Smokey Skies Harken To Dark Day Of 1780

I was up in Delaware a couple of weeks ago. Somehow, I’d missed the news about the bad air over the Middle Atlantic states. When I arrived at my friend Mary’s house and thought I smelled ag chemicals.

Nope, it was the smoke, she said. Forest fires in Canada.

My eyes were irritated, I coughed a bit. On one day, the thick haze cut visibility to a mile.

I remembered the California wildfires a couple of years ago. If memory serves me correctly, we could actually smell wood smoke from 2,000 miles away.

Mary and I mused about what earlier generations might have made of something like this. Without the benefit of radar and satellite images to explain it all, what would people have thought?

Turns out my cell phone was listening. Sure enough, last week, algorithms steered me to a Lance Geiger, a You Tuber known as The History Guy. He had the perfect video for me: “New England’s ‘Dark Day’ May 19, 1780.”

The year 1780, I knew, was on the waning side of the American Revolution. Indeed, American victory was still very much in doubt when May produced some worrying signs: both the sun and moon appeared blood red.

On that Friday in 1780, the sun was all but blotted out due to the mysterious haze that had been creeping into the skies for days. By noon, it was dark as night.

Gen. George Washington wrote of the peculiar day in his diary while in New Jersey— hundreds of miles from the darkest locations in New England.

Flowers folded their petals, cocks crowed, night birds sang, frightened cattle returned to their stalls. midday meals were taken by candlelight.

Colonials, in freak-out mode, threw up their hands at as they expected to hear the sound of trumpets announcing Judgement Day.

The faithful rushed to meeting houses to pray and lament the terrifying darkness.

Others sought solace in taverns.

Meanwhile, observers calm enough to take note, recorded that winds prevailed from easterly to westerly on May 19. Around midnight a light breeze spring up, blowing away the clouds and vapors. Amazingly, the next day the sun came out as usual.

Some proposed that the Dark Day was caused by meteor showers, a solar eclipse or perhaps volcanic eruptions.

The strange occurrence wasn’t quickly dismissed. American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a New Englander born nearly 30 years after the Darkest Day, wrote a poem about it in the 1870s. “A horror of great darkness,” he described it. “The Twilight of the Gods.”

Sidney Perley, a 19th-century historian, was onto something when he reported that rainwater gave off a strong sooty smell. Indeed, a black scum floated on rivers. Boston smelled like a coal kin. He and others proposed that some massive wildfire was the culprit, but it wasn’t confirmed for another century and a half.

In 2008, forestry researchers from the University of Missouri confirmed the theory of a massive forest fire by studying tree rings of the Algonquin Highlands, Ontario. Sure enough, charcoal and resin “fire scars” in the growth rings proved that an inferno had occurred in the year 1780.

Canadian forests—perhaps the very ones that sparked the smoky days we saw earlier this month—were responsible for all the panic and pandemonium.

The American Revolution, by the way, ended more than a year after the Darkest Day. Exactly 17 months later, Oct. 19, 1781, British troops surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown.

---Tammy Wilson lives near Newton. Contact her at [email protected]