May 19, 1780, dawned like a promise. It had been a particularly brutal winter in New England, but spring had finally arrived. In fact, it had been unusually warm for days.
There were fields to plant, goods to manufacture, ships to load and unload. But then, as, Cornell University professor Thomas Campanella explains, things got weird.
"Shortly after 9 o’clock, and I quote here, 'Came on an appearance over the whole visible heavens a light grassy hue nearly the color of pale cyder,'" Campanella said.
Within an hour or so, darkness had fallen — and I’m talking darkness. Birds stopped chirping. Hens returned to their roosts. Crickets came out. Various diary entries from the time paint the picture.
“It was so terrible dark that we could not see our hand before us,” one reads. Another describes "the inky black was probably as gross as ever has been observed since the almighty fiat gave birth to light."
Now in 1780, New England was still a deeply religious society, steeped in a literal reading of a Bible chock full of passages where great darkness portends some pretty frightening things.
"People are panicking and people are indeed flocking to the churches and the meetinghouses and a great fear, really, among a lot of people that this was a sign of the end times," Campanella said.
It’s probably best that folks had no idea at the time that the darkness stretched from southern Maine to northern New Jersey. In Connecticut, an increasingly panicked legislature turned to Abraham Davenport, who proved himself to be a true Yankee.
"The day of judgment is either approaching or it is not," Davenport wrote in his diary. "If it is not there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore for candles to be brought."
The darkness lasted the whole of the day. And I’m sure it didn’t help matters that when the moon was seen briefly that night, it was blood red. But of course, the end did not come. The sun came up the next morning and a curious debate began. Not everyone had looked to the heavens when darkness fell. Massachusetts was also the center of a burgeoning scientific community, an emerging Athens of America.
"These amateur [Benjamin] Franklin-like characters go out in the field and start taking detailed notes and making these field observations," Campanella said.
With no scientific journals yet around, a protracted debate about what had happened played out for weeks in the newspapers of the day.
"There’s one fellow that’s convinced this sudden darkness was caused by a passing comet, an errant transit of a planet, there are others that are suggesting perhaps this was a solar eclipse," one report recounted.
Still others noted a curious soot buildup — and sulphur smell — in the rains that came in the days that followed. And they, it turns out, may have been onto something.
Richard Guyette is a forestry professor at the University of Missouri, and an expert in a dating technique called dendrochronology.
"We find pine stumps that survive," he explained. "They don’t decay very fast. And we cut ‘em and do this thing called cross-dating, with dendrochronology, so that we can date every fire scar that’s on some old stump."
Guyette says that dendrochronology is incredibly precise. Using it, he and his team found that in the spring of 1780, an enormous fire raged through what is today Algonquin Provincial Park, north of Ontario — across an area more than 6 times the size of current-day Boston.
"Seventeen-Eighty was a huge event, and we do know that those fires could burn quite rapidly," Guyette said.
In 2007, his team published a study. Given the fire, what is now known about how smoke from large fires interacts with the atmosphere, and the wind patterns at the time, they concluded that the fire in Algonquin was the likely cause of New England’s dark day.
"I would go like with a 75 percent chance," Guyette said. "It’s not impossible it could have been from New Hampshire or several other places, although we have the data from Algonquin."
New England’s Dark Day: Proof that — if nothing else — the debate between religion and science in America is as old as the country itself. And it happened right here, 235 years ago this week.
If you have a tale of forgotten Massachusetts history to share, or there's something you're just plain curious about, email us at curiositydesk@wgbh.org. We might just look into it for you.
