Groton — The home movie shows houses torn apart on Jupiter Point, a boat lying on the porch of the Griswold Hotel, the Shetucket River overflowing in Norwich and downtown New London smoldering.

George Lawrie Nye was a Groton accountant who got a movie camera in the 1930s and started filming as a hobby. Before the hurricane struck and after, he shot film.

The footage, 26 minutes and 49 seconds long, documents the damage the 1938 hurricane did in Groton, New London, Norwich, Stonington and coastal Rhode Island.

The film as it is now is in no apparent order. In the midst of showing wind, rain, leveled homes and smoldering buildings, are clips of a picnic, a girl in saddle shoes walking on stilts and a croquet game. The movie jumps to timber strewn all over Misquamicut Beach and then nothing left of a house but the roof.

The video also shows the Bostonian, a train that was stranded in Stonington, scenes of water rushing down Route 32 in Quaker Hill and men using hand-held saws to try to clear massive limbs in Groton. It shifts from footage of houses leveled by trees in Groton to the Shetucket River raging in Norwich and people trying to extinguish smoldering buildings in New London.

It is the first of its kind that Betty Ann Reiter, director of the Groton Public Library, has seen.

"Even though it's a home movie, this guy really captured what happened, the big things that happened," said Marilyn Comrie, former president of the Mystic River Historical Society, who has given a lecture on the hurricane every year since 1978 and will speak about the film Friday.

The library will show Nye's footage at 6 p.m. on Friday as part of the fundraising kickoff “Looking forward, giving back.” It's free and open to the public, but the library is accepting donations toward its history collection expansion project.

The Connecticut State Library gave the Groton Public Library a $414,000 construction grant to expand its local history room to accommodate the vast history collection donated by former town councilor and mayor James Streeter. The project, which includes some library maintenance, requires matching funds, which it has asked the town for. But the library is seeking donations to help offset the costs.

Streeter's collection includes more than 15,000 archived photos and at least 1,000 others, 40 city directories dating back to 1929, collections of local artifacts and documents including a copy of a speech given at Fort Griswold in 1825. The fundraising kicks off at 7 p.m. Friday, following the showing.

Reiter got the home movie from Groton City Mayor Marian Galbraith, who taught for years at West Side Middle School and got it from a former student. The film belonged to Margaret Avery, now 87, who still lives in the Broad Street house where she grew up. She declined to be interviewed.

Hurricanes had rarely hit New England since their main fuel is warm water, so no one expected it, Comrie said. It struck on Sept. 21 with enormous momentum, during one of the wettest years on record, with rivers at their peak and at high tide, Comrie said.

“So it had speed, and the other thing it had was, nobody knew it was coming,” she said. The storm surge drowned people.

Almost 700 people died, mostly in Rhode Island, Comrie said. “There was a group of women having a picnic on the beach and they all drowned,” she said. The water rushed into Providence. “People drowned in their cars in front of the Biltmore Hotel,” she said.

The wind tore down thousands of trees in Connecticut, trapping people, tossed boats into streets and ignited a fire in New London. “All of downtown New London was on fire, but because the winds were whipping so much it just jumped from building to building to building, so they had no way to stop the fire,” she said.

Nye managed to capture what happened, she said.

“It shows all the devastation at Ocean Beach, all the buildings that are just a mess. It took boats and just threw them everywhere," she said.

Shawn Greeley, Groton municipal television specialist, said it was probably shot on 16-millimeter film and then transferred onto VHS tape. He converted it to digital form.

He said he was struck by the footage of people milling about, looking at the devastation.

“It’s just fascinating to me to see the number of people. Because it’s not like today where we have TVs. They actually went out and looked at it,” he said.

Greeley said he also was impressed by how many places Nye reached.

“You also have to think, the roads really weren’t that great. And after the hurricane, how many places he went to document the devastation,” Greeley said.

d.straszheim@theday.com

Twitter: @DStraszheim