From the account by Eleanor Crandall Thayer:

There will be no Autumn this year; no flowers of any kind; no beautifully colored woods; not much of anything.

In the aftermath of the Hurricane of 1938, a young woman named Eleanor Crandall sat on the front steps of her family's farmhouse in Westerly and surveyed the destruction all around her. She was 18 and a freshman at the Rhode Island College of Education. Over the next few days, she jotted her thoughts in pencil in a small three-ring notebook.

At some point, years later, she took the pages out of the notebook, paper-clipped them together, and put them in a drawer, along with her college report cards, teaching certificate, and diploma. There they sat until last year, when she died of a heart attack at 92 and her daughters – my sister and I – found them.

"No one is allowed down to the beaches except milkmen and rescue crews," she begins, in a tone both reportorial and poetic:

All remaining leaves are dried and black as though touched by frost, and all flowers have been blown off. Worms, starving for want of food, crawl everywhere. I went over to the groves this morning only to see a holocaust of destruction. Giant trees are uprooted by the dozens, leaving only great gaping holes higher than a man.

The Crandall Farm was located on the Dunn's Corners Bradford Road, where their father, Frank, planted acres of vegetables to sell, including corn, potatoes, and cantaloupe. Although nearly all of the children were grown, the farm was a true family operation. Besides my mother, there was Ruth, 26, married and living nearby; Charlie, 24, who helped his father with the farm; Dorothy — or Dot — 22, who had just graduated from URI and was looking for a teaching job; Marguerite, 20, a commuter student at URI; and Frank Jr., or "Tene," 16, a student at Westerly High School. At this point, they were all together in Westerly, but time and tide would soon change all that.

On the afternoon of Sept. 21, 1938, Charlie and his father were loading boards onto a truck and his mother, Alice, was canning pears in the kitchen. A storm picked up, and soon the wind was blowing ferociously, sending the boards every which way, knocking Charlie down, toppling outbuildings, and flattening a chimney — sending bricks and debris into the kitchen and the outdoor well.

Hours later, Marg and Tene made it home from school, but no one had heard from my mother. As it turned out, she had left college in Providence on the 4 p.m. train and didn't arrive in Westerly until 9:30. No one was there to meet her, and she struggled in the pitch black to her grandmother's house on High Street (next to what is now Other Tiger bookstore), where she spent the night.

My Aunt Dorothy, in her memoir "A New England Childhood," recounted the anxious hours Eleanor's family spent worrying about her until Ruth and her husband, Ed, found her the next day in town.

Eleanor writes of none of this in the journal, however.

Indeed, the passages reveal little about her; it's as though she knows she is writing for history. Through her impressionable eyes, we see how the ordered world she lived in had suddenly been turned upside down. The farm was a mess of uprooted trees and collapsed outbuildings; the beach, along with the family's fishing shack, had been wiped clean; and the high school from which she had graduated was now a morgue.

The family was truly cut off from the world, and it was only through word of mouth that they slowly grasped the enormity of the storm's damage:

Block Island may be almost completely destroyed for all we know. There have been no newspapers, & no means of communication. In Providence people are wading waist deep in water; shop windows were looted by the hundreds. No schools are open anywhere. There would be some satisfaction in knowing just what was going on, in knowing the exact extent of loss of lives, and damage to property. This we know: from Georgia to Maine, the sea coast has been destroyed.

Her father saw, but was not able to buy, a newspaper, and people stopping by the farm brought stories of widespread destruction. Eleanor jumped at the chance to see for herself:

I went with my father downstreet for some chains. Everywhere lies havoc and destruction, everywhere people are trying to patch chimneys and shingle roofs. Along by Slocum's bog all the telephone poles are down or leaning heavy with wires. Roofs have blown off, sides of homes smashed in. The traffic was so heavy, traffic officers were at every intersection, trying to relieve the congestion. Typhoid & paratyphoid injections are being given at the Town Hall.

While I waited for my father in the library, I read last night's [Providence] Evening Bulletin. According to the paper, Westerly is the hardest hit with 91 known deaths … Charlestown is virtually wiped out, scores everywhere are homeless. Among the names of the dead are many people we know. Mrs. Dinsmore who used to buy vegetables from us is gone. The last time my father saw her she picked up our half-grown [kitten] and said she hoped she could live sometime in a place where she could have cats. She and her husband had been looking for a place to live.

A farm girl is no stranger to death, and Eleanor was no exception. The previous year, Ruth had given birth to twin daughters, who survived only a few weeks. An uncle had died in the flu epidemic, leaving her aunt with nine children to raise. But these were private tragedies, and every family has them; no one had experienced death on this scale. The hurricane's violence, and the randomness of its victims, left an impression on her she would never shake.

On the morning of Sept. 23, two days after the storm, she wrote:

Charlie and Daddy came in last night from looking for bodies. They found none in Winnapaug Pond, although the Sanitary Corps with a big crew chopping through debris found many, and one without a head. As they ate their supper by candlelight and one lamp (we haven't any more kerosene) they told us how conditions were. Winnapaug Pond was full of bathtubs, fixtures of every kind; and debris was piled miles beyond on the opposite shore. They could not run their motor for fear of breaking something.

Eleanor had ridden down to the coast with them, and while her father and brother searched the pond, she and a friend crossed what remained of the Weekapaug Bridge to the Misquamicut side. There the family had kept a fishing shack for years, where they moored a dory and speedboat and made chowder on the potbellied stove.

We drove our car up by Morris's cabin, and walked from there into Weekapaug. We had to walk: roofs of houses lay in the road; whole battered houses which had floated fifty to a hundred feet lay everywhere. Furniture was strewn about for miles, personal belongings, valuables, and junk, boats, and everything that made up a summer colony. We walked over the [Weekapaug] bridge, and carefully made our way over a washout on the further half of the bridge – a washout about 15 feet deep and as wide – by walking along the bridge railing. Our shanty, of course, was completely gone. My father and two brothers whom I had met earlier had found the dory, but no trace of the shanty or the speedboat.

Fifty feet of dune wall had been washed out by the tidal wave, and the water rushed like mad over the houses below. Most of the mansions on the rest of the dunes had either been washed off or gutted underneath. Some houses still stood with about two posts for the complete first story. … Three persons were found back of our land in the Italian colony. Old Tom Hartley who used to sell clams outside of his little shack is dead. Rumors of death are constant; some of the missing persons have turned up, many more are dead whom have not even been found.

… I stayed, while Ruth and Edward went up to the other beaches. Sheila Colling walked with me over the wreckage searching for a sign of the shanty. The variety of wreckage was unbelievable – mirrors, beds, chairs, mattresses, parts of buildings, clothes, novelties (probably from Miss Chapman's), dishes, and everywhere were people who were trying to reassemble what things were left. There was no actual salvaging, except (in some cases) as things could be put where they had been before the tidal wave. All cars returning from the beaches were searched for loot. I suppose if a person was actually caught stealing it would be the duty of the militiamen to shoot him on the spot.

The tide the morning after the hurricane was as low as normal, though the seas were a bit choppy still. An airplane circled low, looking for bodies and marooned persons. Sheila found two birds, one dead, and the other well and very tame. Finally (about 2 o'clock) my father took my brothers and me home. Along our road a number of telephone poles leaned dangerously, but there were no trees on that end to block our way.

For the rest of her life, my mother dreaded storms of any kind. When a hurricane was forecast, she would fill the bathtub with water, drag out kerosene lamps, and grimly watch the television. Although storms like Hurricane Belle in 1976 fizzled, my mother would not be swayed. We didn't know the damage a hurricane could do. She did, and she would never forget it:

Another storm is coming up to-night with wind and probably rain. As I am writing now by lamplight, I am wondering what can ever be done for the homeless. If the government offers to help in reconstruction, who will have the courage to build near the ocean again? Can what people thought impossible happen again?

Some information in this story is from "A New England Childhood" by Dorothy Crandall Bliss (Higginson Books, 1997).

More from the diary of Eleanor Crandall, September 1938

According to people at the beach there were two great tidal waves: one following directly after the other. With this there was the force of the hurricane, and the combination of wind and water wiped everything before it: houses, people, dunes, cars, everything.

Root's cottage at Weekapaug still stands, though damaged. The three cottages beyond it are gutted underneath. With the dunes washed low a high tide may completely destroy them. One of these is Price's house where Eloise Saunders, the cook, stayed the wild night. Somehow she and the other cottagers managed to wade to Root's mansion and break in.

The first report was given that both Mr. and Mrs. Price had gone out in a boat just before the storm, but it appears they were visiting friends and are alive and well. It is a wonder, though, that Eloise is alive to tell the story. Price's cottage, hanging only by a thread, would have gone with another wave like the other two, and escape would have been impossible because the roads were flooded. In the morning she and the other cottagers walked to safety from Root's.

Misquamicut is gone, with the Casino, Town Beach, stores, all the houses. Our marsh is strewn with broken houses and other wreckage. Another breachway has opened up across the dunes just beyond our marshes. At Weekapaug the dunes are level with the sea, and a high tide would wash over into the pond. There is another breachway down by Weekapaug Inn.

Misquamicut, Watch Hill and Quonochontaug have suffered much more severely. The entire shore has been wiped out, and with this fact go others affecting the towns proper. How can taxes be paid this year? Who will there be left to give the town financial support for years to come? For Watch Hill was the mainstay of the town, and people will hesitate before rebuilding.