Connecticut’s Gardner Lake, at the junction of Salem, Montville and Bozrah, is home to Gardner Lake State Park, popular with boaters and swimmers. However, it may be the bizarre incident which occurred in the winter of 1895 that the lake is best known for.
Thomas Lecount, a grocer, wanted to move his summer home from the south shore of Gardner Lake to the land he owned on the east shore. He hired a contractor named Woodmansee for the job. Because it was less expensive to move the house over the frozen Gardner Lake rather than traveling on the road around the lake, Woodmansee brought in a crew of men and horses to pull the home over the ice by cables.
Work began February 13, 1895. The house was placed on a large makeshift sled and pulling began. About 300 feet onto the icy lake, the house slid sideways into a snowbank. The ice beneath the home cracked. The crew attempted to get the home back on solid ice but were unsuccessful and abandoned the attempt when the sun went down. They planned to resume work on dislodging the house the following morning. The house broke through the ice overnight, becoming submerged in 15 feet of water and lodged at the angle seen in the postcard below. The home remained in this position until the ice thawed in the spring, at which point it came to rest at the bottom of the lake. Popular legend has it that for years afterward, skaters and swimmers were able to see the top of the house while passing above it. The home gradually sank into the mud over a period of years until it was no longer visible.
In recent years, divers have explored the location of the sunken house. Pieces of pottery, a door, a shotgun, and shingles from the roof have been recovered.
A farmer in Anderson County, Kansas captured this slow-moving tornado on April 26, 1884. This image is considered the first tornado ever photographed.
On March 11, 1888, and lasting through March 13, a massive blizzard devastated the Northeast, having begun overnight and crippling that region of the country. Snowfalls ranged from 20-60 inches, and with winds blowing at around 85 mph, snowdrifts rose in excess of 50 feet.
Heavy flooding occurred in many areas once snow began melting.
The combination of snow, fires and flooding resulted in an estimated $25 million in damages throughout the region. This storm, which is referred to as “The Great White Hurricane”, is considered one of the most severe storms in United States history.
The photos below show the blizzard and its aftermath in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The summer of 1896 saw one of the worst and deadliest heat waves in American history.
Beginning August 4, 1896, and lasting ten days throughout New York, Boston, New Jersey and Chicago, temperatures rose into the 90s with 90% humidity and barely any breeze. Temperatures didn’t drop most evenings during this heat wave, remaining in the 90s with high humidity throughout most nights. By the time the heat wave ended on August 14, nearly 1,500 people had been killed, as well as thousands of animals.
The area hit the hardest by the heat wave were the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. Housing the poorest people in the area, as many as 100,000 were crammed into these types of dwellings. Inside these tenement walls, temperatures reached 120°. A number of people chose to sleep on the tenement rooftops. Some ended up rolling in their sleep off the roof, falling five stories to their death. Others would head down to the piers of the East River and try to sleep there. Some ended up rolling into the river in their sleep and drowning.
At least one person took their own life in order to escape the heat. A 15-year-old Polish immigrant, named Lewis Pumper, worked in a bakery all day, the heat from the ovens intensifying the already high temperatures. At night he slept in an unventilated basement within the tenements. One night proved to be too much for him, both working and living in continuous highly heated environments, and he hanged himself.
Many of the individuals living in the tenements were young men who worked manual labor six days a week. It is these men who account for much of the 1,500 people killed as a result of heat exhaustion, literally having been worked to death.
Theodore Roosevelt, then the New York City police commissioner, began giving away free blocks of ice to the poorest people living in the Lower East Side. On August 15, following the end of the deadly heat wave, Roosevelt wrote to his sister, “The heated term was the worst and most fatal we have ever known. The death-rate trebled until it approached the ratio of a cholera epidemic; the horses died by the hundreds, so that it was impossible to remove their carcasses, and they added a genuine flavor of pestilence, and we had to distribute hundreds of tons of ice from the station-houses to the people of the poorest precincts.”
Below are death certificates of a Chicago and New York man. “The oppressive heat” leading to “the softening of the brain” is listed as the cause of the Chicago man’s death. “Heat stroke” is listed as the New York man’s death. Also below are newspaper articles, both domestic and abroad, reporting on the daily heat wave, as well as its latest victims in New York. Lastly, businesses ran ads in newspapers using the heat as a scare tactic to sell their products, as this ad for talcum powder demonstrates.
You’ve heard the expression “raining cats and dogs”, but alligators? On July 2, 1843, an alligator was reported to have fallen from the sky during a thunderstorm in Charleston, South Carolina. The newspaper clipping below is from the July 11, 1843 edition of The Times-Picayune, a New Orleans newspaper, which picked up the story from another source.
March 1, 1910 marks the deadliest avalanche in American history, which had come to be known as the White Death. The Great Northern Railroad, today’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe, in Washington state, was carrying 119 passengers from Spokane to Seattle. For six days at the end of February 1910 the train was stopped in Wellington at the base of the Cascade Mountains due to a massive snowstorm that hit the area, causing large snow drifts which prevented the train from continuing on, some of the drifts measuring 15-20 feet high.
On March 1, shortly after midnight, the snow had changed over to rain and the train was scheduled to resume the trip shortly once specialized snowplows had removed snowdrifts from the track. There were large claps of thunder occurring as it rained, each one said to have caused vibrations to snow on the mountains. After one large clap of thunder, the snow gave way, causing a massive avalanche. A wall of snow 14 feet high slammed into the side of the train, lifting it effortlessly off the track and carrying it 150 feet down into a river gorge, slamming it into trees along the way. Of the 119 passengers, only 23 survived. Several employees of the railroad perished as well. Those who were injured or perished were placed on toboggans and pulled to a nearby hospital in Wellington. Those who were unharmed were brought to nearby lodging.
One survivor recalled many years later, “White Death moving down the mountainside above the trains. Relentlessly it advanced, exploding, roaring, rumbling, grinding, snapping — a crescendo of sound that might have been the crashing of ten thousand freight trains. It descended to the ledge where the side tracks lay, picked up cars and equipment as though they were so many snow-draped toys, and swallowing them up, disappeared like a white, broad monster into the ravine below”.
Another survivor recalled, “At 12:05 I woke up and saw a flash of lightning zigzag across the sky, and saw another, and then there was a loud clap of thunder. The next thing I knew I heard somebody yelling. We got up and climbed down on the bank to where the trains had been knocked by the slide…I saw a man lying on the snow and I went and got him, and put him on my back…and while I started up the hill, another slide hit and knocked me down underneath it, and I lost this man. I was sort of dazed and was underneath the snow some 10 or 15 feet. I started to dig and climb out along the side of a tree, and finally got out, and I was in such a dazed condition that I walked down and walked into the river up to my shoulders, when I came to and realized what I had done.”
It took three weeks for the track to be repaired. The last victim’s body was found in July. Because the name Wellington became associated with the disaster, the town was soon renamed Tye, though it still shows up as Wellington on some maps today.
