axe. It was a two-man crosscut, and it would vibrate and wobble and be quite difficult.
“He put me on the end of the saw to keep it from wobbling and vibrating. He didn't earn very much, but my parents bought me a new pair of shoes for my efforts.”
All told, the hurricane of 1938 ruined $200,000 worth of telephone equipment ($3.2 million in today's dollars), $500,000 worth of county roads ($3.5 million in today's dollars), and 24 covered bridges were destroyed or swept away, including the Center Bridge in Wardsboro, Brookside Bridge in Newfane, the West Dover bridge, and the Ryder bridge in Grafton.
Many of those bridges replaced after the 1938 hurricane were those bridges damaged or destroyed this week - 73 years later - by Hurricane Irene.